BackStreamlining the Billing Process
CNY Fertility is on a mission to provide the most affordable fertility care in the industry. Echobind built CNY Fertility’s new Fertile Financing Platform for patients and the CNY Fertility staff. What we built was a seamless way for their team to create individualized financing plans. Their patients are able to review and agree to financing terms, review their balances, and make payments in a variety of ways.
The Concept
CNY Fertility’s goal was to remove the manual processes for enrolling patients into payment plans. Their team spent a significant amount time setting up each patient's financing terms. This included applying line item discounts, re-calculating monthly payments and capturing payment information. Automating this manual work would allow team members to spend more time with the patients, improve CNY Fertility's cash flow and give patients more control. And by bringing all payments into a single system, CNY Fertility could better track data on their financing plans and patient enrollment. This presented three interesting challenges for our team.
Challenge #1 - Data Migration
Echobind's first challenge was to migrate CNY Fertility's customers from their existing payment processor. We wanted this to be a seamless process. Stripe offers several options to help migrate data, but we wanted CNY Fertility to have more control over the migration process. We created a tool in their billing platform to allow admins to migrate patients to the new system if it fit their migration criteria. This gave CNY Fertility granular control over the migration process. Patients received an email about the migration and could review and accept their new payment plan. Upon acceptance, patients securely store their payment information on Stripe. CNY Fertility staff members then received a notification about the migrated user and cancelled their old payment plans.
Challenge #2 - Facilitating Financing
Stripe provides excellent options for Buy Now, Pay Later through Klarna or Affirm integrations; however, because CNY Fertility provides its own financing, those weren’t viable options. Luckily since Stripe’s list of products is so robust, approaching this problem in another way was feasible. To apply the Buy Now, Pay Later concept with CNY’s own financing, the EB team structured Stripe Subscription Schedules so that all outstanding funds are calculated and collected over a number of iterations equal to the terms the patient selected during checkout. For example, suppose a patient chooses to finance their treatment for six months. In that case, a Subscription Schedule is created for six iterations for the total amount of the treatment, divided by the number of iterations.
- Build features for the new mobile apps
- Contribute to their news feed API
- Run tests and troubleshoot complex performance problems
- Set up monitoring tools to track and manage post-launch performance
Challenge #3 - Managing Payment Plans
Our mission was to automate much of the payment and finance process. One ask from CNY Fertility was to keep as much of a human touch as possible when interacting with customers. This is a great reminder that software is made for humans. And because life happens, it was critical for us to add tooling that allowed for payment adjustments. CNY Fertility needed the ability to change payment terms at any time for any reason. Echobind built the ability for admins and patients to adjust – or remove – the down payment. When generating quotes, admins can apply line-item discounts. And when patients want to pay off the remaining balance, the portal can apply a discount automatically. Finally, admins can use the portal to add payments made when a patient pays with cash at a clinic. Any cash payment made will reduce future monthly invoices. Everything described here flows through Stripe's Payments, Subscriptions and Invoices products.
The Outcome
CNY Admins now have consistency in quoting practices, available services, service prices, discounts, legal terms, and payment options. Creating a quote is as simple as choosing line items, applying discounts, and clicking ‘Send’. The system still gives them the flexibility they need to offer discounts or waive down payments on a case-by-case basis. Patients now have an easy, streamlined way to view quotes, review terms, reject quotes, or accept and enroll in a monthly payment plan. Their billing portal shows them their monthly payment and outstanding balance at a glance, so they never need to wonder about the state of their payment plan. As of this writing, a number of patients have successfully paid for services through the new portal, with some of those opting for a monthly payment plan. As the portal continues to roll out, even more patients will be onboarded and enjoy the convenience that the patient dashboard provides. And CNY is still able to preserve the personal interactions and support they give to their patients through every step of their treatment, which is what makes them stand out in their industry.
