Transcript
David Ezeobinwa (00:00) hey, josh. What’s up?
Josh Brunell (00:03) David? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Sweet. How you doing, man? I’m.
David Ezeobinwa (00:10) good. I’m good. How you doing?
Josh Brunell (00:12) Doing well, doing well?
Josh Brunell (00:22) Are you back? No, I’m not back home. I’m still at airbnb. Oh, okay.
David Ezeobinwa (00:30) Yeah.
Josh Brunell (00:31) I’m like in a random room with bunk beds, actually kids like playroom. Yeah, if she hops on and I mean, my nanny’s here, but I have two kids and if they burst in for whatever reason and I go on mute or off camera, just maybe just do some stalling… for me. Okay? No.
David Ezeobinwa (00:57) Worries just.
Josh Brunell (00:59) Be like, josh has some kids at home today that are home from school, took the call before he could drive them to daycare.
David Ezeobinwa (01:06) Okay. No worries.
Josh Brunell (01:12) I’m just going to go ahead and share my screen because I’m only on a single, actually, I’m not going to share my screen.
David Ezeobinwa (01:20) Okay.
David Ezeobinwa (01:26) Give her a couple minutes.
David Ezeobinwa (01:38) Send her a note at like five minute mark. It’s tough to tell. I feel like everyone’s so back to back, it’s like it’s always like a couple minutes delay.
David Ezeobinwa (02:05) Thank you. Okay. She is here. I think.
David Ezeobinwa (02:34) Hey, Cynthia. Is that, I think that’s you? You’re on mute?
Cynthia Sturdevant (02:49) Hello?
David Ezeobinwa (02:51) Hey, hello? Is this Cynthia? Is that you? Hi?
Cynthia Sturdevant (02:53) Yes, it’s me. It’s me. Sorry. I’m using my cell phone. I’m still driving, but I just get into the parking lot in my office. I came from another location. So, can you give me five minutes to go upstairs to my office, and then we’ll go. I use my laptop from there.
David Ezeobinwa (03:14) Yeah. No, that sounds great. Okay. No worries.
Cynthia Sturdevant (03:16) Okay. Sounds good. So, give me five minutes. I just park and then I just need to go upstairs.
David Ezeobinwa (03:22) Okay. No worries. Okay?
Cynthia Sturdevant (03:23) All right. Thank you.
David Ezeobinwa (03:25) All right.
Cynthia Sturdevant (06:47) Hi, David. Okay. I’m back. Hey?
David Ezeobinwa (06:51) How are you doing?
Cynthia Sturdevant (06:56) So, I will be transfer this to my laptop once? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, give me one second. Yeah.
David Ezeobinwa (07:06) We’ll give you a second. I saw.
Josh Brunell (07:10) The balloons. Did you have a birthday recently? Oh,
Cynthia Sturdevant (07:13) yes, my birthday last Friday?
Josh Brunell (07:16) Happy late birthday.
Cynthia Sturdevant (07:19) Thank you. Give me one second. I’m going to put this into… it’s muted.
Cynthia Sturdevant (07:37) That’s okay. I’m going to transfer to my laptop anyway. Still, so, how is it going? Where do you guys base it?
David Ezeobinwa (07:46) Yeah, it’s going good. I’m in Texas. I’m in Austin. Yeah, josh, I’ll pass it to.
Josh Brunell (07:52) You. Yeah, I’m actually in southern California. I’m in orange county. Okay. We’re a fully remote company though, so, I support customers back east, like all over the states. So, okay, a lot of traveling and, you know, you’re in Virginia, whereabouts. Okay. Sorry, I don’t know if you heard me. I was asking, where are you? Are you based in Virginia?
Cynthia Sturdevant (08:25) Yes, my office is in Alexandria, but actually our clinic, we have like 15 clinics and, you know, it’s mostly in northern Virginia. So, in Arlington area, city of Alexandria and in fairfax.
