Health Tech Opinions

Recurring Revenue Rules for Healthcare

What every healthcare decision maker must consider before implementing new technology to drive revenue

When my husband woke up with his new pacemaker, there was a box on his bed. I sat next to him has he groggily awoke from the short acting medicine. He saw it and shrugged. The surgeon came in for a few minutes; the procedure was smooth. He joked that my husband could live forever with the way this hardware was improving. He changed clothes; we left. We would follow up with our own cardiologist in a few months.

Here’s what we definitely did not know: when we opened that box and plugged in the black metal cube, we were subscribing to quarterly reads which would be billed at full price.

Fast forward two years: we paid just shy of $2000 for “remote reading” by physicians we didn’t know who (I assume) produced reports we haven’t seen. One time we got a call during a power outage about monitoring; we had forgotten the box was there. Because we had previously setup autopay with this healthcare provider, we were not getting bills that showed any balance, and I didn’t investigate further.

That is, until the card that had been put on file expired and we got a bill for the more than $500 accruing once auto-pay stopped going through. What the heck is this for, I wondered. That’s when I gathered all the bills together that had been neatly filed away and started calling.

I had no idea the journey I would have to go on.

Long story short: after nearly a year and more than ten hours calling, holding, escalating, transferring, message leaving (and finally LinkedIn posting and tagging after months of non-resolution), the charges have been dropped and removed from collections.

The charges stopped only by unplugging the device. Then, we followed the directions as given by the third party company actually doing the monitoring through a clinic employee, to “throw out the device.” There was no option to have just the emergency monitoring without the quarterly reads. It seemed such a waste. As I tossed the device into the electronics bin at our county collections, I thought about how this situation came to be.