Collectly wants to make paying healthcare bills easier so medical providers don’t lose $200B

20 July 2023

Not only are healthcare bills confusing, but also paper bills can often get lost in the mail or covered up in big piles on counters. Large healthcare organizations, for the most part, offer electronic billing, but that’s not always something solo or small practices can take advantage of.

That is the sweet spot for Collectly, founded by Levon Brutyan and Max Mizotin, which aims to help medical providers more easily collect payments.

One report shows that the amount medical providers collected was about 55% of what they were owed in 2021, down from 76% the year prior.

“Patient payments overall have to be about $480 billion, and considering that the patient responsibility grows at about 12% year over year, this huge number increases as well,” Brutyan told TechCrunch. “The bigger pain point for healthcare organizations is that approximately $200 billion of that never gets collected. Hospitals, for example, run on very tiny margins, and a lot of them are actually running at a loss, so that makes this whole thing even worse.”

Pasadena-based Collectly has proprietary interfaces that integrate with electronic health records and practice management software to enhance patient billing operations.

Through its platform, customers have, on average, been able to increase patient collections for medical group partners by 75%, reduce the “days sales outstanding” to 12 days from between 60 and 90 days, and achieve a 93% patient satisfaction score — important for retention, he added.

We’ve followed Collectly since it launched in 2017 as a digital debt collection startup, and then again later that year after being part of Y Combinator, raising $1.9 million and refocusing on automating and streamlining billing operations as a patient financial engagement company.

Not only are healthcare bills confusing, but also paper bills can often get lost in the mail or covered up in big piles on counters. Large healthcare organizations, for the most part, offer electronic billing, but that’s not always something solo or small practices can take advantage of.

That is the sweet spot for Collectly, founded by Levon Brutyan and Max Mizotin, which aims to help medical providers more easily collect payments.

One report shows that the amount medical providers collected was about 55% of what they were owed in 2021, down from 76% the year prior.

“Patient payments overall have to be about $480 billion, and considering that the patient responsibility grows at about 12% year over year, this huge number increases as well,” Brutyan told TechCrunch. “The bigger pain point for healthcare organizations is that approximately $200 billion of that never gets collected. Hospitals, for example, run on very tiny margins, and a lot of them are actually running at a loss, so that makes this whole thing even worse.”

Pasadena-based Collectly has proprietary interfaces that integrate with electronic health records and practice management software to enhance patient billing operations.

Through its platform, customers have, on average, been able to increase patient collections for medical group partners by 75%, reduce the “days sales outstanding” to 12 days from between 60 and 90 days, and achieve a 93% patient satisfaction score — important for retention, he added.

We’ve followed Collectly since it launched in 2017 as a digital debt collection startup, and then again later that year after being part of Y Combinator, raising $1.9 million and refocusing on automating and streamlining billing operations as a patient financial engagement company.

“We are also looking at emerging technologies, like ChatGPT,” Brutyan said. “AI is highly leveraged, so we are working on that as well to make sure that the patients will receive the best experience, understand their bills and that questions are resolved in a timely manner.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/