News | W Squared

W Squared provides retained finance and accounting services to nTelagent.

October 6, 2009

By Erin Lawley

Nashville revenue cycle management company nTelagent today announced the release of a reporting package addition to its health care collection software.

The tool, called the Point-of-Service Reporting Director, lets health care providers using nTelagent's Retail Application for Healthcare track patient payment information through eight reports designed to provide better visibility of collection data, improved compliance reporting and staff performance metrics.

"It lets management know what each one of their people are doing from every perspective – from a cash collecting perspective, from a charity perspective - because what our solution is about is settling all patients at the point of service," said Earl Winter, chairman and CEO.

nTelagent's Retail Application helps doctors and hospitals settle patient accounts at the time they deliver care by determining what the patient owes, what they're able to pay, and then directing staff in what to do and what to say to patients so they can collect as much of that patient's owed amount as possible.

The company, founded in 2003, has about 60 customers of varying size – roughly triple its client load at this time last year, Winter said.

With Reporting Director, hospital management can track real-time patient payment data from a company-wide, or down to an individual employee level. The Cash Collected Report, for example, shows dollars collected by area, registrar and account. It details patients' capacity to pay, what the staff collected and what they should have collected.

According to Jeff Drake, executive vice president of Franklin-based revenue cycle management firm Passport Health Communications, collecting a patient's payment at the point of care is critical for providers to get paid at all.

If payment isn’t collected on the front end, "the ability to collect is cut in half by the time I walk out of the office or by the time I leave the hospital," Drake said. "By 90 days, it's down in the neighborhood of a 10 or 15 percent chance they have the ability to collect."

W Squared provides retained finance and accounting services to nTelagent.