VisitPay, formerly known as iVinci, is a health IT business founded by a serial entrepreneur with the goal of taking the stress and complexity out of healthcare billing and make the process more transparent for patients and automated for health systems. It has closed a $15 million Series A round.
The Boise-based business sees an opportunity to make a difference as a greater share of healthcare costs come from patients’ pockets in a post-ACA world
The 60-person company plans to use the funding to double in size and build a marketing strategy and support product development, said Kent Ivanoff, VisitPay CEO, in a phone interview.
Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from Ascension Ventures. The round marks the first “professional capital” VisitPay has received. The company previously raised $5 million in a Seed round with health system investors including Intermountain Healthcare, Virginia-based Inova Health System, and St. Luke’s Health System in Boise. It is these and other integrated health systems that are the target customers for the business, although the company also plans to include smaller players as part of its long-term strategy.
“What we were struck by when we started the company in 2010 was that with ACA hospitals were facing a big change in billing but were still using 20th century technology. Our approach was to create an end to end, transparent system to address this issue and help providers and reduce confusion for consumers.”
The power of having early investors in the company who were also clients is that they had seen what the company was able to accomplish early on, Ivanoff said. Since those health systems had board observation rights, they saw the results of that first pilot platform and could see how VisitPay’s strategies would roll out in their own systems.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
After the successful pilot in 2014, the company took the decision to spend the following year rebuilding the platform with insights taken from the pilot to ensure it was ready for a national launch.
Ivanoff claimed that bad debt rates on finance plans created by consumers in VisitPay were 75 percent lower than the bad debt rates on finance plans created in legacy systems.
“We have fixed the underlying billing experience,” he said. “Patients are able to pay more and better than they otherwise would.”
Ivanoff said the company made two critical hires from Cerner and IBM to oversee its marketing and commercialization strategy. Will Reilly, who worked as vice president of product marketing for IBM, will lead client and consumer marketing. Mickey Lemon will head up sales and business development. He previously worked at EHR vendor Cerner where he was vice president of the revenue cycle team.
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