Not only are healthcare bills confusing, but also paper bills can often get lost in the mail or covered up in big piles on counters. Large healthcare organizations, for the most part, offer electronic billing, but that’s not always something solo or small practices can take advantage of.
That is the sweet spot for Collectly, founded by Levon Brutyan and Max Mizotin, which aims to help medical providers more easily collect payments.
One report shows that the amount medical providers collected was about 55% of what they were owed in 2021, down from 76% the year prior.
“Patient payments overall have to be about $480 billion, and considering that the patient responsibility grows at about 12% year over year, this huge number increases as well,” Brutyan told TechCrunch. “The bigger pain point for healthcare organizations is that approximately $200 billion of that never gets collected. Hospitals, for example, run on very tiny margins, and a lot of them are actually running at a loss, so that makes this whole thing even worse.”
Pasadena-based Collectly has proprietary interfaces that integrate with electronic health records and practice management software to enhance patient billing operations.
Through its platform, customers have, on average, been able to increase patient collections for medical group partners by 75%, reduce the “days sales outstanding” to 12 days from between 60 and 90 days, and achieve a 93% patient satisfaction score — important for retention, he added.
We’ve followed Collectly since it launched in 2017 as a digital debt collection startup, and then again later that year after being part of Y Combinator, raising $1.9 million and refocusing on automating and streamlining billing operations as a patient financial engagement company.
Currently, Collectly has engaged over 300,000 patients daily and is growing revenue over 3x year over year. Brutyan touts its growth and the fact that the company “doesn’t have any churn” as reasons why investors were eager to supply the company with capital for additional growth.
The company closed on $29 million Series A in a funding round, led by Sapphire Ventures, that also included YC, Wayfinder Ventures, Burst Capital, Cabra VC and Davidovs VC. The new investment brings the total capital raised to $34.1 million.
Brutyan declined to say what the company’s valuation is with the new round; however, he did say that “the valuation has grown accordingly” and is one of those “rare companies that was running for so long profitably and grew by ourselves. I think that investors appreciate that specifically during these interesting and tough times.”
He intends to use the new funding on technology and product development and to double the team’s size by the end of the year. The company will be rolling out new products around pre-service modules and in-person payments as well.
“We are also looking at emerging technologies, like ChatGPT,” Brutyan said. “AI is highly leveraged, so we are working on that as well to make sure that the patients will receive the best experience, understand their bills and that questions are resolved in a timely manner.”