Pilot engagement
Start with a Controlled Pilot
Evaluate our delivery capabilities through a structured pilot engagement before scaling to a larger offshore operation.
Why a pilot rather than a proposal
Nobody should move a billing process offshore on the strength of a slide deck. A pilot is the cheapest way to find out how a provider actually works: how fast they learn your payers, what they do when something is ambiguous, and whether the second month looks like the first.
So the pilot is scoped small enough to fail safely and defined tightly enough to be judged. Every element below is agreed in writing before the first transaction is touched, because a pilot without a definition is just unpaid work that nobody can evaluate.
What gets defined before anything starts
Eight elements, agreed in writing. A pilot missing any one of them cannot be judged at the end of it, which is usually the point of leaving it out.
01
A defined process
One process, named. Eligibility verification, payment posting or a single AR bucket, rather than a slice of everything. A pilot that spans the whole cycle measures nothing, because there is no way to tell which part worked.
02
A defined scope
Volume, payer mix and date range, written down. The boundary matters more than the size: everyone needs to know what is in the pilot and what is still yours on day one.
03
A defined team
Named people, not a pool. The team that runs the pilot is the team that carries into the scaled engagement, so what you are evaluating is what you would get.
04
Defined KPIs
The measures are chosen up front and the targets against them are agreed with you, because KPIs and SLAs are customized according to the client's process requirements and contractual scope.
05
Quality benchmarks
The accuracy standard and the sampling rate are set before work starts, along with what happens when a sample fails. Agreeing this afterwards turns every finding into an argument.
06
A reporting mechanism
The format, the frequency and the person who sends it, fixed at the start. You should never have to ask how the pilot is going.
07
A review period
A date in the calendar to sit down and decide, with the numbers already on the table. Long enough to get past the learning curve, short enough that a bad fit is cheap.
08
A scale-up plan
What the next stage looks like if the review goes well: which processes come across, in what order, over what period, and what has to be in place first. Agreed before the pilot, so a good result does not stall waiting for a plan.
What a pilot settles
- Whether the team learns your payers, your system and your exceptions at a workable pace.
- Whether the documented process survives contact with your actual data.
- What the real throughput is once the learning curve flattens, rather than what a proposal estimated.
- How the team behaves when something is ambiguous, which is the part no reference call ever reveals.
- Whether the reporting tells you something useful or just tells you the reporting happened.
What it does not
A pilot is an evaluation of delivery. It is not a forecast, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
- It does not predict a revenue improvement. Collections depend on payers, contracts, documentation and your front end.
- It does not guarantee claim approval. No offshore provider controls a payer decision.
- It does not settle a price for the scaled operation, which is scoped separately against the full volume.
- A short pilot under-represents anything seasonal, and cannot show how a team handles a volume spike it never saw.
What we need to scope one
Enough to write the definition above. Most of it you already know without looking anything up.
- 01The process you want piloted, and why that one.
- 02Approximate volume in that process, as a band rather than a number.
- 03The system the work is performed in, and how access is normally granted.
- 04Your payer mix, at the level of the top few.
- 05Whether a documented SOP exists, and how far it matches what the team does now.
- 06Who on your side will review the pilot, and what they need to see to say yes.
Put a small, defined scope in front of us
Tell us the process and the rough volume and we will come back with a written pilot definition covering all eight elements, before anything is signed and before any work starts.