Corey Feldman, CEO of Protego Health, sat down to chat about the company’s rebrand. Stick around for a teardown and peek behind the curtain to see how this brand refresh went from concept to go-live. 

About the brand: Protego empowers billing teams with AI-driven tools to prevent and appeal denied medical claims.  Visit their website here. 

Before the rebrand

Covered Health was a brand destined for traction, and Corey and team wanted a name they could get behind and stick with for the long haul. “We wanted to avoid any trademark issues, but we also wanted a name for which we could begin to grow brand awareness. If you were looking up Covered in Google, all you’d find were health insurance companies,” Feldman shared. 

How the brand transformed

“The software we built outpaced the vision that we put on the previous Covered Health website. Our website needed to establish trust quickly, especially given the sensitive nature of patient and claims data. The quality of the website needed to be in line with the quality of the product that we had built, and the service that we aim to provide,” Feldman added. 

The timing of the rebrand also reflects the current state of healthcare, more specifically, effective revenue cycle management (RCM) processes. Healthcare providers are constantly under stress to balance increasing profits, rising demand, and higher expectations from clinicians and employees, among other things. This also means aggressively pursuing funds and closing gaps in the revenue cycle. 

In terms of process, this meant bringing in an agency to help clarify what the brand did and the direction they wanted to take in the future. 

Including their designer, “The three of us had a lot of calls about the brand, about the logo, about the name, etc. Even in the early days, we went section-by-section through the website, carefully articulating how we wanted to describe ourselves. We also looked at competitors and how they described themselves. We really tried to hone in on what makes us different from the rest of the market,” Feldman described. 

The brand’s new name

It’s always interesting to see how brands can lean into timeless cultural moments that make meaningful sense with what they do. 

Protego Health’s name, for example, was conjured through the magical wizarding world of Harry Potter. As Feldman outlined in the rebranding announcement on LinkedIn. 

“Latin for ‘I defend,’ and the memorable protective spell in the Harry Potter series, Protego reflects our mission—to act as a shield against unjust medical claim denials, safeguarding healthcare providers and their patients.”

The brand’s new messaging

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the brand’s old messaging as Covered Health and its new above-the-fold language on the home page. 

This shows the current website’s above-the-fold content. 

Some of the messaging that was woven into the new site was: “Stop fighting machines with humans!” This sentiment aligns with Protego Health’s core differentiator of putting RCM teams on the same level of preparedness as payers and health insurers through technology (rather than replacing them). 

“We aim to empower our end users, particularly revenue cycle professionals, to be more productive in their work as they're fighting against machines without many good resources. So we want to empower them. We don't want to replace them,” Feldman added. 

Strategic positioning

“The other piece that makes us different is the idea of ground truth. The truth is not what you or I say it is, or what the American College of Gastroenterology says. It's what the policy says,” Feldman added.

“What we do is draw upon those policies when helping providers or revenue cycle professionals make determinations about what should be paid for, what's a fair denial, and what's not. We think there's another factor: actually being able to be the judge and the jury (and gather evidence).”

They look at all pieces of the equation, like the:

• Claim
• Denial
• Policy (FDA, Payer, CMS)
• Local or national coverage determinations and guidelines
• Contract(s)
• Medical record/progress notes

“After looking at all of those things, even the contracts (if relevant), being able to say succinctly, here's what happened, is powerful. You said that you would pay for this service if condition X was met. It was met. Here's the evidence, and here's the policy in which you stated that you would pay for it if that policy was met,” Feldman added. 

It takes the emotions and stress out of denial management while speeding the process up exponentially. 

Competitive and consumer market landscape

“There are a few competitors in the outpatient space. Some of them are B2B, and some are more D2C. The third category includes those who do everything related to medical billing. One of them is specifically built around denials,” Feldman added. 

You might think that there’s a case to be made for Protego to approach the business from a D2C angle as well, but “we find that if you can get the claim handled at the provider level, then the bill never hits the patient. The idea is to intervene before a patient knows that they might have had a bill.” 

Right around the time of the new brand launch, they also “launched a new product line geared towards preventing denials from happening,” Feldman added. “The way we previously had done that was by auto-appealing denials or adding AI and automation to the process of appealing denials. Now, we cover the preventive side of things as well, to try and stop the problem before it starts.”

Protego Health’s future

“70-80% of providers have seen an increase in denials. They're either hiring to fix it or looking for solutions. We look at ourselves as a co-pilot in this journey, and as a software tool that can help empower their existing team to be as effective as their most effective biller or AR specialist,” Feldman added. 

These types of services aren’t meant for everyone, though. “I spoke to a provider the other day who had a 97% clean claim rate. So only 3% of their claims are denied. For a group like that, they might not need us. We're focused on this specific problem. 

That's not necessarily a problem for everyone, but there is a large market, approaching a trillion dollars in denied medical claims annually. For every practice that's got a 97% first-pass claim acceptance rate, there's another that has a 30% denial rate.  

Revenue cycle management (RCM) is becoming a more prevalent part of the healthcare discourse, and denials will continue to be a significant part of that conversation. When providers feel the pain, patients do as well. 

As Feldman shared in his rebrand announcement, “every year, providers incur over $20 billion in expenses chasing denied and delayed claims, with losses amounting to more than $750 billion from claims that are ultimately denied—costs often passed on to patients.” 

When providers and RCM staff are equipped with the right technology, automations, and AI-powered workflows, they can even the playing field. 

Want to learn more about Protego Health and how they can help you prevent, and if necessary, fight your denied medical claims? Check out their website: https://www.protegohealth.ai/ 

Protego worked with brand agency <name redacted> and freelance graphic and product designer, Kelley Kemp, who can be reached at kelly@sonicestudio.com.