MedPilot’s portal shows patients a breakdown of their bill and what it means.
Lost bills, collection calls and confusing terms plague the healthcare industry. Cleveland-based Medpilot sought to solve those woes by building software to make it easier to contact patients and explain what’s in their bill. But the software startup quickly found that the human element would be key to its success.
MedPilot CEO Jacob Myers, COO Nate Spoden and Chief Marketing Officer Matt Buder Shapiro co-founded MedPilot five years ago. The company sells its software as a white-label solution to revenue-cycle management and third-party billing companies.
The company has multiplied its headcount since the five-person startup moved from New York to Cleveland two years ago. MedPilot now employs 40 people and has raised a total of $3.6 million to date.
Buder Shapiro said they first started the company to address some of the problems rampant in the patient billing process.
“(Patients) can’t afford their bills. Sometimes they’re not even receiving them,” he said.
That translates to millions of dollars lost from providers, not just in unpaid invoices, but in patients who leave with a bad taste in their mouths from a bungled billing process.
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.
To combat this, MedPilot brings together a number of ways to contact patients, via email or text, not just sending a bill to an old address. But as the startup brought on more clients, it also found that how it handles incoming calls from patients is just as important as finding the best way to reach them.
“It’s less about the perfect text at the perfect time,” Buder Shapiro said. “For us, it’s more about how do you efficiently handle your inbound. … How do we help people around their situation?”
When MedPilot launched its first pilot, the company initially focused on optimizing its outbound communications. But the client quickly became overwhelmed.
“We send out a bunch of emails and texts at once, and their front desk got loaded with questions and concerns,” Buder Shapiro said. “We realized a ton of our clients didn’t have the appropriate staff to handle the patient side.”
Since then, the company has built out a patient service team to help answer questions about bills. That’s translated to a 97% patient satisfaction score — unusual for a billing company.
“We have the tech to allow us to talk to patients more efficiently. That’s key,” Buder Shapiro said. “I don’t think you can fully remove humans from this process.”
To be clear, MedPilot doesn’t work with collection agencies. The company has worked with 1 million patients to date. It recently raised a $1.5 million funding round, led by several Cleveland-based investors, including Jumpstart, North Coast Angel Fund and Valley Growth Ventures. MedPilot plans to use the funds to further grow its headcount.
“Patient billing is complicated and can often be unclear to patients,” Rem Harris, senior partner of investing at JumpStart, wrote in an emailed statement. “The MedPilot solution simplifies the billing process for patients delivering convenient and easy-to-understand billing information. The result is a better experience for patients and improved revenue collections for healthcare providers.”
Photo Credit: MedPilot
