Health tech startups Tend and Cedar partner to simplify dental patient billing

Dental startup Tend aims to simplify the patient billing process via a partnership with health tech startup Cedar, the companies announced on April 11.

The US spends roughly $165 billion per year on dental services as of 2022, according to professional organization the American Dental Association—but the payment experience can be “opaque” and “confusing,” Matthew Fitzgerald, chief marketing officer at Tend, told Healthcare Brew.

“From the outset, Tend has sought to innovate the dental experience by leveraging technology and hospitality to build a company around the patient,” Tend CEO Troy Bage said in a statement. “By partnering with Cedar, we’ll be able to streamline and simplify the payment process for all our members—further enhancing their overall experience with Tend, while unlocking new ways for us to elevate engagement.”

Tend, which was founded in 2019, has about 25 locations across the US and roughly 200,000 patients. The startup’s goal is to make the dental experience enjoyable for patients, with offices designed to put patients at ease, according to Fitzgerald. Everything from color, smells, and sounds in the offices are carefully curated, he said.

“We started with the patient first…and worked backwards,” Fitzgerald said. “Our observation and insight was maybe there was an opportunity to infuse the [dental] category with technology and modernity and make it a much more tech-enabled patient experience.”

Cedar is an online platform that partners with healthcare providers, including hospitals and physician groups, to digitize patient billing and make the process more transparent. The company works with roughly 25 million patients each year, according to Cedar. After a Tend office visit, patients can use Cedar’s mobile-friendly website “because nobody downloads an app just to pay a bill,” according to Florian Otto, Cedar’s co-founder and CEO.

The payment process can be personalized using patient data, like whether a bill is paid faster via text or email, Otto added.

Cedar also tracks where patients are in the payment process.

If Cedar detects that a patient is struggling to understand or pay a bill, Cedar will follow up with communication that may include connecting the patient to a company representative or offering a financing option, Otto added.

Inability to pay a bill is a common issue—roughly a quarter of US adults either have medical or dental bills that are overdue or that they cannot afford, according to a survey conducted by KFF Health News and NPR.

The average dental practice has a 95% collection rate, meaning they lose roughly 5% of annual revenue to uncollected payments, according to 2018 data from dental management consulting company Levin Group.

Simplifying the billing process benefits both patients and Tend—patients get a better payment experience, and Tend is able to successfully collect more payments, Otto said.

Both Otto and Fitzgerald said the main success metric they’ll watch to see is the net promoter score, or NPS—a widely used figure companies use to measure customer satisfaction.

Fitzgerald said the partnership will help Tend “bring transparency and certainty to payments in dental that just does not exist.”

“Anytime you can create that level of trust with the patient to give them options in how they pay—just to put it at their fingertips—that’s a sea change when it comes to payments in healthcare,” he added.