PayGround Enhances User Experience with 95% Form Fill Time Reduction

PayGround addresses the complex challenges Americans face in their healthcare system. Specifically, they seek to simplify the often-overwhelming process of paying medical bills, which needs to be clarified and needs a personal touch. Research shows that over 90% of Americans need help navigating the healthcare system.

The company was co-founded in 2018 by Drew Mercer, the company's CEO, following two significant health events in his life. Mercer was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and just a few weeks later, his wife gave birth to their third child. The experience of paying dozens of medical bills was both frustrating and time-consuming. This experience inspired Mercer to create a solution to simplify the process for others.

PayGround streamlines the process of paying customers' medical bills and increases healthcare providers' efficiency in collecting payments. The company has established a strong presence in over 100 healthcare facilities, and customers across the United States utilize its services.

PayGround's mobile app is their primary application, which enables users to pay their medical bills. Users receive bills by mail, which they can scan and upload to the app, where they fill in the necessary details and proceed to payment. The objective is to simplify the payment process and reduce the time it takes to pay bills.

Initially, users had to manually select the provider and fill in provider, patient, and payment details for every bill. They were required to fill-in anywhere from 6 to 10 form fields, which led to customer drop-offs at every incremental step. As a consumer app, this user friction was a major issue for PayGround and they wanted to limit the time and effort spent for their end users. 

PayGround's competitors were already using OCR technology, and manual processing was becoming a bottleneck for them in terms of growth. They required an OCR solution that could automate the processes end-to-end, provide fast turnaround time, without significantly increasing costs for them.

PayGround evaluated various OCR providers, such as Google and AWS. They quickly found out that the accuracy results were not aligned with their expectations and had a lag in turnaround time to make it worse. To provide a good user experience, they needed data extraction completed in seconds and an OCR that could accurately capture data from user-generated images of bills from any healthcare provider in the US.

This is where Nanonets came into the picture. Using Nanonets’ OCR data was captured seamlessly from a plethora of bills and returned in a JSON format via the Nanonets API. PayGround leveraged the Python post-processing within Nanonets app to supercharge formatting and carry out customizations according to their needs.

The user could see their details filled in on the app and edit any errors before approving and paying the bill, making the process touchless - something the competitors weren’t providing and this aided PayGround’s marketing campaign as well.