Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the
Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm delighted to be joined
today by Ryan Natzke, who's the chief revenue
officer at Trust Commerce, which is a sphere
company. Ryan, thank you so much for being
here with us today. So before we dive
into some questions and pick your reins a
little bit here, can you give us a
60 second overview of your role at Trust
Commerce? Sure thing. So I am our chief
revenue officer. So I'm in charge of earlier
my team is in charge of really growing
the company both from a direct sales standpoint,
from a partnership standpoint,
and working with our existing customers to make
sure that they're kind of aware and know
what we have in addition to maybe some
of the stuff that they're already doing. And
what we do is we help with with
integrated patient payments. Mhmm. So we help collect
on the patient responsibility side of things. And
for the most part, if we're doing our
job right, the end user, whether that's a
staff member taking a payment at the front
desk or a patient paying online,
they don't really know even exist. We wanna
be integrated and embedded within other systems to
help them securely and compliantly take payments, and
then we handle the rest from there. Mhmm.
And such a key important area in health
systems at the moment, a ton of partnerships
in this space. So excited to pick your
brains and hear a little bit more about
what you do on the front end. Can
you to start, can you tell us about
challenges the health care providers face and what
opportunities
does
adopting omnichannel payment solutions offer for them and
their patients?
Yeah. So the interesting
thing about health care payments compared to what
you might see in other industries
is patients pay all sorts of different ways.
When you think of going to Target,
you pay either online or you pay when
you check out.
When you pay at a gas station, you
pay before you get gas. But if you're
a patient, you might pay a little bit
beforehand, which might be a co pay. It
might be an estimate on something that's gonna
be done. It could be a down payment
on a procedure that's gonna happen.
You might pay when you get to the
facility, and that could be at a kiosk.
That could be talking to the person checking
you in. You could pay. And then after
the fact, you could pay online. You could
pay over the phone. You might be set
up for a payment plan.
You might pay with your credit card. You
may pay with your bank account. You might
have an HSA or FSA card. So when
we think about omnichannel payments and health care,
it truly is omnichannel. Any way that you
can potentially pay a health care system needs
to be able to accept
that, and have that work. And some of
the challenges there is you might not have
the same system in place for all of
those workflows.
So trying to provide a consistent user experience,
like, patient experience
for the patient when they pay. So that
if they're paying beforehand at the point of
service or after the fact,
it feels like they're dealing with 1 organization
and not like, oh, it's easy if I
pay afterwards, but it's really hard if I
pay at the point of service.
So it's managing that and making it work
with all the different systems that are kind
of underlying for that for that workflows. Mhmm.
Can you expand on what sort of digital
tools providers should consider to deliver more transparency
and, like you said, convenience
in improving the patient experience and also collections
as well? Yeah. So there historically has not
been a lot of transparency at all when
it comes to health care billing or the
patient collection side of it. Things like the
no surprises act and being able to provide
estimates ahead of time really helps that out,
but we're still at the early stages of
that. I don't think it's very common yet
where,
when you schedule an appointment, somebody's gonna tell
you, oh, this is how much it's gonna
cost.
You can ask ahead of time, and you
might get an estimate, but it's still an
estimate.
So
being more proactive with providing an estimate upfront
really helps with that transparency.
And transparency goes a long way because it
makes it so that the patient can plan
for something.
In many cases, health care is not a
planned event, but let's say you need a
hip replacement or a knee replacement.
Usually, those aren't acute things that have to
happen instantly,
but it's gonna be helpful to know how
much that's gonna cost and how much your
insurance is gonna cover. And that could be
different in the first half of the year
if you when you didn't hit your deductible
versus the back half of the year when
you maybe have hit your deductible.
So being able to potentially budget, set up
a payment plan,
that transparency allows for better decision making and
a better communication between the provider and the
patient to make sure that they pay what
is owed, but they also understand why they
owe what they owe. Mhmm. So, right, obviously,
consumerism is a rising trend across the health
care spectrum with more patients shopping around for
the best care. As providers work to offer
a more retail retail like payment experience, how
important are integrated solutions here? Are there specific
examples that stand out to you? Yeah. So,
obviously, do a little bit of plug for
the work that we're doing in terms of
being able to help out with that. But
so that retail experience ties in with the
transparency we talked about before of kind of
knowing what you owe and why you owe
it. But it also
is allowing the patient to pay the way
they wanna pay. So like I was we
were talking about earlier, there's credit cards, debit
cards, HSA, FSA cards, but also Apple Pay
and Google Pay and PayPal and Venmo.
And health care is traditionally not known as
being the most risk taking forward thinking when
it comes to some of these things. It's
a it's a risk adverse industry,
but there are areas of the country where,
maybe there's a lower or less banked population.
We work with a group in Hawaii that
was really pushing for PayPal because not everybody
has a bank account, and they just use
PayPal as their bank account, essentially. So they
needed to make sure that we could
have them accept payments via PayPal for the
patient care that they were giving. So doing
stuff like that helps
that health care payment experience feel a lot
more like what you might expect in other
other industries
where it's it's a lot more than just
a credit card. Mhmm. Ryan, fascinating to hear
more about what you do and a little
bit more about Trust Commerce. Thank you so
much for taking the time to share with
your insights with us today, and thank you
to Trust Commerce for sponsoring today's content. Thanks,
Trevor.