MedoSync co-founders Séamus Cooley and Dr Martin Rochford. Image: Chris Bellew/Fennell Photography
After winning a prestigious German accelerator in November, Dublin-based MedoSync has some big plans for 2023.
In early 2019, Dr Martin Rochford decided he had had enough of the inefficient, paper-based billing system in hospitals. An emergency medical consultant, Rochford noticed a pattern of the same challenges cropping up every month, losing the hospital substantial amounts in revenue.
By the end of that summer, he got in touch with tech industry veteran Séamus Cooley and asked him to lend his engineering mind to the problem at hand.
“Together, we mapped out all of the challenges faced by hospitals when it came to revenue cycle management and how technology could help to solve those problems,” Rochford told SiliconRepublic.com recently.
This led to the birth of MedoSync, a digital platform that integrates hospital and insurer systems to enable more accurate, efficient and real-time medical billing. By early 2021, the two ran a proof-of-concept with the Laya Urgent Care centres.
Soon after, Affidea, one of Ireland’s leading independent providers of advanced diagnostic imaging services, came on board as an early adopter of MedoSync’s platform.
“Despite the many incredible advances that have taken place in medicine over recent decades, hospital billing processes are often still paper-based, inefficient and admin-heavy,” said Rochford, who is the company’s chief executive.
“Our mission is to eliminate this waste in the medical billing process for hospitals and insurers alike, focusing on what needs to be done to connect all teams in the billing process, ensuring that hospitals are reimbursed fully and efficiently for their work.”
One system to bill them all
Rochford estimates that hospitals lose between 6pc and 9pc of their revenues annually through “leakages” in the billing process – largely because of human error. The current system, he says, is paper-based, prone to error and admin-intensive.
The story is the same for insurers, who are, in Rochford’s words, “underserved” by the current system and end up spending up to 10 times more in processing paper claims versus digital.
“They are sent data in a variety of ways – from boxes of files to a variety of software applications that often rely on optical character recognition [converting images of text into machine-encoded text] and human input to load into their systems,” he said.
“We provide clean structured data from hospitals which enables them to automate huge amounts of adjudication work that currently requires a significant amount of manual input. We also provide an interface for smaller providers to submit to the insurer, which eliminates another source of paper.”
Essentially, MedoSync solves the problem of multiple hospital departments inputting into a single invoice using several channels by establishing a single system to manage all stakeholders and making the status of the claim clear to everyone.
Revenue cycle managers can also use the MedoSync platform to analyse the efficiency of their workflows and optimise them as they try to secure payments at a faster pace.
The ultimate goal? To eliminate waste in the medical billing process so that more consultants and medical staff can focus on providing patient care. And since this problem is global, MedoSync wants to take its technology global too.
Global problem, global ambitions
While the start-up is currently engaging with an expanding group of private hospitals and health insurance providers in Ireland, it also sees 2023 as a year of expansion – with plans to take its innovative platform to the UK and Germany – Europe’s largest market.
“The issue of hospital billing processes remaining paper-based, inefficient and admin heavy even in 2023 is very much a global problem and we have global ambitions for our product,” Rochford said.
And MedoSync is well on its way to making waves on the continent. Since its product launch in 2021, MedoSync’s platform has been used to submit more than 100,000 claims valued in excess of €20m – with more in the pipeline.
The Dogpatch Labs-based start-up also won the prestigious German accelerator GKV Impulse in November. It will now engage with Bitmarck on the potential to adapt its medical billing tech to the service provider’s network of health insurers covering more than 25m Germans.
MedoSync has previously raised €1.2m from Enterprise Ireland and individual investors in December 2021. “We are always talking to investors and funders about our product, particularly as we believe it is a solution to a global problem,” Rochford said.
Speaking of challenges faced while trying to run the business, Rochford said the “clichés of start-ups are true where you have ups and downs” at various times.
“I have found pace varies from quieter weeks when you wonder if you will get anywhere, to busier weeks where you wonder where you will find the time,” he said.
“We are a very customer-centric team and by hearing from customers directly, it gives energy to what we are doing.”
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