Andrew Coyle

Building a health-tech startup focused on automating revenue cycle management for modern private practices

Summary

Hey Healthcare was a billing service for healthcare providers. It combined medical billing experts and technology to help private practices maximize collections and minimize hassle.
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Role

Co-founder, Product Designer 2018 - 2022

Fig 1. - Hey Healthcare's desktop and mobile dashboard views.

Creating a design-driven company

My co-founder and I started Hey Healthcare after finding out how hard it was for healthcare providers to verify patient health insurance. After building an insurance benefit checking app, we realized it was just the tip of the iceberg of the problems plaguing revenue cycle management (RCM).

Fig 2. - The main navigation's hover effect.

In the United States, healthcare providers spend over $280 billion on billing and insurance-related costs. Smaller providers face greater challenges because they lack the economies of scale to manage these costs. Hey Healthcare was founded to help providers stay independent by improving their cash flow with technology, design, and a better service model.

Fig 3. - The billing dashboard and a close up of the display density toggle.

Responsibilities

  • • Research, product design, and strategy
  • • Hiring and managing a small team
  • • Client, partner, and investor relationships

Improving cash flow with better design

My co-founder and I met at Flexport in 2014 as early employees, where we helped build the company from a seedling startup to a multi-billion dollar unicorn. We worked closely together to design and develop internal and client-facing software that helped automate parts of international logistics. We saw firsthand how technology combined with industry experts could create dramatic efficiency gains. We applied these learnings to drive innovation in RCM.

Fig 4. - iOS Messaging views.

Evolving the platforms beyond its initial audience

We started with a simple benefit checking app for private practices to verify patient coverage compliantly. After gaining initial traction, users wanted more from the platform.

We employed expert medical billers to help manage clients as we built software around them to help automate their work. The platform evolved to help private practice managers visualize data, make decisions, and communicate with RCM experts.

Our strategy focused on integrating multiple APIs and EDIs to improve data quality, building productivity tools for our specialists to increase efficiency, and creating a delightful user experience for private practice managers.

Fig 5. - Patient table, details, and create views.

Product strategy

Building Hey Healthcare with my co-founder and team enabled me to develop a product, operations, management, and GTM strategy in unison.

The strategy hinged around acquiring private practices that were beginning to take insurance by offering eligibility lookup and credentialing services. From there, we aimed to provide software to manage and visualize their revenue cycle along with professional billing services administered by our industry experts. We then built software around the medical billers' workflow to improve service delivery.

Fig 6. - Main views in the app.

We documented the tasks and completion time for each step in processing a claim to determine automation potential and ways to streamline the operations of our medical billers.

Insurance companies had many variabilities, but the biggest obstacle was streamlining client operations. If a private practice forgot to update their EDI enrollment with a payer, it could cause cash flow bottlenecks outside our control. So we built a messaging system to manage exceptions, provide updates, and enable clients to commit actions to address these variables.

Fig 7. - Select components from the app.
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