Startup Raises $5M For RCM Services
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Increases in patient obligations means healthcare systems need to make billing more user accessible.
According to Venture Beat, iVinci Health is “launching a new patient portal, called the VisitPay Portal, which hospitals can use to simplify the selection, financing, and billing of health services for their patient customers. It tells patients exactly what they owe and when they owe it, then provides online management tools and financing options.”
iVinci’s new patient billing and revenue management tool comes at a time when the proliferation of high-deductible health plans have increased patient obligations from less than 5 percent of health systems’ revenue to a whopping 20 percent in just a few short years. That percentage is predicted to increase as more costs are shifted to patients through higher deductibles. It is a sea change that has profound financial impacts for both patients and health systems.
Current revenue cycle management (RCM) systems were designed to track claims and optimize payments by third-party insurers. Solutions like online bill pay and recourse finance are fragmented and incomplete. Worse, all too often, they turn a positive patient care experience into a negative one.
To respond to the changing healthcare payments landscape, iVinci is attempting to make healthcare billing more consumer friendly, and it closed $5 million in new funding earlier this month to support those efforts. The new round of funding included investors such as Intermountain Healthcare, Inova Health System, and St. Luke's Health System.
"We find that patients are becoming increasingly challenged by health plans passing a higher percentage of each final bill onto them for payment," said Dr. David Pate, CEO at St. Luke's Health System. "iVinci provides effective solutions that help us work with our patients to manage their obligations because they simultaneously provide our patients with easy-to-use online tools for managing, paying and financing their healthcare bills.”
iVinci Health's CEO, former Capital One executive Kent Ivanoff, believes the market is primed for a solution that addresses the collection of patient balances and delivers a substantially more consumer-friendly online experience to healthcare billing.
"With the rise of high deductible plans and the corresponding rise in patient financial responsibility, there will be unprecedented demand for a different billing experience – one that's on par with other consumer-driven markets. Patients will choose where to get care – based not just on the quality of the care itself but also on the financial management resources made available to them by healthcare providers," said Ivanoff. "Billing is the last phase of a patient's experience with a health system.
“Whether it fractures the patient relationship – or positively enhances it – is entirely a function of how consumer-oriented health systems become. Fostering patient loyalty, by providing patients choice and convenience online, is key to driving all of a health system's revenue, not just the portion owed by patients," said Ivanoff.