Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1084691
12 Sponsored by: M ost patients wouldn't use the words convenient, transparent or personalized to describe their billing experience with hospitals and health systems. Cedar has set out to change that. The New York City-based company created a patient payment and engagement platform that helps modernize the medical billing process. By personalizing the patient financial experience and providing patients with an easy-to-read statement, Cedar helps healthcare providers across the country simultaneously improve patient satisfaction, collection rates and time to collect. Cedar CEO and Co-founder Florian Otto, MD, PhD, discusses why he launched Cedar, why the consumer experience in healthcare needs to improve, and the role technology plays in transforming the patient billing process. Editor's note: Responses have been edited for length and clarity. Question: You started out in medicine and dentistry. Why did you decide to make the switch from MD to CEO? Florian Otto: I'm really passionate about healthcare and helping patients. However, while practicing on the clinical side two things stood out to me. First, if you want to be an excellent physician, you need to do the same procedure hundreds of times and for me, it was bit too monotonous. Second, it's much tougher to scale your work when you are a doctor. You can do 30 percent faster work, maybe 30 percent better work and maybe work a few more hours, but there are limits. What excited me about business — especially technology — is, it's infinitely scalable. I was very drawn to this idea of making a bigger impact. Q: How does the consumer experience in healthcare stack up when compared to other industries? FO: Most of the innovation in healthcare has been on the medical or business side — we haven't yet really focused on consumers. When you go into the operating room, it looks fantastic and the technology is very advanced. However, on the consumer engagement side, we are still working with pen, paper and phone. Healthcare's consumer technology lags far behind. Other industries, in contrast, have adopted technologies to vastly improve the consumer experience. Compare the consumer experience in healthcare with the airline industry, for example. Over the last 10 to 15 years, the airline industry made the transition away from an offline model. You used to have to buy your ticket through a travel agency, print out your boarding pass, check in again at the gate, get another pass, and then finally board the plane. As they transformed, airlines did a very good job of meeting consumer needs and bringing all of this to a digital experience. And, they didn't just digitize outdated processes; they completely rethought the customer journey. Right now, nobody goes to a travel agency to shop for flights. Nobody goes to the check-in counter. You handle basically all interactions from your mobile device. If you compare that to the experience of the patient in the healthcare system, it's very different. There's a large gap between consumer expectations and reality in healthcare. It's time to modernize the patient financial experience: Eight questions with Cedar CEO Dr. Florian Otto "There's a large gap between consumer expectations and reality in healthcare." — Florian Otto, MD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Cedar