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The medical bill that lands in the mailbox six weeks after an appointment is one of the least popular pieces of paper in American life. The visit is a memory. The symptom may be gone. And the number on the statement rarely matches whatever the front desk collected at check-in. A lot of those bills never get paid.
“Most medical providers are sitting between a 20 to 40% patient default rate because patients don’t pay bills when the bills arrive six weeks later,” Rahul Naidoo, CEO and co-founder of Superscript, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in a recent Monday Conversation.
That default rate is the problem Superscript set out to fix. Its answer is to give the practice an accurate, patient-specific price before care is delivered, collect it at the point of care, and attach payment options to it so the patient has a way to say yes. Superscript’s real-time pricing API now covers more than 25 medical specialties and 3,000 services.
Webster’s take: The model is clever, and it will reduce collections. The open question is whether patients are ready to pay, in full and up front, for care they haven’t received yet. That’s both the challenge and the opportunity.
Most practices already collect something at check-in. The trouble is what they collect. 34. 34.
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