Inbox Health CEO Blake Walker on simplifying patient billing

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Blake Walker, co-founder and CEO of patient billing platform Inbox Health. Walker founded the company in 2014 hoping to simplify the billing experience, leading to more revenue for providers and higher satisfaction for patients. Today, the company, headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut, has 137 employees and has raised about $55 million in venture capital.

Walker talked with Healthcare Brew about what drove him to start the company, how it simplifies the complex billing process, and what his goals are for the company’s future.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to start Inbox Health?

I got a job out of college, got health insurance, went to the doctor, and got a printed, mailed bill that you had to write your credit card number on to pay it. And I was like, “Wow, this is nuts.”

We’re really coming at it from the consumer’s perspective of [having] very cumbersome, frustrating experiences with unaffordable bills…Patient billing is actually a really big part of the healthcare experience for most people, but it was still, in the software, treated very much as an afterthought. When we started the company, it was paper bills every 30 days. Just send them out; patients would have questions; it was like, “Well, it’s not really our problem.” We continue to build and innovate around that experience. We have about 4,000 practices that serve every specialty across every state, all across the US.

How do you go about simplifying the billing experience?

The first couple of years, it was looking at the patient billing problem and seeing it not as “We need to send better statements,” but “We need to build some sort of communication platform.” Because this is really what this is: It’s a bi-directional communication challenge between the provider and the patient about the balance that’s left over. We need to give the patient and provider the tools to have the conversation…rather than have to go through a process that takes 60, 70 days of back-and-forth over the phone and paper mail.

From a simplification perspective, it’s really taking the data that’s available in the electronic health record and from the adjudicated claim, and then trying to use that data to convey clarity to the patient around how their claim was paid and why certain aspects of it weren’t covered. Then giving them this AI layer to interact with, where they can dig deeper into why a certain CPT code wouldn’t be covered by their insurance, for example.

What are your goals and priorities for the company at the moment?

We’ve been, over the last couple of years, doing more and more with AI. That’s really more driven toward how patients understand and interact with their bills, how patients ask questions, how they get help, how they get access to payment plans. All that is being driven by AI agents, whereas in the past, it was driven by the staff or human agents. That’s been a big focus for us over the last 24 months.

The other thing that we’re focused on is how patients initially understand costs and working on bringing more clarity to the patient in terms of expected costs before the visit…That’s become the bigger focus for us now as we look forward and help providers and patients really try to get more clarity before the visit actually happens and before the patient actually leaves.