Interview with Amy Hillman, HealthiPlan® & Tom Harris, Sycle.net

CAROLYN SMAKA: Amy and Tom, thanks for your time today. Amy, what do you do for Alliance Data?

AMY HILLMAN: I’m the National Sales Manager for the HealthiPlan® program, so I handle of all the Alliance Data side of the program.

SMAKA: Tom, what’s your role at Sycle.net?

HARRIS: I’m Executive Director of Sales and Product Development.

SMAKA: Can you give us an overview of the HealthiPlan Program?

HARRIS: HealthiPlan is really unique because it takes two industry leaders, Alliance Data and Sycle.net, and combines their expertise to provide a great patient financing product for Sycle.net users, on an extremely easy to use platform.

HILLMAN: I’ll take a step back to give you a quick overview of Alliance Data. At a high level, Alliance Data is a $3 billion company with three businesses, each of which provides loyalty marketing solutions in various forms to some of the best-known brands in the world. Our Retail Services business, with whom I work, provides marketing-driven credit solutions to over 90 clients, including a number of medical providers—which is where the HealthiPlan program and our partnership with Sycle.net comes in. We’re thrilled to have such a dynamic relationship with Sycle.net, truly the leader in practice management software, and to have the opportunity to create a great product for healthcare professionals and their patients.

From a provider point of view, HealthiPlan is extremely user-friendly. It cuts out some of the steps that they encounter with other patient financing programs. For example, other programs may require you to go to a separate website, use a terminal or even call into a call center to process an application, which can interrupt your clinical workflow and add unnecessary time to a patient appointment. With HealthiPlan, you can complete an application right in your Sycle.net software with just a few clicks. HealthiPlan will also post that payment right away in your books.

The pre-approval tool is also a great benefit to clinics. This tool takes the guesswork out of the conversation about hearing aids as it helps you to know what the patient may be able to afford, before you enter into that discussion.

SMAKA: It sounds great, but let’s take a step back for a minute and talk about patient financing in general. Why should clinics offer financing, and what are some reasons they may not be offering it? 

 Tom Harris

HARRIS:  Great question. I’ve been on the Sycle.net product development team for over two years now, and a lot of the products we develop stem from user surveys. We survey Sycle.net users on a regular basis to enhance our current products and our portfolio. We found out a lot of people were not happy with the financing programs that they were utilizing, due to poor experiences with them. They didn’t like having to navigate away from Sycle.net, and they didn’t like having to take time and attention away from their patient to go perform administrative tasks associated with these other programs. We found that professionals like the idea of patient financing, but they didn’t having to adopt new workflows and new processes in order to offer it.

So we decided to take all the work out of offering patient financing, dialing it down to literally a couple of clicks in Sycle.net, in order to make that provider-patient experience as smooth as possible.

HILLMAN: All hearing care professionals have had the experience where you know what’s best for your patient, but the patient can’t afford it at that the moment. You may then have to recommend another device that costs less, but doesn’t have all of the features the patient may need. Professionals tell us that it is sometimes difficult to have financing discussions with patients, because they want provide the best care possible, and discussions about costs and payments make the process impersonal. That’s where patient financing comes in, especially with the HealthiPlan pre-approval tool. Professionals can rest assured that the discussion will go smoothly as they will know the options to offer their patients.

You can give patients all the payment options available to them, including HealthiPlan deferred interest plans, or those at a fixed interest rate that offer a lower monthly payment, which is great for people on fixed incomes. It streamlines the hearing device selection and ordering process, by taking the guesswork out of it and providing the professional with more information to help move the conversation forward.

Some people may be under the impression that if a patient needs help with financing, they’ll ask. From our experience, however, we find that many patients are too embarrassed to ask if payment options are available. If they are not presented with options from you, the professional, they may miss out on needed care; you can’t assume they will ask.

SMAKA: Amy, can you go into more detail about the pre-approval tool? Let’s say I have a new patient on my schedule in about an hour from now. He may or may not need hearing aids; he may or may not be able to afford them. How do I go about using that pre-approval tool for this appointment?

HILLMAN:   Well, it’s really intuitive in the Sycle.net software. Under the Administration tab, there’s a box you can check when you’re setting up different appointment types to indicate whether there may be a sales opportunity. Any appointment that you have designated as a sales opportunity simply by checking that box, will trigger a pre-approval request for that patient. Using only the patient name and address, we can for example, indicate yes, we can pre-approve this customer for $5,000.00.

So simply by checking the sales opportunity box, a pre-approval screen for your customer will be generated. It’s a tool we use with great success for many Alliance Data clients, as it creates a seamless experience for the customer.

SMAKA: Is this going to run a credit check?

HILLMAN:   No, it does not run a credit check. The pre-approval request is exactly like receiving a pre-approved offer in the mail. It does not show up as an inquiry on a credit report. We don’t use a patient’s Social Security number or set up an account; it is just a prescreen so it lets us know the customer has the likelihood of being approved.

HARRIS: A common question we receive from providers is, “Is the pre-screen going to ding a patient’s credit report” and the answer is no, it does not affect the patient’s credit in any way.

