Accelerating the Patient Payment Process

On a special edition of the Accelerate Health podcast, we continue our series of spotlights on unique digital health startups that are changing the face of healthcare.

We spoke to Adam Younger, chief strategy officer for Payground, a platform that is shifting the patient payment process to be more patient-centric. Younger talks about the deeply personal and passionate story of how this idea originated and how their founder, Drew Mercer, decided to affect change in the midst of his own personal health struggles and how their approach reduces burden on both the patients and providers.

While going through two major healthcare-related life events at one time, Mercer received in one week “20 healthcare bills from 20 different providers that required him to do 20 different actions just to submit payment,” shared Younger. “Whether that was him picking up the phone, making a payment over the phone with a credit card… creating a login to some type of patient portal, or even dusting off the old checkbook from his office and dropping a check in the mail.” Younger added that it escalated at one point to Mercer being sent to collections for an unpaid healthcare bill.

“And that’s the sad truth. All of us at some point, we have experienced the pain associated with paying a healthcare bill,” said Younger. “It’s super easy for us to pay a friend with [a payment app], but it’s just not the same when you pay your healthcare bill.”

The web-based platform is changing patient payment process and the way patients pay their medical bills by removing the friction between a patient and their provider by letting users have one login to access multiple profiles and providers to make payments.

Younger also touches on how the platform will be useful to both patients and providers as telehealth is utilized within healthcare more and more.

The views and opinions expressed in this content or by commenters are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of HIMSS or its affiliates.