Where We Invest

• Education Credit Strategies
• Healthcare Credit Strategies
  • CarePayment
  • Capio
• Private Credit Strategies
  • ETC
  • Ivey
  • Syncronex
• Beyond

CarePayment

CarePayment is a revolutionary patient finance program that significantly improves recovery of the patient-responsible portion of hospital receivables. At its core is an affinity-based card program that offers affordability and creates higher patient satisfaction. CarePayment is committed to providing individuals and families with affordable payment options. CarePayment is a flexible payment program with generous terms available to everyone, regardless of insurance coverage, credit history or employment.

CarePayment illustrates hidden profits leveraging a groundbreaking product within an inefficient market, while leaving a positive impact on the community.

Healthcare Receivables Market

With over 5,000 hospitals and growing, the United States remains the largest healthcare provider in the world. Over the years, healthcare costs have steadily increased, and as patients in the United States face steadily increasing co-pays and deductibles, greater numbers of patients are unable to afford health insurance. As a result, over the past 10 years, hospitals have seen the patient-responsible portion of medical billing increase from less than 5% to over 20%. This trend continues to grow and represents a problem to hospitals and patients. Hospitals remain poorly equipped to deal with patient collections, as it both conflicts with their mission of providing patient care and takes resources and energy away from dealing with the main sources of their revenue: Insurance providers and/or government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Hospitals typically choose between hiring an outside collection company to deal with these patient receivables or, rather than bearing the risk of negative publicity often associated with the practice, writing the receivables off or assigning them to “Charity Care.” As a result, the average patient-pay receivable recovery rate across the country hovers between just 5% and 15%, and hospitals are writing off a huge amount of potential revenue.

CarePayment solves this problem by offering an innovative product that helps patients pay their medical bills in a dignifying way while also allowing hospitals to maintain their brand image and collect unpaid billings in a respectable manner. CarePayment provides a hospital-branded membership card to all patients with no pre-qualifications. CarePayment allows the patient to amortize their payment out to 25 months at 0.00% interest.

CarePayment’s Challenge

In the summer of 2003, CarePayment was looking for a financing partnership that would allow them to grow their struggling business and expand operations into new hospital markets. They needed a partner that would provide working capital, funding capital, and strategic insight to foster future growth. More importantly however, they needed a partner that saw their vision and would commit to making it reality. Aequitas was introduced to CarePayment in 2003 through its broad network of partners.

The End Product

Carepayment and Aequitas have been able to leverage each of their respective strengths. Aequitas was able to build off CarePayment’s innovative business model by installing key management and operations personnel from within Aequitas’ broad range of expertise. This insight, combined with working capital, allowed CarePayment to not only grow quickly, but provided scalability to sustain and leverage the growth.

Aequitas continues to provide strategic insight and capital as CarePayment continuously grows. They work with some of America’s largest, progressive, quality-focused providers to assist individuals in meeting their rising healthcare costs. They continue to expand into new markets, new hospitals, and new patients. CarePayment’s stellar reputation in the hospital market has created and continues to create valuable investment opportunities for Aequitas in the form of networking, partnerships, and joint ventures.