For Allegheny Health Network (AHN) and Highmark, the goal isn't just to reinvent health care, but to also provide a seamless and supportive patient experience right down to the details of patient billing. After all, patients can get overwhelmed by the disconnected bills and explanations of benefits piling up in their mailboxes. Not only can it compound stress patients already have about their health, but it can also lead to missed payments and costly customer service inquiries. In this episode of Health Care Reinvented, we explore how ANH and Highmark leveraged technology and a leading-edge health care IT company, Cedar, to deploy a solution that not only increases payments but reduces patient stress around the billing process. Listen in to Neil Kulkarni, Vice President of Customer and Clinician Experience Solutions at Highmark Health; Kimberly Wilkinson, Director, Central Business Office, AHN; and Shanti Krishnan, Vice President of Sales at Cedar, detail their journey to radically simplify their customer financial experience by implementing Cedar Pay. With the Payer Intelligence Layer, Highmark members who receive care at AHN have access to uniquely integrated billing information and insurance data. In less than one year with Cedar Pay, AHN added $17 million in patient payments, thanks in part to the integration with Highmark. But the clearest signal that payer-provider partnership was working came from patients themselves, who gave the integrated experience a 90% satisfaction rating. Listen and learn how embracing technology can create so much positive impact and how more projects are in store for the future. Transcription: You're listening to the healthcare reinvented podcast series. And I'm your host, Jonathan Kersting. With the Pittsburgh Technology Council. This podcast is all about the intersection of technology and healthcare. And we talk about it at every single level, whether it's in the operating room, whether it's about virtual visits, and everything in between. It's where technology is making a positive impact. And today, it's all about how technology is simplifying the payer provider system. Simplifying just makes it sound, dare I say too simple, because it is super complex. But you want a streamlined system, you want a sensible system, you want an easy system and understandable system, so the customers don't have to be stressed out when it comes to paying and understanding their bills. And joining us on the podcast today is Neil Kulkarni, who's the vice president of customer and coalition experience solutions at Highmark Health. We have Kimberly Wilkinson, who is Director of Central Business Office at Allegheny Health Network. And we have Shanti Krishnan, who is vice president of sales at Cedar. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I'm excited to explore this conversation. And I always love starting with introduction. So our listener knows who is who. So why don't we just start down the list and I went through Neil, let's start with you your background real fast, and what you do, how you do it off the ball, Jonathan, thank you so much for having us and really excited to be able to kind of talk about this with the group today. I've been at Highmark, for a little under five years. And really what my role is all about is how do we transform our delivery system? And how do we make things easier for our customers? How do we make it easier for our clinicians? How do we think about simplification experiences being more practice personalized, and then working with our provider partners to really deliver a seamless and blended experience for people and so we say customer because it doesn't really matter if it's a insurance member or a provider system patient than today, it's a person. And healthcare is really complicated. And so I'm excited and unfortunate that I get to spend kind of my day thinking about how we think make things easier from a system perspective. And you make it sound easy. And that's very complicated, because it's like, like I said, In the beginning, it's one of those deals where it's like, you're dealing with people here, we need simplicity from a very complex system. And that's when you get to work on every day. And that's just improving the quality of people's lives. I love that is so cool, Neil. So Kim, how about yourself and what you do at Allegheny Health Network? Hello, everybody. I'm Kim. I'm the director of the Central Business Office for Allegheny Health Network. And my team is compromised of our Customer Care Center, which is our call center where patients are calling in inquiring about their bills, our Single Billing Office cash management, enrollment and credit balance. So as you can imagine, my areas are very involved with the patients and answering their questions as healthcare is very complicated. And we're, as Neil said, trying to make it uncomplicated for our patients and it easier for them to navigate and understand their bill. And not make it so stressful, because they're stressed enough. That's what I was gonna say. I mean, you're often talking to customers that are at an inflection point in their life where they're dealing with maybe a medical crisis or something and you're just stressed out like crazy. And all of a sudden, they you're getting some, some bills, or some get some questions, and you can't figure it out. So it's just increasing that stress. And you don't want your folks to be stressed out. So that's why I love what you're doing, because let's bring the stress down and help people heal. Right. Right, and make it easier for them make it easy. That's what I'm talking about. And of course, we couldn't have this conversation without our friends from cedars. So Sean cheap. Tell us about yourself and really like what cedar is all about, because I love the fact that like Highmark comes in and uses these tech partners like this to make these things happen to make that simplicity happen based on a technology platform. I'm Shanti Krishna and vice president of sales at Cedar I've been with the company for almost four years now. So we've evolved quite a bit over that time. But really thrilled to be here today. And of course, just so excited to have such wonderful partners in Miele Kim and the rest of the Highmark and AHN teams. What cedar does is that we have a platform that really aims to make it easier and more intuitive for patients to navigate and ultimately fulfill their financial and administrative obligations in health care. We know this is a real pain point for patients and as Kim just alluded to, it's often coming at a moment that is already stressful because of some sort of healthcare incident. And so our view is if we can take the stress out of what is already a pretty stressful situation, you know, we're doing our job. And so, we aim to do this in two kind of key related ways. One is just bringing the best of other consumer industries to this known pain point in the patient healthcare experience, making it more personalized, more intuitive, really leaning on data and design science to help inform the experience And the second is really bringing disparate parties such as payer and provider together on one platform because we know that patients don't see these things as being entirely separate. They're actually very related, yet our system treats them as totally separate. So, again, an area where agent and Highmark have just been such fantastic partners and really helps us to realize this vision. Yeah, I was looking at your website. And you have, I mean, you have the biggest clients out there. And of course, Allegheny Health Network. Highmark, they're right there with you guys. So you're, you're helping lots of lots of big organizations solve these very tough problems. So that's, that's cool stuff. Certainly a privilege. Most definitely. So let's get the conversation rolling. I guess maybe starting off with talking with with Neil Kim about maybe some of the problems that were that Highmark was looking at knowing that you needed to find a solution around this. Can you guys set the stage for us? Yeah. So happy to kind of chat through that. So I think the last couple of years, as we've been looking at how do we drive a better experience for our customers, I really started to break that down into a bunch of buckets of things that we want to focus on. But one of the major ones is around kind of the end and healthcare financial experience to say, hey, people struggled to understand financial costs, they struggled, they don't get treatment at times, because they really don't understand that as well. So that relates is often delayed care, when they actually get then care, then there's really complicated payment processes, we don't do a good job of connecting people to financial services and advocacy programs that they might have access to. So that entire ecosystem is really, really complicated. Everything from kind of understanding what costs are known, giving, comparing cost options, making it easy for people to kind of pay their bills, helping them understand the benefits that they have, as well. And so once we started kind of looking at the space, we said, hey, this is an area that we really need to kind of dig in and and tackle, and we're not doing a good enough job today. And so about three years ago, we really started kind of looking into, Hey, what are the set of partners because this is it's complicated, like it's talked about, it isn't something that we're going to solve completely on our own. And we know that there are other organizations and kind of other companies that are really partnering to drive this experience. And so we started looking at who are the center partners that are doing that. And so through that process, we identified initially, a company called boot up as a place that we wanted to start and that transition into cedar. And so I think one of the interesting parts, which I think we'll talk a little bit f
