Cedar develops personalised patient billing platform
New York start-up Cedar aims to improve the consumer experience with its medical payment platform. Aimed at health systems, hospitals and medical groups, it incorporates data from across a patient's medical billing history, enabling providers to offer a personalised service. According to Cedar, which recently raised $13m in series A funding, implementation of the platform resulted in customer satisfaction rates of more than 90%, while collections rose by 22% and self-serve payments were up by 62%.

New York City-based Cedar, a startup offering patient-personalized medical billing, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Participants in the round include Founders Fund, Thrive Captial, Martin Ventures and SV Angel.

Cedar promises a smart billing system that incorporates data points collected across the overall patient payment process. Its platform uses these to inform the method of communication, messaging, and payment option that it surfaces for patients, while optimizing its selections via machine learning in pursuit of improved patient responses.

“At Cedar, we study everything from a patient’s billing history, to their level of engagement with previous communications and general payer and demographic information," Florian Otto, cofounder and CEO of Cedar, said in a statement. "Putting all of these signals together, our platform provides data-driven recommendations for providers to optimize all interactions with patients...We are excited to work with innovative, consumer-centric healthcare providers that see patient billing as an opportunity to vastly improve the patient experience and their own operations.”

Cedar’s platform is designed for hospitals, health systems, and medical groups. With it, providers are able to consolidate billing information across multiple caregivers while allowing a provider billing team to oversee these activities through a dashboard interface.

The platform can be implemented within 10 weeks and integrates with any EHR or practice management system, according to Cedar. Early tests of the system have demonstrated, on average, a 22 percent increase in collections, a 33 percent reduction in accounts receivable days, a 62 percent increase in self-serve payments, and a customer satisfaction rate of more than 90 percent.

“The consumer experience in healthcare lags behind nearly every other industry — this is painfully obvious when you look at the current patient billing process," Kareem Zaki, an investor at Thrive Capital, said in a statement. "We see Cedar doing much more than providing a Band-Aid solution to this problem. They're approaching the patient billing experience from a completely different viewpoint than other vendors, and creating a new standard for revenue cycle operations.”