WALTHAM, MA – Hospitals that look to third parties to collect overdue bills often struggle with maintaining oversight of collection agencies' activities.

A new approach from Waltham, Mass.-based Connance Inc., released Monday, is intended to give facilities more ability to maintain control of the collection process, even as it's farmed out to outside agencies.

Connance executives say the Web-based platform is intended to assist providers who are seeing larger payments from patients, but are feeling pressure to maintain control of the collection process.

Connance Agency Manager enables healthcare providers to automate the placement to and oversight of collection agencies working on collecting copays, deductibles and payments from uninsured patients.

Stephen Farber, CEO of Connance, said the hosted software solution is intended to help hospitals improve collection performance, reduce costs and protect relationships with patients by giving healthcare organizations the ability to have detailed, automated visibility and control of third-party collection efforts.

The technology is based on debt placement technology from the Fair Isaac Corp., he said.

"Healthcare providers face rapid growth in revenue due directly from patients, and increasingly rely on collection agencies and other third parties to pursue. It is critical that hospitals have visibility, control and confidence in those partners to ensure solid collection rates, as well as fair and compliant efforts," Farber said. "Agency Manager delivers this critical functionality in a Web-based application. It substantially reduces administrative costs for both hospitals and agencies, improves the communication between the parties, reduces complaints and improves collection performance."

The platform gives providers control through logically assigning accounts according to provider's strategy, reviewing collection activity for adherence to service level agreements and automating and executing full inventory reconciliation weekly.

Company officials said Agency Manager is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. With no implementation charges, Agency Manager is priced based on volume of placed accounts and the number of agencies a provider works with. Performance-based pricing options are also available.