Challenge

Hero Health launched in 2017 to improve patient engagement for general practitioners in the UK. Both private and NHS practices were underserved by the limited functionality of available software; the result was a disconnected patient experience and inefficient business operations. Hero Health’s non-clinical practice management platform addresses the problem with billing, payment, and online booking features that integrate seamlessly with traditional legacy electronic health records.

Initially, Hero Health had developed its own in-house invoicing infrastructure that providers could use to bill patients for private services. However, as time went on, maintaining and improving a custom-built system became a significant burden. Eventually, medical practices requested advanced invoicing features, such as partial credit notes, customer credits, and discount codes. Hero Health decided that continuing to support its own invoicing system would divert too many resources from the functions that had become the company’s primary focus: online booking, patient messaging, and online consultations. The company began looking for a long-term solution.

In addition to advanced invoicing features, the new invoicing solution would need to offer several features tailored to the medical field. For example, practices often issued invoices several days after an appointment, which could create discrepancies in reconciliation if each invoice wasn’t clearly linked to the specific patient and their services. Hero Health’s solution would need to offer flexible metadata fields to capture relevant patient information, so that practices didn’t lose the context of a patient interaction while using the invoicing interface.

Hero Health also wanted to add integrated in-person payments to its platform. Many practices were not set up to accept money at the front desk, making it harder for patients to pay their bills on-site. And for practices that could accept in-person card payments, connecting those payments to the correct invoices was often a time-consuming and error-prone process.

Solution

Hero Health had been using Stripe Payments to process transactions and Stripe Connect – which facilitates the movement of funds among multiple parties – since 2019. In 2024, Hero Health incorporated Stripe Invoicing into its platform to replace its in-house client-facing invoicing infrastructure. Hero Health saw that Invoicing offered the best combination of flexibility, scalability, and ease of integration. Its developer-friendly design and thorough documentation meant that Hero Health could offer practices a feature-rich product while minimising the work of implementation.

“Other solutions just didn’t have the depth of invoicing functionality or payment method integrations that Stripe has, and Stripe has fantastic docs,” said Gus Kennedy, CEO and co-founder of Hero Health.

With Payments, practices could access a range of payment methods that they could turn on and off with a single click. By integrating Invoicing in conjunction with Payments and Connect, Hero Health was able to offer additional tools that practices had been requesting, including discount codes and partial credit notes.

To enable patients to pay their invoices in person, Hero Health added an integrated point-of-sale capability with Stripe Terminal. This gave Hero Health practices access to hardware card readers that connected seamlessly to Hero Health’s platform. “The best part is that, with Stripe Terminal and our invoicing functionality, you never have a floating payment. Every single payment is intrinsically linked to an invoice,” said Kennedy.

Hero Health’s implementation of Invoicing also gave practices direct access to the Stripe Dashboard. This allowed practices to turn on additional Stripe products, such as Stripe Sigma, to get business insights from data – for example, revenue by product or revenue by practitioner. It also allowed practices to take advantage of Stripe’s various platform integrations, such as with Xero and Salesforce. As Stripe adds products and integrations, practices will be able to benefit from them automatically – with no work required from Hero Health.

Results

Seamless payments made available for 6,000 practices and 65 million patients

Hero Health’s Stripe-powered invoicing and payment solution is the only one that integrates with both major NHS electronic health record systems, TPP, and EMIS Web. This enables nearly 6,000 practices and 65 million patients across the UK to access Hero’s Stripe functionality directly integrated into their existing tools.

Smarter invoicing that drives patient engagement

With Invoicing, medical practices using Hero Health gained access to discount codes, which support patient engagement by giving practices a new way to motivate patients to come in for preventive visits. Practices also gained access to partial credit notes, simplifying payment collection by allowing them to update the balances of partially paid bills without generating an additional invoice.

“We’ve leapfrogged over larger patient record systems with the flexibility our new invoicing solution offers customers,” said Kennedy.

Practices get paid 54% quicker

With Invoicing’s robust features and convenient payment options, practices using Hero Health have seen patients paying their bills more quickly on average. After switching from an in-house invoicing infrastructure to Invoicing, Hero Health’s practices have seen the average number of days between issuing an invoice and receiving payment drop from 16.2 days to 7.4 days.

Terminal helps practices reduce fraud and workload

Integrating Terminal deeply into the Hero Health platform has allowed practices to reduce the number of fraudulent transactions. At the same time, it has reduced the amount of time practices spend reconciling transactions.

Hero Health has become one of the largest providers of NHS patient engagement technology

Transitioning to Invoicing freed Hero Health to focus on its online booking, patient messaging, and online consultation offerings. It has since become one of the largest providers of NHS patient engagement technology.

“With Stripe now handling the complex invoicing and payments plumbing, we’re more free to focus on our differentiated scheduling, communication, and triage functionality – all of this has been achieved whilst actually improving the customer experience,” said Kennedy.