Josh Brunell (08:45) Awesome. Yeah. And, David, I don’t know if you want to like, just give a little, you know, introduction or not, but I could actually just dive into the slides and take it from here, if that works for you.
David Ezeobinwa (08:59) Yeah, no, I can let you dive in. I know, we got about 20 minutes left, Cynthia, I don’t know if you’re able to transfer to your laptop or you just want to continue on your phone? Yes?
Cynthia Sturdevant (09:10) I’m about to do it now. It’s.
Josh Brunell (09:15) yeah. And this could be more of a discussion anyways.
Josh Brunell (09:17) I mean, I, with, for the sake of time, I think as far as like overall agenda goes, I just want to make sure, you get the most out of this call, Cynthia, and that we are, spending the time on the right things.
Cynthia Sturdevant (09:30) Sorry?
Josh Brunell (09:42) There we go. Okay, perfect. Can you see our screen? Okay?
Cynthia Sturdevant (09:47) Yes, I can see your screen now, perfect.
Josh Brunell (09:50) We’ll start with introductions on the medallion side, if that’s okay with you. And then we’ll go into really like, the reason why we reached out to you and where we think that there’s potential value and partnership alignment between medallion and neighborhood health. And from there, you let us know like, hey, is this aligned to your business objectives or not? If it does great, we could maybe continue discussions, and go from there and play next steps, if not, if, at any point in the call, you think, hey, this really isn’t a fit because of whatever reason, just let me know. I want to put some time back in your day and make sure that, I know you’re kicking your day off. And so, I want to make sure that you, you have some time to focus on other things. So, I’ll dive into it if it’s okay with you, josh Burnell.
Josh Brunell (10:32) I lead our partnership. I’m on our partnerships team here at medallion, David works with me on the business development side. And as, you know, reached out to you because, thought we saw some things specifically on your LinkedIn, just around goals, roles, and responsibilities, and some of the, some of the outcomes that you’re driving for neighborhood health. And, we saw a lot of similarities between the different leaders that we work with and companies we work with in particular. And so, wanted to just start by asking, have you ever talked to anyone at medallion? Do you know what we do at a high level or is this your first time?
Cynthia Sturdevant (11:07) No, it is my first time. Yeah. Okay.
Josh Brunell (11:10) Before, we get into where we see a potential alignment and a fit from a partnership perspective with neighborhood health. I’ll just give you kind of like the short overview of what we do if that works, and then we can, okay. Yeah. So, I mean, at the highest level, we’re a provider data management platform built to automate, a number of back office processes. As David might have shared, some of, the majority of the work that we’re doing is around provider operations, specifically credentialing things like primary source verification, payer, enrollment, both, commercial and government payers, so, mcos, medicaid, payers, et cetera, as well as ongoing compliance and monitoring, we’ve been around since, started just with a handful of customers have since grown to over, I think we have close to 400 now. And we’re seeing a lot of success with other fqhcs for a few reasons. One is that we know that, a number of the processes that we help automate are often done either manually spread across multiple teams. Maybe HR might handle initial onboarding and kind of welcome letter to new providers. When they get started. They might be handling primary source verification. And then there could be a dedicated team that’s actually doing the payr enrollment enrollments with the mcos medicaid, etc, and there might be handoffs that occur, different tools, spreadsheets being used, lack of visibility from a leadership perspective. Well, we centralize all this and we use automation to do the process much faster as well as much more efficiently. So, our mission really is to enable just one individual in your organization to handle a limited scale. And some of the things that I saw about your organization which intrigued me is that you have 15 integrated clinics today with different services and specialties that you offer. I know that from a complexity and an audit standpoint, fqhcs obviously have different regulatory, more of a regulatory burden than standard provider groups. And so, some of the things that we’re often partnering with organizations are, is, yeah, we want to get the providers enrolled and starting and seeing patients as quickly as possible. We do that better than any other platform in the industry. But I think the one thing that I’m curious to discuss with you in more length is, you know, what are some of your growth goals and plans for this year and beyond? And also?
