Clinical billing has been a critical aspect of our value proposition at Elephant Healthcare. This feature set directly influences primary care at our affiliate healthcare facilities, their revenue streams and by extension, Elephant Healthcare. Arguably, two of our biggest challenges with our current clinical billing approach are revenue loss due to unbilled care and the heavy workload for our billing officers.
Automating our billing via automated invoices would help reduce the workload on our billing officers and mitigate revenue loss due to unbilled care. This would also afford billing officers and clinicians the mental bandwidth to make more strategic decisions regarding billing and patient care respectively. By seamlessly streamlining billing at the facility level with patient care via a well-integrated end-user workflow, we aim to enhance primary healthcare delivery at our facilities while greatly improving their revenue generation potential.
Our current approach to billing, although sufficient had some shortcomings. Our billing process was purely manual. This contributed to a massive workload for our end users and made them prone to clerical errors, leading to revenue loss due to unbilled care.
This feature should automatically create and populate invoices with the appropriate service or item. This approach should reduce the end-user workload and speed up the billing process while introducing a level of transparency.
Consisted of a product designer/user researcher(myself), a product manager and a handful of engineers.
Hands-on product design and user research.
User-centred design/business thinking driven product development.
Roughly a month of discovery and ideation, followed by two months of prototyping and development.
Our research efforts aimed to substantiate reports regarding some of the billing challenges highlighted by our affiliate healthcare facilities both in Ghana and Kenya while also looking for opportunities for improvement.
On a high level, this would validate the key needs and pain points for billing officers and uncover new ones under realistic conditions. We also aimed to understand their current workflow, the patient journey concerning billing and how price lists were managed at our facilities.
Field studies were critical in learning the most about the end-user within their context. To gain a deep understanding of the end user's workflow, needs and behaviour, my colleague and I adopted a contextual inquiry approach to our research, combining direct observation of our end-users with interviews.
After visiting multiple facilities in both Ghana and Kenya, the insights we gathered allowed us to paint a clearer picture of the daily billing issues our facilities were struggling with and certain nuances in billing workflows.