It’s really helpful for our providers to know going into the appointment how much their patient’s been approved for for lots of different reasons. It reduces the risk of the potential for awkward conversations when counseling the patient about solutions.

SMAKA: Certainly. You can never assume anything with patients. Why not give every patient every option to enable them to make the best decisions for their treatment?

Tom, I know that at Sycle.net the development process doesn’t end when you offer a new product. What enhancements have you made to HealthiPlan since its initial release?

HARRIS: In the past couple months we’ve deployed several feature enhancements. One of the coolest is a new Payment Calculator. One of the most frequent requests we heard from professionals is, “I can provide all these different financing plans for my patient, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what their monthly payment will be with each plan, and that information is really helpful.”

So now you can click a button to bring up a Payment Calculator. You enter the price of the hearing aid, and then you can see the monthly payment for each of the various plans offered to that patient.  Or, you can decide on the monthly payment, and then work backward to determine which plan would best suit the patient.

We also enhanced our Settlement Report, so professionals can see how much HealthiPlan financing they are doing, what plans their patients are using, and what funds have settled in their account. At Sycle.net, we like to give our users reports to help them take a deep look into their business. The feedback we’ve had is that the visibility these reports provide has been really helpful for professionals to analyze and ultimately improve their businesses.

HILLMAN:   In addition to the enhancement Tom mentioned, we also rolled out some Equal Pay plans that are available to patients on a fixed interest rate. The terms range from 12 to 60 months, and the great thing is that the cost to the clinic is the same regardless of the term that the patient chooses. It empowers the patient to choose which plan works best for his or her individual situation.

HARRIS: In addition, we are continually talking with our users and making further enhancements.  For example, we are working on the ability for someone who’s not a patient to apply for a HealthiPlan account and then use it on the patient’s behalf. So you have someone bringing their parent in for a hearing aid, or parents bringing in their children, or a spouse bringing in their husband and wife. Our system will allow the loved one to apply for an account independent of that patient in Sycle, and then use that account to pay for a hearing aid.

That’s a great example of something that you don’t really think about when you’re developing a product, but after talking with some of our Sycle.net users, we realized how great it would be to implement this functionality. We’ve also made other really simple changes with Alliance Data to do things such as update the patient’s account balance on their patient summary. Or, let you know to pre-screen again if a patient closed their account. Sometimes it’s just little things that can make the user experience much, much better.

SMAKA: That makes a lot of sense. What do you call the feature that enables a loved one to open a HealthiPlan account for your patient?

HILLMAN:   We’re calling it the Financial Responsible Party. The thought process behind it was similar to that of financial responsibility from an insurance company’s point of view. Often you have a situation where mom is the person on the insurance, but the child is on the account. Obviously a minor won’t be paying for their hearing device, so we wanted to grant the ability for that mother to also apply for financing for her child.

This idea was a brainchild of Sycle.net users, which is one of the things I love about partnering with Sycle.net. We’re fortunate to receive great feedback from Sycle.net users, and the Sycle.net team is really proactive about taking ideas, and making them happen in terms of products and functionality in a very short amount of time.

HealthiPlan is just over a year old, and the program just keeps getting better and better for everyone involved. We definitely a have a program we are very proud of, and one that clinics continue to be proud to offer to their patients.

HARRIS: For us, we knew that Alliance Data was large, but nimble enough and experienced enough to handle this business and handle the financing, and we at Sycle were able respond to the needs or our industry much more quickly than maybe a larger entity.

SMAKA: With the current state of the economy, do you see an increased need for patient financing in our industry?

HILLMAN: Yes, professionals are definitely concerned about having a way to enable their patients to get the devices that they need.

HARRIS: In addition, as the demographics of our patients change, we’re expecting to see the demand for financing continue to grow. Baby Boomers and younger generations are more comfortable with financing and very open to it.

SMAKA: Right. Also, because you offer a patient financing does not necessarily mean they are going to take it. But I think it speaks to something about you as a provider that you are providing options and are flexible and easy to work with.

HARRIS: Yes, and it’s free to enroll in the HealthiPlan program.

There’s a Patient Finance button on multiple pages in Sycle.net – you simply click on it and complete the enrollment form to get started. Or, you can contact us at Sycle.net if you have any questions, and we can sign you up as well.

Being on the HealthiPlan product development team from the very beginning and watching it grow, there is thing that I have to stress and that is, that it is so easy to use.

It’s literally two clicks of a button, and a financing transaction is complete. When we show this to professionals for the first time, the most common response is, “That’s it? It’s really that simple?” Once they try it, they’re hooked. It’s a no-brainer.

HILLMAN: I’d like to add that the merchant fees are very competitive with other plans. Through December 31^st, 2012, the interest rate for our most popular plan, the

12-month interest free plan, is only is 4.9. I definitely would encourage clinics to sign up now and take advantage of that.

Most importantly, though, is that professionals will find that offering HealthiPlan with Sycle.net streamlines their workflow, helps make the counseling and sales process go much smoother, and enables them to spend more time on patient care.

SMAKA: Tom and Amy, it’s always a pleasure speaking with you, and thanks again for taking the time to detail HealthiPlan with me.

For more information, visit www.Sycle.net or the Sycle.net Expo Page on AudiologyOnline.