Nabla has partnered with Apero Health to offer their clients the very best in billing

Clément Baudelaire

ML Product Manager

Venturing into medical billing as a digital care provider is akin to diving into a murky, bottomless pit filled with sharp needles. In a nutshell, it's a pain. Grasping the intricacies of the money flows between insurances, pharma, physicians, PBMs, and patients can take a lifetime. And, as a company under a tight schedule to improve patient experience, every minute spent trying to understand these flows is a minute not spent on care. Well, good news: you don't have to dive into the pit. Apero x Nabla has already done it for you.

The why of partnerships

Because one cannot start a post without a pitch, here's a reminder of Nabla’s. Nabla supplies clinics with an “AI assistant” for their healthcare professionals - so they can spend more time serving patients and less time doing admin. Nabla does this by building messaging and video consultation modules augmented with AI capabilities that automate tasks like consultation note-taking.

As a tech enabler, Nabla has long embraced the principle that it's best to do one thing exceptionally well than to do many things well enough. At Stanford, the founders of Apero and Nabla researched together the cutting edge of AI. And now with this renewed partnership, Nabla can focus on its core value proposition: ML-powered communications.

This modular, developer-first approach allows Nabla to integrate the best of everything they decided not to build themselves. They know that great companies have poured as much heart into their own digital health verticals as they have into communications. That's why they selected Apero Health as the medical billing partner for their clients.

Why Apero Health?

Apero Health is an API-driven medical billing wizard. They manage everything end-to-end, from claim submission to patient billing, to eligibility checks and data reporting. They've automated tedious workflows so you don't have to suffer so much. Plus, the integration is seamless: Nabla customers are on-boarded in only a few simple clicks.

Apero is fully integrated into the Nabla workflow and operates on two main components: billing and eligibility checks. It is now possible to effortlessly generate and view invoices in the Nabla platform, or access additional details in the Apero dashboard. Patient eligibility can now be verified directly from the provider consultation schedule in the Nabla platform.

Both partners take security and regulations very seriously. Nabla is HIPAA compliant, and so is Apero. You can sleep soundly.

Nabla customers can enable the Apero integration directly in the console.

The pain points that will no longer hurt

Insurance Billing

Insurance billing is no picnic. Quite the opposite. Once you've been to the doctor, your visit must be converted into standardized codes that will tell insurers what services (and how many units) were provided. In other words, how much they should pay. In the context of telehealth, consultation documentation is all the more important to support billing - and all the more tedious.

It is now possible to add consultation-related ICD and CPT codes when generating a note in Nabla’s patient view. This will soon be automated by machine learning algorithms to ease the administrative burden even more and allow providers to focus on diagnosis and treatment. In turn, these codes will be sent to insurances for billing. All of this reduces billing time by up to 80% and gets the claim to the right payer.

Eligibility checks

Eligibility is another issue that is not efficiently addressed. Knowing whether a patient is covered for a specific service (and, even more so, what the extent of that coverage is) is very sticky for providers. More often than not, providers can't find the answer electronically and are left to guess and fix later. Even more agonizing, they sometimes have to call the insurance companies themselves to get the answer.

Reimbursement for telehealth in the U.S. is governed by both state regulations and individual insurers' policies. This makes it challenging to ascertain whether a client is covered by telehealth services. Yet it is necessary. Confirming coverage from the outset helps avoid delayed or denied claims and ensures timely reimbursement for providers.

When the patient makes an appointment, Nabla automatically sends their details to the Apero search engine to check whether they are eligible or not. The eligibility information is displayed directly on the provider's consultation schedule. No more guessing, no more phone calls. It's that simple.

Eligibility check directly in the Nabla calendar tab.

A partnership for better care

In the current market context, the most effective solutions must be built on the best bricks of each component of digital health. Because Nabla firmly believes in a complementary vision of healthcare, they are building a technological foundation that enables them to integrate the best of each of these components in a consistent developer-first approach.

Medical billing is inherent to the care process in healthcare systems. Nabla’s partnership with Apero Health is designed, as are their in-house communications, to relieve providers of everything that is not care-related, so that they can focus on what matters: patients.