Novant Health, which claims to be one of the largest healthcare systems in the Southeast, has significantly improved its patient financial experience by partnering with Cedar, an enterprise healthcare engagement platform that “improves the end-to-end consumer financial journey.”
By investing in Cedar Pay, Cedar’s post-visit billing and payment platform, Novant Health continues to “lead” the way when it comes to “bringing digital innovation to the revenue cycle.”
For years, Novant Health had “worked to modernize their revenue cycle organization, leaning on mail, email and EHR communications to reach patients.” While these initiatives drove incremental improvements, the health system “identified two key opportunities in 2019 to truly enable a more consumer-centric experience” for their patients:
- Combining Novant Health’s acute and ambulatory services into a single billing experience. While the organization had tried to combine physician and facility billing for years, they had always been met with pushback from vendors or complex EHR upgrades that could fundamentally break their existing processes.
- Making bill payment a low friction, easy to navigate experience for both patients and team members. Novant Health wanted to help patients understand how their payments work and how their insurance benefits applied. In order to do so, they needed to personalize the experience, using mobile technology that consumers were already familiar with.
- To address these challenges, Novant Health invested in Cedar Pay. Cedar Pay delivers personalized billing through outreach, messaging and bill resolution based on a variety of unique factors and preferences. The platform is fully integrated with Novant Health’s existing Epic EHR system across both hospital billing and physician billing.
As a result of their implementation of Cedar Pay, Novant Health has “seen a material rise in collections over a 12-month period, amounting to tens of millions of dollars,” as well as:
- 90% patient satisfaction score
- 87% of collections now completely self-serviced
- 43% drop in days to collect
Geoff Gardner, senior vice president of Finance at Novant Health, said:
“Investing in a consumer engagement platform like Cedar is something we had wanted to do for a long time as part of our digital transformation strategy—we wanted to create a singular financial experience that allows our patients to pay with the technology we keep in our pockets. Cedar has been a great partner to us in our commitment to delivering a remarkable healthcare experience to our community; the results truly speak for themselves, as we have been able to increase collections while also improving patient satisfaction.”
Florian Otto, CEO and co-founder of Cedar, remarked:
“At Cedar, we know that engaged, happy patients lead to better outcomes, and the best way to improve patient satisfaction is by implementing consumer-friendly technology. It’s been a privilege working with such an innovative health system like Novant Health, and we look forward to continuing our partnership and continuing to impact the lives of their patients.”