Challenge:
Catalyst Dental Allies is an Oklahoma-based DSO that cultivates a private practice-oriented ecosystem focused on exceptional patient care and group benefits for all employees. A high intensity focus on continual improvement has led Catalyst to seek solutions that improve the patient experience.
Prior to Pearly, Catalyst had been using a solution that required a mixture of employee activity with limited auto-communication for patient billing. Dissatisfied with the net collection results, the patient experience, and the amount of staff time sunk into billing tasks, Catalyst decided to pilot Pearly to determine whether their collections would improve with best-in-class RCM solution.
Solution:
To offer an improved experience for patients and the front office team, Catalyst considered Pearly to optimize their patient billing process across their organization.
The result–accelerated payment volume with reduced staff hours spent on collection.
Throughout their initial pilot with Pearly, Catalyst used Pearly’s billing workflows to send statements to thousands of patients. By setting their billing targeting parameters to automatically engage only fully-eligible balances, they saved their RCM team countless hours on auditing accounts and manually sending statements.
Impact:
In less than 4 months, Catalyst’s collection performance increased 29% with over one third of all collected payments coming from the 90+ days past due (DPD) aging bucket. As Catalyst continued to scale Pearly within their organization, they saw their payments increase an average of 18% month-over-month.
A large portion of these collected balances were at high risk of being written off, as they were over 90 DPD and represented small balance sizes that often are neglected. Catalyst’s performance collecting these write-off risk balances exceeded that of DSOs of similar size by 26%, indicating that their approach to deploying billing workflows was highly effective for their patient base.
Catalyst is now using all of the primary RCM tools that Pearly offers to collect their patient balances. From offering custom payment plans to issuing pre-collection letters to delinquent patients, their RCM team is leveraging the Pearly platform to fine-tune their patient billing process while giving their patients a modern payment experience.
