Waystar, a provider of revenue cycle technology, today announced it has acquired PARO, a financial assistance predictive analytics solution designed for the healthcare industry. As part of the acquisition, the PARO solution will be integrated with Waystar’s technology platform to help hospitals better assess charity care, reduce bad debt and meet community benefit requirements.
Why PARO?
Nonprofit hospitals are required to make reasonable efforts to determine if patients are eligible for financial assistance before engaging in collections to demonstrate community benefit and maintain their not-for-profit status. Founded in 2006, the PARO presumptive charity solution automates this process to proactively and consistently identify patients that qualify for charity under a provider’s Financial Assistance Policy.
This solution eliminates barriers for patients that might face challenges in completing a traditional financial assistance application. This electronic screening tool also enables hospitals to correctly classify a patient account prior to bad debt, thus improving the hospital’s financial assistance footprint while directly benefiting patients. PARO provides a fair and consistent evaluation for financial assistance, ensures legal compliance and helps hospitals deliver on their community benefit mission. PARO services nearly 1,000 hospital locations directly through custom interfaces and through a network of value-added integration partners.
“As we continue to build a powerful platform to make financial processes simpler and more productive, bringing on best-in-class technology is crucial—and charity determination is an increasingly vital part of the healthcare revenue cycle equation,” said Matt Hawkins, Waystar CEO. “PARO is the original and leading predictive-analytics-powered solution in charity-related healthcare. Adding this technology to the Waystar platform further empowers us to provide health systems and hospitals with cutting-edge solutions to address their evolving challenges.”
Recent Hospital Charity Care Screening Milestone
In 2018, PARO’s technology screened nearly 11 million patient visits and identified more than 3.5 million patient visits as eligible for free or discounted care, thus reclassifying more than 30 percent of what would otherwise be considered bad debt write-offs to charitable care. Unlike other solutions, PARO presumptive charity does not use credit scores as an evaluation metric (thus avoiding credit checks, which can disgruntle patients). PARO pioneered the use of public-record data to help hospitals assess patients living in poverty and patients who live in the financial shadows.
Waystar Recent Expansion Moves
Waystar’s acquisition of PARO comes on the heels of a busy year of product expansion. In September of last year, Waystar strengthened its revenue cycle management capabilities with the acquisition of Connance, a leading provider of workflow-driven by predictive analytics solutions. Just a month later, the company added enhanced claims monitoring capabilities through its acquisition of the transaction services business from UPMC’s Ovation. With the addition of a pioneering solution for automating the financial assistance process, Waystar continues to build on its mission to improve healthcare through comprehensive and innovative technology.