TherapySouth

TherapySouth has grown from 21 clinics to 50+ in the ten years Johnny Cupp has served as CFO, but the way it billed patients didn’t keep up. Outside of collecting copays at the front desk, getting paid meant hours of manual reconciliation, stacks of paper statements, and patients paying by check or phone. Before PatientPay, Johnny says, “we were just so far behind the times.”

Hours Lost to Reconciliation

Card payments didn’t integrate with TherapySouth’s EMR, so every day, each front office matched the previous day’s credit card transactions to patient accounts by hand. Depending on the size of the clinic, that took 20 minutes to an hour and a half, and every clinic had to do it.

“They would literally have to go transaction by transaction by transaction and tie it back to the patient side in the EMR,” Johnny says. “That time alone, we could be doing so many other things if it just integrated.”

An Outdated Way to Pay

Patients didn’t have it any easier. A balance meant waiting for a statement in the mail, then writing a check or calling the office to pay by card. The online payment page had so many problems, from buttons that didn’t work to patients paying the wrong clinic, that TherapySouth shut it off. Setting up a payment plan took a phone call, and with no card on file, every patient had to pull out a card at every visit. Johnny puts it in the patient’s words:

“I’ve paid every time I’ve come in, I’m a little off, I’m going to get a bill. Why does it have to come snail mail? And then why do I have to write a check or call to pay because your website doesn’t work?”

For Johnny, that frustration puts the patient relationship at risk.

“When it comes to paying bills, no one wants to do it. And if it isn’t easy or if it isn’t right, they may never come back just because of that,” Johnny says.

The Cost of Printing

With online payments shut off, even more statements had to be printed, and TherapySouth did its printing in-house. At its size, each run took a day or two to print, stuff, and stamp. “Oh, it was terrible,” Johnny says.

It was expensive, too. Containers of statements went out to the post office every month, and every cycle meant paying for paper, envelopes, and postage, plus the staff time to produce it all and answer the calls that followed. Send out 5,000 statements, Johnny points out, and if even 10% of patients call, that’s 500 phone calls.

And all of it depended on the printer.

“There was a month, I’ll never forget this, where the printer broke. Statements didn’t go out because the printer broke. So then it’s like, now we’re behind,” Johnny says. “Let’s get rid of paper. Let’s stop printing statements.”

Two Requirements, One Partner

Johnny knew there had to be a better solution, and he knew exactly what it had to do.

“Our problem that we needed help with was, one, we needed a solution that integrated with our EMR. And then two, we needed a solution that was easy to use for patients to make payments.”

He also wanted one partner, not a patchwork of vendors. PatientPay, he says, “was the only one that checked all the boxes.” Before signing, he called PatientPay customers smaller than TherapySouth, its size, and larger.

“I did not run into a single practice that said don’t do it. Every person I talked to said slam dunk all day long. Do it tomorrow. One in particular told me that day one, they collected 100 grand. And I’m like, all right. Sign me up. Let’s go.”

The most persuasive calls came from practices that had lost PatientPay after switching to an EMR that didn’t integrate, leaving them to send payment texts by hand, one at a time.

“You didn’t have it. Now you have it. Now you can’t have it, and you really still want it. That’s the most telling thing to me.”

PatientPay President Pete Heydt and his team also flew to Birmingham to sit down with TherapySouth’s leadership and learn where the problems were. Johnny contrasts that with the cold calls that promise to “save you 15%” and “grow your collections by 30%.” As he puts it, “That guy has no idea what I need and don’t need.”