As we enter a brand new year, we reflect on the previous one, its challenges, and all we’ve accomplished as an organization, and for the benefit of our clients and their customers. The last couple of years have been complicated for everyone. We are still in awe of how our staff and partners rose to meet the operational challenges brought upon by the pandemic— we seamlessly moved to a remote workforce without service interruption and quickly adapted our approach with consumers to ensure consideration for how they were being impacted by this “new normal.” Now nearly two years later, we can look back and see how successful that approach really was and how our instinct to put consumers first translated to continuity. We are so proud of these accomplishments, our staff’s resilience, and especially how we leaned into our values when faced with adversity. Here are a few other significant accomplishments from 2021…
HFMA Peer-review Client Survey
Professional’s collections services have earned the Peer-reviewed designation for four consecutive years. As a part of the process, HFMA surveys clients to ensure our services continue to meet their criteria. Early this year we received the results of their survey illustrating stunning improvements, among which 100% of clients said we exceeded their expectations.
SOC 2 TYPE II Audit
Professional completed a SOC 2 TYPE II audit report, which is when an agency passes a stringent technical security audit focused on both the security systems in place and the organizational structure that manages them. We are proud to be one of only a handful of agencies to do so. Read more about SOC 2 TYPE II audits here.
Client-branded White Label Portal
This year we expanded our service offerings as an early-out partner to include omnichannel communication and a white label portal option. We know how important it is for our partners in healthcare to be able to provide modern engagement technologies to the patients and we are happy to be able to facilitate a better patient financial experience.
New Tools for Consumers
We have always been able to boast about our consumer payment technologies but in 2021 we ramped up the functionality of our online consumer portal to include new tools that allow consumers to manage their payment plans and negotiate a settlement agreement. It’s a big step towards our goal of offering the most comprehensive self-service consumer portal in the industry.
A New “Professional”
Like many businesses, the pandemic had us assessing our values and direction as an organization. This process resulted in a number of revelations, which brought about a lot of positive change. One of the biggest was the recognition that our early-out partner organization (Ensource) and their unique resources could fill a service need for our clients by assisting with back-office tasks and gaps in customer service created by staffing issues due to COVID-19. This compelled us to join forces under a common umbrella to provide our clients the ability to engage in services more seamlessly from either company. At the same time, we were trying to devise new ways to help our healthcare partners who were hit the hardest by the ongoing pandemic when we realized we had the resources to provide another new service. The combination of revenue cycle experts from Ensource and Professional Credit meant we were uniquely positioned to provide high-level consulting and assist our clients in optimizing their revenue cycle by helping them identify areas to better utilize existing systems and where improvements can be made based on time, cost, and ROI. This new direction was substantiated by the adoption of a new look with our collective rebrand as, simply, “Professional.”
We are proud to be able to share our successes from 2021 with our friends, colleagues, and partners today. 2021 was a year full of growth and we are looking forward to the possibilities in 2022. We have big plans for this year, including recruiting new talent to expand our thriving team and being able to visit our partners across the nation (IN-PERSON!) who we’ve missed so much these last two years.
Stay tuned!