Electronic Health Reporter

Relatient is passionate about assisting healthcare organizations with patient-centered engagement.

Elevator pitch

By helping organizations automate patient-centered outreach and messaging, Relatient helps practices, hospitals and health systems facilitate more compliant, and ultimately healthier, patient populations.

Founders’ story

Our co-founder and CTO Kevin Montgomery began tinkering with an email and text appointment reminder service for a local medical practice during a family health crisis to keep his mind busy. The first software was finished late one night at a hospital bedside, but it wasn’t until two years later that Relatient was officially formed. The core idea of automating patient engagement through consumer-like technology tools hasn’t changed. Since then Relatient has expanded on that simple idea and now automates text, email, and voice to improve administrative, billing and clinical aspects of medical practices and hospitals.

Marketing/promotion strategy

In late 2017, we announced the appointment of Michele Perry as CEO. In her new role, Michele is helping Relatient achieve its next phase of growth and realize our company’s vision to bridge the communication gap between patients and providers. Earlier in 2017, Michele joined Relatient’s board of directors, concurrently with an investment from Elsewhere Partners, where she serves as an operating advisor.

Since joining, Michele has added fuel to Relatient’s marketing and sales teams, including the recent addition of a SVP of sales and business development in order to advance our direct sales strategy.

Market opportunity

First, we believe that practice and office managers are the unsung heroes of healthcare. Unfortunately, despite the rise of technology, ambulatory office personnel have workflows that are still largely manual and inefficient. For example, most practices have to manually go through payments collected throughout the day and post them to the system so that the doctor gets paid. This process usually happens after office close every day. Many practices also still mail patient reminder postcards via the postal service – licking stamps and all. We aim to alleviate and empower these heroes with modern patient engagement software.

Second, patients are consumers. They’re also becoming the new payer. Their behavioral expectations and financial power is driving physician practices to modernize. According to Black Book’s 2017 Revenue Cycle Management Report, consumers are facing a 29.4 percent increase in deductible and out-of-pocket costs. Moreover, 71 percent of today’s patients say mobile pay and billing alerts improve their healthcare experience, citing the billing process as their No. 2 customer satisfaction metric, just behind patient care. Relatient’s solutions help patients get to the doctor on time, check-in with ease, and pay their bills with consumer-like convenience.

Who are your competitors?

We bump up against a variety of patient communications solutions in the market, like Televox and Solutionreach, that offer singular patient reminder or messaging solutions. Other patient engagement companies focus on hospitals and health systems, but at Relatient, we specialize in ambulatory practices with five or more physicians.

How does Relatient differentiate itself from the competition and what differentiates your new product, MDpay?

Most competitors do not offer the full suite of patient outreach solutions that we do, including patient reminders, on-demand messaging and RideToHealth. Through our partnerships with leaders such as Greenway Health and AdvancedMD, we are also able to offer more seamless integrations than most competitors.

Further, our new patient billing product MDpay is truly in a class of its own. It is the first complete patient billing solution for the ambulatory care market to autopost patient payments back to the respective visit ID. The software solution uses automation and patient-centered outreach, which enables patients to pay for medical bills either in the office, on desktop or on any mobile device. In turn, this gives practices back time, savings and profits.

Business model

Providers pay a reasonable subscription fee to use our different patient outreach solutions, as well as a small transaction fee on some products.

Current needs

We are always looking for talented technologists, sales and customer support professionals that have a passion for improving healthcare. We’re currently hiring for QA, R&D and software engineers, among other positions. Candidates can click here to view our Tennessee-based openings.

When founded: 2012

Number of full-time employees: 54

Headquarters: Nashville, Tenn.

For more information, visit www.relatient.net and click here to demo the new MDpay patient billing solution.