Growing Prominence of On-Demand Care Facilities
Monte Sandler discusses the growing prominence of on-demand care facilities, like urgent cares and the evolving patient as a healthcare consumer. Monte Sandler is the Executive Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management at DocuTAP, a dynamic HIT company and provider of revenue cycle management (RCM) services, electronic medical records (EMR) and practice management (PM) software for urgent care clinics.
Transcript
Neal Howard: Hello and welcome to this health Supplier Segment here on Health Professional Radio. I’m glad that you could join us here today, I’m your host Neal Howard. We’re going to have a conversation with Mr. Monte Sandler, Executive Vice President of revenue cycle management at DocuTAP. DocuTAP is an on-demand care specific service and solution provider and he’s going to talk with us about his role there at DocuTAP and talk about the urgent care space as a whole. Welcome to the program Monte.
Monte Sandler: Thanks for having me Neal.
Neal: Now I did mention of course that you are Executive VP of revenue cycle management at DocuTAP. Give us a bit about your background and talk about your role there at DocuTAP.
Monte: Okay, great. Well I’m actually a CPA by background but I’ve been in the revenue cycle outsourcing business for the past 23 years. My experience has been in kind of the broad horizontal ambulatory healthcare market and I have been at DocuTAP focused on the urgent care vertical for about the last year and a half. Maybe one of the past accomplishments that I would call out for your audience is a class, the independent rating agency has rated my revenue cycle outsourcing model as best-in-class which we’re extremely proud of from past lives. My current role is Executive Vice President of RCM services at DocuTAP and really the responsibilities for me are to lead our revenue cycle outsourcing business. So at DocuTAP we provide both solutions and services and revenue cycle outsourcing is really kind of the main service offering that we offer as an organization. And as a company, we’re really focused on the urgent care vertical and helping urgent care organizations optimize their performance, both clinically and financially in a fast-growing market.
Neal: How does RCM, first explain the the revenue cycle as it relates to urgent care because sometimes you get a picture in your mind that all you need to do is take care of your patients and the revenue will take care of itself. Obviously, that’s not the case.
Monte: Exactly. So Revenue Cycle Outsourcing is really outsourced billing and collection. Oftentimes I refer to our service offering as kind of the EDP of medical billing and our focus is really helping organizations on the financial side of their practice and making sure that they are optimizing the revenue that their providers are generating.
Neal: Talk about the cost effective aspect of outsourcing your revenue cycle management as opposed to dealing with an in-house.
Monte: Yeah, it’s a great question. S we continue to see growth in the revenue cycle outsourcing space, largely because this is our core competency. I run an organization that is focused on optimizing the revenue cycle every single day. Our organization is built for scale and we can bill and collect for healthcare services much more effectively and efficiently than individual organizations can do it on their own. And I like to think of it as these urgent care organizations are really focused on the patient care and driving patient volume, patient experience and those are their core competencies. And so working with an organization like ours and outsourcing the back-office billing and collection and revenue cycle work allows us to focus on our core competency to let them focus on theirs.
Neal: Is there a vast difference in the revenue cycle management of an urgent care facility as opposed to managing the revenue cycle of an ER department, say, in a hospital? Because every department has its own budget, is that correct?
Monte: Sure. So look, generally speaking the revenue cycle and billing and collection for healthcare services is fundamentally the same. That said, the urgent care space is unique in that it’s really capitalizing on what’s happening in our society and we are becoming a much more on-demand society. Now you look, everybody has cell phone, people are constantly online, using social media and the urgent care space is really focusing on what’s happening in our society and the whole on demand requirement. And so patients want immediate access and immediate care to healthcare just like they want access to everything else and and so urgent care becomes kind of the vehicle to do that. It’s a very retail focused business which is also different kind of in the broader ambulatory space and these operators are really focused on the patient experience and patient satisfaction and so while fundamentally the billing and collections are the same, there are nuances within urgent care that make it unique.
Neal: What type of feedback do you get, I guess either directly from healthcare consumers or through the facilities that you service about patient awareness of improvements or efficiency or cost savings as it relates to them maybe getting in and out faster, more time with the doctor, less time? What type of feedback are you getting from a patient standpoint not just from the facility or the providers they are in?
Monte: Yeah, I mean the patients have really taken to the model. Again the urgent, on-demand focus is important to them. The patient experience is very important to them. And at the end of the day, these urgent care settings are much less expensive and so with more and more responsibilities being put on the patient for their healthcare costs, going to a more economic friendly environment tends to be a patient satisfier as well. So the feedback that we get in this space, it’s very positive and it’s largely because operators are focused on patient experience and it’s a more cost-effective way to kind of treat patients.
Neal: Now in wrapping up, we talked about the feedback that you got from the patients based on their experience. What type of feedback do you get from folks who have a stake in these facilities? Are the people who are actually paying the bills, seeing an improvement in efficiency and overall experience based on your management efforts there at DocuTAP?
Monte: Yeah, without question. Without question because our focus is 100% on the urgent care space, that’s all we do and so we’re constantly looking for ways to improve the business operations of our urgent care operators, whether that be with technology for our EMR and practice management software, whether it be patient engagement tools and things that we’re doing to make it easier for those operators to engage with their patients or whether it has to do with our service offering and providing a very specific and focused revenue cycle outsourcing service only for urgent care providers.
Neal: Where can we go online and get some more information about this Urgent Care space and about DocuTAP as well?
Monte: Yeah, sure. So DocuTAP is online at docutap.com. Certainly find a lot of information about not only our software solutions but also our revenue cycle outsourcing service and everything else that we do.
Neal: Great. Monte Sandler, thank you for joining us on the program for this Health Supplier Segment.
Monte: Very good, thanks for having me.
Neal: You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio, I’m your host Neal Howard. Transcripts and audio of this program are available at hpr.fm and healthprofessionalradio.com.au
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