Cynthia Sturdevant (13:43) I lost you. Oh.
Josh Brunell (13:45) Sorry, where did you leave me? Can you hear me now?
Josh Brunell (13:56) David, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah.
Cynthia Sturdevant (13:58) Now, I can hear you.
Josh Brunell (14:00) Okay. Perfect. Long winded way of me saying we put together some analysis based off of some of the, some of the things we saw about your organization, some of the common challenges we see from an operations standpoint regarding these processes with other fqhcs, wanted to just share a little bit about or I guess learn a little bit more about your current process today and the teams that are supporting these functions, and see if there’s potential for medallion to help streamline and drive better visibility, speed and accuracy when it comes to credentialing and enrolling your providers as they’re getting onboarded to the organization. Are those processes ones that roll up to you? Yes?
Cynthia Sturdevant (14:48) So, HR is not under me but credentialing is in my domain. So basically, once we have a new provider start, HR will just contact our credentialing specialist. We have a credentialing specialist in our organizations to start the process, you know, asking for all those requirements, you know, right? So verifications about the educations, all the licenses, Dea license as well. And then, you know, once he has it completed and then we use. So in Virginia, we have, you know, all the community health center in Virginia, fqhc in Virginia, they form a body that kind of work for us. So this body will actually doing like, you know, initial provider credentialing also they work with the health plan. So it’s kind of like, taking that direct responsibility from us because it would be easier for just one body to be able to do all of those for all the fqhc here in Virginia. So that’s the reason why you know, we only have the credentialing specialist in house. But this is pretty much like onboarding provider onboarding, completing all the documentations, having set up with, you know, caqh, but then, you know, for the credentialing itself and then credentialing to the health plan will be done by this body. It calls synavia. So they are the one who like, you know, credential all our providers into the health plan and they’re also doing our billing. So that is a little different with us here in Virginia because we are not like doing like we don’t have in house billing, we don’t have in house credentialing, but we do have the documentations, you know, with us and then also health plan enrollment as well. Like that’s. Also done by that by synavia. So then, you know, for us in here like we don’t deal directly with the health plan. We don’t deal directly with the billing, something… like that. You know, I don’t know if that is, but I understand the process because that was also like, you know, we’ve been… you know, there is a share like a website or database that we all can have access to that. And to be able to see where is the, you know, how far is the process for credentialing for all the health plan? And… and then also, there’s a systematically there’s a system where, you know, they will remind us about like, you know, provider or so. And so it’s time for recredentialing. So that is like already being automatically done. And, and yeah, I think.
Josh Brunell (18:06) that’s.
Cynthia Sturdevant (18:07) do you?
Josh Brunell (18:08) Know, and that all makes a ton of sense. And so when I was doing my research, I saw that you had one credentialing specialist and I was like, wow, they’re doing a really great job if they have just one person supporting.
Cynthia Sturdevant (18:21) All of this. Yeah, that’s not enough.
Josh Brunell (18:23) Okay. So that makes sense that you have kind of like the shared model and you’re kind of offloading some of that burden, the majority of the burden to that team. So, just to make sure I heard it, they’re called Synovia.
Cynthia Sturdevant (18:37) Synovia, CENEVI a.
Josh Brunell (18:41) Okay. And are they a large organization that supports like or like organizations across the U. S, or just specific?
Cynthia Sturdevant (18:51) To Virginia? No, no, no, it’s just northern Virginia. Yeah, it’s just in northern Virginia.
Josh Brunell (18:56) Okay. That’s great. Well.
Cynthia Sturdevant (18:58) No, sorry. Sorry, sorry, not northern Virginia. The state of Virginia got it because there are about like, I couldn’t remember maybe… two or three got it. Yeah.
