From ASCRS 2026: Key Conversations & Insights (Part 1) – Promptly’s Anish Kapur

This is Part 1 of our ASCRS series.  In this episode, we are sharing key highlights and emerging trends discussed at the recent ASCRS/ASOA meeting in Washington, DC. We’re joined by Anish Kapur, who offers his perspective on what’s shaping the industry—grounded in his work with Promptly, a patient engagement platform focused on streamlining payments, collections, and patient communication through automation and AI.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome back to the Ophthalmology Reimbursed podcast. This is Mary Pat Johnson and I'm Rebecca Greenlaw. So we're with you today, coming to you today from Washington DC.

We're wrapping up the last few days of the ASCRS ASOA meeting and today we have the pleasure of being joined by Anish Kapur from Promptly. Welcome. Hi.

Thank you for taking time to join us. We've been by your booth and you've had a busy few days. Thank you, yeah. 

So sit down, we're not going to grill you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it feels like a hot seat, but you know.

Not too bad. So we have a few questions. So the podcast is available to administrators, physicians, private practice, ASC.

So we try to introduce a variety of topics we think will be useful to them. So if you don't mind, I'm going to dive in with just a few questions. Absolutely.

So for listeners who might not yet be familiar with Promptly, can you give us a little introduction as to how this might help practices manage payments, collections efficiently, streamline that full process? Yeah, absolutely. So we are a patient experience and patient engagement platform that also has a ton of flexibility and modularity as well. So there's so many different pieces to our system that can be utilized at a practice, especially when it comes to payments and when it comes to collecting from our brand new AI assistant bots that go out and provide prior auths for practices to being able to do payment posting, to be able to take all the patient balances and securely and efficiently text or email them to make sure that the patients understand their balance and also giving out digital statements as well.

So we're trying to bring a lot of different transparent pieces to the to the healthcare ecosystem, frankly. Okay, and does it sit on top of someone's practice management system or ride kind of concurrent with it? Does it replace it? Yeah, so it does not replace the practice management system. We integrate to the practice management system and all of the major practice management systems work with us as a partner.

So yeah, and just, you know, really it doesn't really matter which one it is because there's a way to integrate with all of them. All right, sounds fine. Now I mentioned your booth being quite busy.

So what kind of conversations are you having with administrators now in terms of the biggest challenges they see when they're bringing their wish list to you? What are their top pressure points? Yeah, the biggest challenge that I think that we're pulling away from this meeting is lack of staff and the staff that they do have is spread really thin across their responsibilities. So when we released our AI-powered assistants and agents, that has been something that everyone's been drawn towards because we're, you know, one thing that we really take pride in is taking all the tedious workflows and just kind of like some of the mind-numbing clicking and data entry points and like how and moving that to, you know, an automated tech-based platform. Like that is giving like the staff time back so that they can actually interact with patients and like kind of humanize that experience because I think most of us are used to walking up to somebody at the front desk or even talking to a technician or whatever else in the office and they are staring at a screen and half listening to you because they have to get through all these certain little steps and clicks and check boxes and if we can get rid of that and automate all those kind of pieces then they get to look their patients in the eye and give better care and that's honestly what we want to achieve.

So we get more efficiency on the back end and better patient experience on the front end which hopefully drives us to more patients. Yeah, more patients and then also a happier staff because I mean I think, you know, patients can see it from a mile away when the staff are stressed or when like they're not really in tune with what they need. And they're stressed with doing those repetitive tasks.

It's that that's not what they want to do all day so yeah and they can dedicate their talents elsewhere. So Anish, for administrators and physicians thinking about implementing a new financial technology, what impact or practice is seeing in terms of collections efficiency or patient satisfaction that goes to what you were just speaking about? Yeah, I think that like we've only really seen upticks especially moving to text-based and online payment. I mean the one thing that I really like our team to focus on is like what are we seeing in other industries that non-healthcare industries.

Like right now as we're talking I could be on my phone and especially because it's a podcast nobody could see my hands, right? But like I could be on my phone and I can both order lunch, get a car, book a flight, right? And I can do literally mid-conversation but like a lot of times we're like okay now try and make an appointment at a healthcare at your ophthalmologist's office or pay your bill or whatever. I was like well no I need to call them during business hours while they're open during the week and like why do we why are we okay with that? And like so like that's kind of the mentality I want people to have when they go into these projects. Like hey guys like just because we've done this a certain way forever doesn't mean that's the way we should be doing it.

And like these aren't insurmountable pieces as well. I think a lot of times people are resistant to these more technology-based changes because they look at the demographic of ophthalmology and say these are all medicare patients who are not going to want to be on their phone and not going to want to like pay through this or not going to want to like you know get text messages on this. And then my first answer to that is have you ever looked in your waiting room? What do you think all those patients are doing? They're sitting there scrolling on their like they are on their phones.

Everyone knows it like we're past that I you know. And so I wouldn't look at it as as scary as it might have been five or you know pre-covid or whatever else because I think everyone got a crash course in tech. And then I think going beyond that is take one piece at a time. 

You don't have to rip the whole band-aid off. One I will say for that in my argument sometimes towards ripping the band-aid off in one shot though is if you're going I kind of view it like somebody who's going back to school. It's if you're committed to doing it and you knock out your courses and you get it done a lot of times you know that's a you know much easier than saying okay we're going to do this and then we're going to come back.

And we're going to come back. We're going to do the next piece. We're going to come back to the next piece.

You have to know if your team is disciplined enough to do that versus like hey listen we if we don't get it all done now we're never going to come back to this thing right. So as practices continue to modernize their financial workflows what trends do you see shaping the future of patient payments and revenue cycle management and ophthalmology? So the biggest one especially this year that I've seen is the acceptance of surcharging to patients. And what I mean by that is for credit cards that provide reward points or cash back or Amex points airline miles all that kind of stuff you're allowed to have the patient pay the credit card fees the three percent for those.

And then again if they pay through any other method like a debit card FSA HSA you know cash check whatever else then they pay no fees. Because of the shrinking frankly in reimbursements that happened in January you know a practice that's looking at an 11 percent cut at on 66984 is trying to find well how do we do more with less. And when you look at your bill and you say hold on we're paying three percent of every single credit card swipe to Visa MasterCard American Express so that people can get their airline miles.

I don't know if we should be subsidizing that as the health care community when we continuously get more and more scraped away from us. So it's been something that groups have come to us more and more every year. But this year I feel like especially after the cuts in January it's become a more central topic that they're approaching us right out the gate about.

Yeah well Anish thank you so much for taking time out of your day to day to to be here with us on our podcast. Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thanks again. 

Thanks for listening to Ophthalmology Reimbursed brought to you by Corcoran Consulting Group the experts in coding reimbursement auditing and education for the ophthalmic community. To learn more about how we can support your practice visit CorcoranCCG.com. Be sure to follow and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time thanks for listening to Ophthalmology Reimbursed.