Challenge

Since its founding in 2017, NexHealth’s digital patient experience solution has helped busy dental and medical offices modernize their practices. With tools such as 24/7 online appointment scheduling, digital intake forms, automated communications, and a convenient text-to-pay experience for patient bills, NexHealth helps practices deliver exceptional patient experiences and drive efficient growth. Practices have eagerly adopted this digital approach to keep their provider schedules filled, increase recall rates, and improve staff productivity and retention.

By late 2023, NexHealth was serving more than 10,000 customers. The company saw strong potential for additional growth, including opportunities to move beyond its core customer base of dental offices and into a wider range of medical practices. But one piece of the NexHealth platform wasn’t keeping up with the company’s scale: its online payments tool.

NexHealth had built a simple service that allowed dentists to request payments from patients via text or email, but company executives were worried that the product wouldn’t support new types of practices as the company grew. Increasingly, customers wanted a sophisticated payments solution that offered better functionality and extensibility. The payments technology also had to work seamlessly with the rest of NexHealth’s patient experience platform, while offering an efficient onboarding process for busy practices.

In addition, NexHealth wanted to offer alternative payment methods such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and ACH, which weren’t supported by its old provider. That system also had very limited data capabilities, which made it difficult for NexHealth to analyze payment trends and deliver reports that customers needed. “We started receiving more sophisticated requests from our customers, and wanted to scale the product and add features,” said Ben Le Cam, NexHealth’s payments and enterprise engineering manager. “Our ambitions were growing faster than our payments system could.”

Solution

NexHealth chose Stripe Connect to power the online payments feature in its patient experience platform, which allows its 10,000 dental practice customers to collect payments from their patients. They also included Stripe’s Payment Element, an embeddable user interface that supports multiple payment methods for the company’s longer-term plans.

With Connect, NexHealth could easily create a connected account for each practice, which reliably moves money across multiple parties—from the patient to the NexHealth platform, and then out to the dental practices. The ease of creating new connected accounts enabled greater scalability for the company’s online payments offering.

Connect also offered a range of technology and implementation options to minimize disruptions for NexHealth customers during the transition. For example, the transition had to account for outstanding payment requests that had been issued through the previous platform. To ensure that patients could easily pay those outstanding bills, NexHealth used the Stripe Payment Intents API to link payments made on old payment requests to the new Connect account.

The flexibility of Stripe’s solutions accelerated the onboarding process for practices. Connect’s combination of out-of-the-box functionality and customization options allowed NexHealth to onboard existing practices quickly using a prebuilt flow while working toward a more bespoke onboarding experience for new customers. NexHealth took advantage of this flexibility to start the onboarding process for practices before completing the Connect integration, inviting its highest-volume users to preregister their accounts for the new payments system.

To provide a fast, simple flow for patients, NexHealth developers added the embedded Payment Element from Stripe’s optimized checkout suite to their existing payment request and online components. Now, when patients pay on a practice’s website or click on the payment button in bills they receive by text or email, Payment Element automatically presents the payment options NexHealth currently supports. As NexHealth adds new payment methods over time, these will instantly be displayed in the payment flow.

NexHealth not only improved the patient experience but also gained greater visibility into its billing and payment processes. As a Stripe platform user, NexHealth has access to a Stripe Dashboard that provides detailed payments data across the company’s entire customer base—a level of visibility that wasn’t provided by its previous payment provider—which allows NexHealth to monitor and troubleshoot payments more effectively. NexHealth also uses Stripe Data Pipeline to automatically feed payments data into its data warehouse, from which it can generate reports for its customers.

Results

Payments platform transition completed in two months with no disruptions

Connect’s detailed documentation, APIs, and flexible mix of implementation options allowed NexHealth to complete the transition from its old payment processor in two months.

The API integration for outstanding payment requests ensured that all payments, even payments made from old requests, went through without any disruptions. NexHealth onboarded the customers accounting for 95% of existing payment volume in the four weeks prior to the transition, so those practices would experience a seamless switchover to the new platform.

A new monthly record for payment processing

With the Payment Element making it easy for patients to pay their bills, NexHealth increased processing volume by 2x year-over-year to reach the highest monthly total in its history. “That’s a huge milestone and a sign that we’re heading in the right direction,” said Matthew Cameron, head of product marketing at NexHealth.

Using the Payment Element has also given NexHealth an easy way to introduce more payment methods—including Apple Pay and Google Pay—without any additional coding. And this is already helping practices get paid even faster: 20% of patients who completed a payment request chose to use Apple Pay within the first week it was available.

Creation of monthly payout reconciliation reports

The integration of Data Pipeline enabled NexHealth to deliver customers a monthly payout reconciliation report, which they had requested for a long time. “Many of our customers want to reconcile that monthly statement with the money that actually lands in their bank, and Stripe Data Pipeline makes it very easy to provide that report,” said Harry Xue, product manager at NexHealth.

A better billing product creates new opportunities for the NexHealth business model

The improvements delivered by Connect have collectively made NexHealth Payments a more attractive option for dental and medical practices. In the past, NexHealth exclusively bundled its payments offering with other services. Now, with the added functionality made possible by Stripe, the company has new opportunities to sell NexHealth Payments as a standalone, premium product.