Overview:
In all financial investments, fund managers seek to achieve above market performance. Yet most struggle to achieve such returns, dampening the expectation any solution would have the chance to deliver improved results. Hospital financial and billing departments face the same challenges when trying to secure revenues from patients. VestaCare through its VestaPay Patient Payment Management system has focused on this challenge for the last five years and has achieved a significant breakthrough and above market success in capturing and securing patient liabilities.
Notwithstanding changes in government regulations, reductions in Payer reimbursements, combined with drastic economic swings, i.e., escalating staff costs and inflation, healthcare providers must continue to collect funds from patients and patients will continue to be responsible for a significant and growing portion of their healthcare expenditure. Rather than presuming that patient liabilities are uncollectible debts and throwing up one’s hands in abject defeat, VestaCare has demonstrated through multiple locations and years of deployment, a solution for which over multiple years results are showing a significant breakthrough in securing collecting patient liabilities. And we are doing this with approaches that are far more patient caring and in direct contrast with typical “Early-out” and “Bad Debt” methods.
The VestaPay Solution:
The first breakthrough came in the ability to secure 100% of the patient’s liability both known and unknown at time of service when typically it’s difficult to collect any money from patients. At time of service you can’t possibly know exactly what a patient’s going to owe unless they are a self-pay patient. So the first question is how is this accomplished? VestaPay has a proprietary, patent pending solution that secures patients known and unknown liability at time of service. The solution can be described in further detail with direct consultation VestaCare.
The second key breakthrough was being able to secure the patient’s liability in the emergency departments. The ED‘s have special requirements specifically governed by EMTALA regulations which prohibit discussing patient liabilities and payments until the patients clinical issues have been triaged. So how to engage with a patient in the ED while staying solidly on the compliance side of the EMTALA regulations is another challenge, but one that VestaPay has affectively solved.
The third key breakthrough was in how to work with patients. The presumption that securing payments from patients will only occur through staff calling or collection personnel trying to collect from patients is flawed and directly limits the success of other approaches. Once one realizes that there’s another way to engage patients rather than through collection agency or hospital staff then further breakthroughs become achievable. A deeper understanding of the psychology of working with patients and securing money to cover their patient liabilities has directly led to breakthroughs in patient’s willingness to pay through the VestaPay platform.
Evidence Based Results:
VestaPay has been deployed in multiple hospitals and in a variety of socio-economic circumstances. For example one of our pilot hospitals, OakBend Medical Center, a three hospital system, has one of their facilities located in a low income region, a second in the middle income region and third in a higher income region. Further, some of the hospitals are in major metropolitan areas and others are in rural farming community areas. The remarkable fact in this reported breakthrough is that these exceptional results were achieved across-the-board in all locations irrespective of their socio-economic standing.
Per Jeff Hammel, CFO of the Oakbend Medical Center, “Oakbend has relied on VestaPay to address some of our staffing challenges through the use of Mobile Registration. We were very surprised and excited to see the positive impact to cash collections which occurred as an added benefit.”
In one group of hospitals these exceptional results were achieved during some of the most difficult financial circumstances one could plan for. For example, we launched the program in one of our client hospitals in December 2019 just prior to the first evidence of the COVID virus. In the February through April timeframe this three hospital system experienced roughly a 20% reduction in total revenues, (meaning insurance and patient payments). Yet this reduction was buffered from a more serious reduction through the VestaPay program. Another notable metric was a 150% improvement in basic cash capture rates (from an average of 10% historically), to 25% after installing VestaPay across the three hospitals. Then in mid-2021 the VestaPay solution was introduced in the three EDs of this hospital system driving their overall patient revenue capture results up to 57%, another 128% improvement. And results are not final as at this point in time further attributes of the VestaPay solution are still to be deployed.
The following chart shows these remarkable results:
VestaCare has proven VestaPay may be implemented in any patient care delivery setting with consistent results that commence immediately upon go-live. VestaCare brings a wealth of technologies, including advanced AI, machine learning, interface systems and capabilities that have enabled the Company to implement VestaPay in nearly every EMR system environment.
The Company also has delivered consistent performance in customizing VestaPay to best support customers’ unique system configurations without dependency on support from the underlying EHR vendor. Where most vendors are unwilling to customize or tailor their solutions to their clients’ needs, our approach is to support our clients with solutions that optimize their ability to improve revenues, with all parties sharing in the successful results.
For further information or to start a discussion on how VestaPay can delivery similar results for your organization, please contact:
Ray Chase
VP National Accounts
Rchase@vestacare.com
281-630-0925
Tom Brekka
Chief Revenue Officer
VestaCare, Inc.
7825 Fay Avenue, Suite 200
La Jolla, CA 92037
(858) 454-7800
(831) 325-7305 (Cell)
