Partner Spotlight
Advocatia
Problem Addressed:
Access to healthcare
Solution:
Created an application that matches uninsured and underinsured patients with financial aid programs, reducing patient costs and helping hospitals get reimbursed.
The missing piece to the insurance coverage-gap puzzle
It’s said that sometimes in tragedy we find our life’s purpose. That the eye sheds a tear to find its focus and see more clearly. Such is the case with Advocatia’s co-founder and CEO, Ryan Brebner. Advocatia uses data technology to sift through aid programs to match uninsured and underinsured patients with financial aid programs that can help reduce their healthcare costs and ensure they have access to care. Based in Lake Bluff, Illinois, the team recently partnered with Olive to launch their inaugural Loop in the Olive Library. We spoke with Ryan about his inspiration for starting Advocatia and how they are tackling the challenge of uncompensated care in America.
What inspired you to start Advocatia?
Prior to co-founding Advocatia, I had worked in healthcare for 12 years and had been working with a family to help them enroll their mother, Avila, into Medicaid. Avila worried about the cost of insurance, so she lived without regular medical care — and without the knowledge that she was eligible for Medicaid. Instead of seeing a doctor, she tolerated stomach pain for months. By the time she arrived in the emergency room, she had stage four stomach cancer, and unfortunately passed away within a few short days.
I told Avila’s story to my sister, Laura Robbins, who at the time was working as an operations professional at a startup, and I just said, “There has to be a better way to help patients understand what programs they’re eligible for.” In 2016, my sister and I founded Advocatia to do just that and Avila’s story has been fueling our passion ever since.
If I say $41.6 billion, you’d say?
Roughly the amount of care that currently goes unpaid each year. And more than half could be mitigated by properly allocating patients to programs. That’s why we wanted to integrate into the Olive platform. With Olive’s ability to deliver real-time notifications to healthcare workers, we recognized that there was an huge opportunity to further empower those workers to assist patients who are uninsured at the point of care, rather than waiting until bills begin mounting up.
How does your Loop work?
The Benefits Screening Loop utilizes our proprietary algorithms that match patients with aid programs, including Medicaid, SNAP, Hospital specific charity care, and other programs. It is initiated to a healthcare worker through Olive’s desktop application with an alert indicating that a patient may qualify for financial assistance. Through a short series of questions, the worker can quickly identify eligible programs and streamline the enrollment process for the patient. The Loop auto-fills multiple applications that [counselors or other patient advocates] are able to complete for the individual and then submit straight from the Olive platform.
Why is making this connection early so important?
The problem of being uninsured or underinsured is widespread; 40 percent of those who qualify are in working families. And as I experienced with Avilia, lack of insurance can have life and death consequences. Allowing patients and their families to focus on their well-being, rather than their financial responsibilities, leads to a better patient experience and life-saving outcomes.
That’s a big win for providers!
Absolutely. Hospitals normally rely on financial counselors to connect patients to aid. By building this access into a hospital’s workflow, our Loop helps them do their job more efficiently, effectively and is delivering real financial results.