Fellow Health Partners, Inc. is a New York located medical business solutions company, helping those operating in this area to streamline the medical billing process. Medical billing is a payment practice within the U.S. health system where healthcare providers submit and follow up on claims with insurance companies. This is often for services like examinations and treatments. The billing process is often digital, via a range of different software providers.
The organization, which operates within the for-profit U.S. healthcare system, has opened a new platform called the Knowledge College. The ‘college’ will interact within the $22 billion dollar U.S. business of medical billing. The college is an in-house training facility, focusing on developing the required “people skills” of the teams operating within the medical billing system.
According to Fellow Health Partners CEO Michael N. Brown, a key objective is to improve the current payments system. “We really want to help patients, doctors, and medical practices”, he says.
Brown explains further: “The best way to do this is to provide customer service that is far above the quality coming from off-shored call centers or untrained representatives.”
For this task the Knowledge College has been established to train teams to “use their communication skills consciously rather than unconsciously, which makes the difference between being effective only some of the time and being effective all of the time”.
Brown enunciates that such a process is important because a rise in high patient deductibles creates new problems in collecting from patients, coupled with the fact that “insurance companies are even more aggressive in denying claims”. This is complicated when the person representing the doctor or the hospital is not as sufficiently trained as the person representing the insurance company. Medical billing disputes are not uncommon, as Forbes reports.
A further reason for the college is because too many companies are negating training in relation to “people skills”. seeing it as a cost rather than an investment. The college seeks to challenge this, seeing people skills are key for this area of the servic sector.
