Parathon
Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management Made Simple

Over the past decades, one of the significant changes in the healthcare sector has been the transition from traditional paper-based medical records to electronic medical records (EMR). While the push toward digitalization was sensible, it profoundly impacted the operations of healthcare providers and hospitals. As the focus was mainly on clinical pathways, revenue cycle space took a back seat and suffered heavily. To that end, maintaining financial viability during the process of modernizing medical records has been a primary challenge for healthcare providers.

Illinois-based Parathon addresses these issues by delivering sustainable transformation solutions for healthcare providers, helping them navigate the complex and dynamic healthcare revenue cycle. With its highly scalable revenue cycle management (RCM) solutions, Parathon enables healthcare providers to maximize reimbursements, optimize accounting and billing operations, and increase patient engagement. “Our objective is to empower providers to improve financial performance, streamline operations, and increase patient engagement,” states James Dudley, CEO of Parathon.

Primarily a software development company, Parathon has been in the healthcare RCM space for over 20 years. During this period, the company has developed a significant amount of solutions, systems, and intellectual property. The company’s offerings are based on three pillars. The first one is a proprietary technology called Parallel Database^® that assimilates the entire revenue cycle functionality of disparate hospital systems and health information systems into one consolidated enterprise database. Since most hospitals are not standalone entities but rather gone through several mergers and acquisitions, having a single system to manage the revenue cycle and gain visibility facilitates seamless operations.

The second pillar of Parathon is contract management and the company is able to adjudicate 100 percent of the claims from third-party intermediaries—which are the brokers between real payers (employers) and healthcare providers. This is important because a significant portion of hospital income is dependent on the ubiquitous intermediaries such as insurance companies—whose incentive is to boost their bottom line by minimizing payments remitted to healthcare providers. In addition to its unparalleled function-rich software system for contract management, Parathon highly experienced specialists ensure that RCM contracts are processed with 100 percent accuracy.
The final pillar of Parathon addresses the challenges—that every healthcare provider struggles with— associated with utilizing several bolt-on functionalities from multiple solutions to patch deficiencies in RCM, EMR, and other systems. Parathon has integrated these functionalities so that all the disparate systems can reside in one location and be managed through a single interface. Illustrating the true value of Parathon’s solutions, Dudley mentions the case of a large hospital network with 2 billion dollar net revenue. The entity comprised 20 hospitals and struggled to manage several disparate systems, which had a negative impact on their revenue. Parathon’s solutions enabled the client to have a unified view of their revenue cycle operations and, at the same time, manage claims and payments. Also, Parathon helped the client improve efficiencies in their revenue cycle and, as a result, improved profits by 200 million over five years.

Parathon possesses the experience and expertise required to handle the inner technical workings of leading EMR and health information systems in the U.S. And due to the several years of experience with RCM, Parathon is able to seamlessly integrate its RCM solutions to a client’s existing systems. Moreover, Dudley adds, “We don’t just offload our solutions, we bear the majority of the effort required to deploy them.” Moving forward, Parathon remains committed to keeping up with the latest technologies and incorporating them into its solutions. The company is also developing new functionality around that will bring about price transparency regarding the healthcare revenue cycle. And with its robust set of software solutions centered on RCM, Parathon has carved a niche in the market as a valuable asset to healthcare providers.