Echo Acquires Prelude to Modernize Healthcare Disbursements

Payments company Echo Health has acquired healthcare disbursement hub provider Prelude Software.

“Together, ECHO and Prelude Software will continue to drive improvements by leveraging Prelude’s disbursement platform, PayPilot, along with ECHO’s fully integrated digital payment platform,” Echo said in a news release Wednesday (Jan. 4).

Steve Root, Prelude’s president, said the acquisition will let PayPilot users access ECHO’s payment options and payment network. The release says PayPilot’s “focus on claims, policy, and AP system integration optimize results while eliminating workflow disruptions.”

Ohio-based Echo says the acquisition is happening as insurers and hospitals are giving more weight to digital payments to reduce costs and improve experiences.

As PYMNTS noted in October, the healthcare sector has lagged behind the digital shift in terms of payment technology.

There are a number of contributing factors, the least of which is the continuing shift to patients bearing larger levels of responsibility for their healthcare payments, coupled with billing systems that haven’t caught up.

And although there’s been some headway on that front, Paymentus Head of Product and Partnerships Chris Trainor said in an interview with PYMNTS that “50% of consumers say healthcare bills are the most difficult of any bill that they have to pay. It’s still problematic.”

Fueling the issue are the nonrecurring nature of healthcare payments, particularly for elective procedures and specialties, along with confusion about what has and hasn’t been paid.

“If you look at investments being made by health systems, they are going up as it pertains to digitizing interactions with patients, as well as unifying back-end systems,” Trainor said. “Without unification, you’re going to have disparate experiences. That’s where we’ve historically seen disparate systems and no unification lead to fragmented customer-patient experiences.”

Meanwhile, the PYMNTS/Lynx collaboration “Healthcare In The Digital Age: Consumers See Unified Platforms As Key To Better Health,” found a strong demand for an easy-to-use, unified platform for healthcare payments.

Our research showed that just 42% of consumers were very or extremely familiar with their health insurance benefits. That can lead to confusion during the healthcare journey — especially when it’s time to pay for medical services.

“Online healthcare accounts make a meaningful impact,” the study says, with “82% of consumers who use them find that the accounts are convenient to use and save time.”

Another 53% of consumers said that these are the most important benefits they realized when using accounts from a health insurer, healthcare provider or a wellness or fitness app.