Emmett Bernsohn
Florida Woman Care Laboratory is a Tampa-based diagnostic laboratory serving the Florida Woman Care network of women’s health practices. The lab performs clinical, microbiology, histology, cytology, molecular microbiology, and non-invasive prenatal testing — functioning as the diagnostic engine behind clinical decisions made across the network’s practice locations.
Florida Woman Care Laboratory affiliated with Unified Women’s Healthcare in 2009, and the broader network has since grown into one of the largest women’s health groups in the country — offering traditional women’s healthcare alongside maternal-fetal medicine, urogynecology, on-site mammography, and laboratory services. The laboratory’s billing operation reflects that scale: patient balances arrive continuously and in very high volume from across the entire network.
Performance at a glance: first eight weeks
The challenge
Laboratory billing is among the hardest patient revenue problems in healthcare, for a reason that has nothing to do with billing competence. The patient never chose the lab. A specimen was collected at a physician’s office, sent out, and processed somewhere the patient never visited. When a bill arrives from an organization the patient does not recognize, the default reaction is to set it aside or assume it is a mistake.
Volume compounds the problem. A reference laboratory serving a network of this size generates patient balances continuously across tens of thousands of patients, and those balances are individually small. The follow-up effort required for a twenty-dollar cytology balance is identical to the effort required for a large surgical balance, which means manual outreach is structurally uneconomic. Practices typically pay roughly $0.56 on the dollar to capture patient payments through manual methods, and at laboratory balance sizes that math simply does not work.
The conventional endpoints are equally poor. Collection agencies charge 35 to 45% and generally will not accept balances under $100, which excludes the majority of laboratory balances entirely. The result is a large pool of legitimate, collectible revenue that quietly disappears — not because patients are unwilling to pay, but because no economical way exists to reach them at scale.
The Rivia Health solution
Rivia Health works alongside the existing billing system to automate patient payment follow-up from the moment a balance enters billed status. Patients receive personalized, HIPAA-compliant communications by text and email — clearly identifying the lab and the associated visit so the balance is recognized rather than dismissed.
There is no portal to log into, no app to download, and no account to create. Patients tap a secure link, verify their identity, and see their outstanding balance. They can pay in full or set up a payment plan in a couple of minutes.
Because the outreach is automated, the cost to follow up on a five-dollar balance is the same as the cost to follow up on a five-hundred-dollar balance. For a high-volume reference laboratory, that changes the economics entirely: every balance gets consistent follow-up, including the small ones that manual outreach and collections agencies leave behind.
Patient engagement at scale
Effective laboratory billing starts with reaching patients in a way they will actually respond to. Over the first eight weeks, Rivia Health followed up on 50,219 patient balances on behalf of Florida Woman Care Laboratory — by text and email, consolidated into a single communication per patient rather than a separate message for every bill.
In just eight weeks — the earliest stage of any billing partnership — automated, recognizable outreach converted a high-volume balance pool that would otherwise have depended on paper statements and phone calls, or been written off entirely.
Patients paid in days, not months
The speed at which patients pay directly affects a laboratory’s cash flow and its ability to meet operating expenses without carrying receivables. The industry average for patient accounts receivable sits at approximately 60 days.
With Rivia Health, patients paid in an average of 8.9 days — an 85% reduction against the 60-day industry benchmark. For a laboratory processing balances continuously across the entire network, faster resolution means revenue converts to cash almost immediately instead of aging on the books.
Revenue recovered across the aging curve
The most telling measure of a billing solution is not just how fast fresh balances get paid, but whether it can recover balances that have already aged. Most workflows stop meaningful outreach at day 90. Rivia Health does not — communication continues, with adjusted frequency and tone, because those balances still represent real revenue.
More than a third of the revenue Rivia Health captured came from balances already aged past 90 days — the exact balances collections agencies will not accept and manual outreach has given up on. In a laboratory setting, where small balances dominate and aged receivables are typically written off, recovering 35% of revenue from the 90+ day pool represents money that would otherwise have disappeared from the books entirely.
Summary
In its first eight weeks with Rivia Health — from June 17 through August 10, 2026 — Florida Woman Care Laboratory saw measurable, data-backed improvement across every dimension of patient revenue capture:
- 1,358 patient payments captured from 1,209 patients, without added manual staff outreach
- 50,219 patient balances followed up automatically by text and email across the network
- Patient AR days averaging 8.9 days — an 85% reduction against the 60-day industry benchmark
- 65% of revenue captured from current (0–90 day) balances, converting to cash almost immediately
- 35% of revenue recovered from balances aged past 90 days — revenue most workflows write off
- Consistent, economical follow-up on small laboratory balances that manual methods and collections agencies leave behind
Rivia Health is the AI driven patient payments platform for specialty practices, built to deliver better financial outcomes for providers and their patients. By automating revenue workflows across the entire patient payment journey, Rivia Health enables providers to lower cost to collect, reduce aging A/R, offset administrative burden, and remove friction from the billing experience. A KLAS Top 20 Emerging Solution, Rivia Health helps providers capture more of the revenue they’ve already earned, while keeping care at the center of every patient experience.
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