Josh Brunell (19:10) Okay. That makes that makes a lot of sense. And so they have a database or a website of some sort that helps give you visibility that you need to understand where all the providers are at in the process. It sounds like as well, correct? Okay. And, do you find, I mean, it sounds like you’re satisfied with, at least from a visibility standpoint? Do you think their delivery like speed and accuracy has been, I guess well received by the organization? I.
Cynthia Sturdevant (19:39) Would say that, I would say that for the initial credentialing initial enrollment, I mean, it’s fast, right? But then, you know, and, this is something that, you know, I have a discussions with the CEO of senevia about, the accuracy in terms of like provider roster, right? Because sometimes, you know, we found out that the provider roster had been shared with the health plan. I mean, it’s kind of like the old provider roster. It’s not being updated accurately. So, that’s something that’s one thing that I’m still frustrated about that, because we also do value based care. And, you know, the provider roster is important, very, crucial for that. So, that’s one area that I feel that, but I know that, you know, I finally received an email, after talking to the CEO and, the person who, the director of the credentialing department finally reached out to me and, you know, want to hear directly from me and then also see share that they have, they are improving their, database to be able to, you know, getting more accurate on provider roster. So that’s one thing that I want to fix. But other than that, I think that we are quite, happy with that. Okay?
Josh Brunell (21:05) And, does senevia, do they build and own that database? And that’s owned by them or is, are they a services company that might be using a vendor like a bedalian to,
Cynthia Sturdevant (21:16) I think they probably use vendor. I don’t think that it’s owned.
Josh Brunell (21:19) By them. Okay?
Cynthia Sturdevant (21:21) So, you may want to reach out. I mean, yeah, I think that you may want to reach out to them and, you know, try to see if this is something, that will work for them. I, you know, I don’t know where they are and I don’t know what kind of software they use. Definitely, I mean, that’s something that they, you know, but I know that they were trying to improve, the communications between them and the health center, initial credentialing provider information. I mean, that’s easy like we can see it in the database. But one thing that I want to see is like, and then, like, you know, sometimes, when our front desk like report to us, oh, you know, I mean, I have a patient and then, insurance say that, we’re not network, with them, you know, and there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of product, you know, like anthem has so many product that, you know, a lot of people come with different product and, you know, sometimes that’s what I’m not sure whether, you know, we are enrolled with that product or not. So, and, that, that’s like everyday work, that like our credentialing specialists will have to check with sanavia, where we are, you know, if we are part, of this health plan, you know, and things like that. So, so I know that they mentioned that they will be improving that on their side, but I don’t know like what kind of, you know, they said that they’re going to have a new software, so I don’t know, what it is.
Josh Brunell (22:55) Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah. I mean on the roster piece, definitely an area that we can help automate and streamline and as well as from a reporting standpoint on par status to understand effectively, you know, what providers are enrolled with, what plans or what group contracts are, you know, that you have. So, yeah, I mean this is helpful. I’ll definitely be reaching out to them and seeing, you know, learning more about their process and as well as the follow up too. Yeah, we’re I would say like that is the most, one of the most automated parts of our platform is the automated follow up both to providers as well as administrators, like letting you know exactly where something is at within the process. But also, we also keep like full audit trails of any email or call that is made with a team member and the payers so that you can have full visibility into that as well. And then I think lastly, we definitely, I think when it comes to your credentialing specialists that you have in house, I think she would be a big fan of ours because when you’re collecting documents in medallion, we actually take the approach of linking caqh, we have a proprietary relationship with them. So we could actually port all the data over from a provider from caqh pretty instantly. And then that way instead of sending a welcome packet and a bunch of emails to our providers, like asking for all these documents, we have a starting point and then the credentialing specialists can then look at that and then say, okay, we got nine out of the 10 things that we need. I’m only going to ask the provider for an updated license or something like that. So it’s less back and forth from a paperwork standpoint, and often saves time when it comes to collecting data. And then with the attestations as well, we can manage that on their behalf. Oh, wow. Okay. That’s nice. Yeah. And so let me just make sure I write this down. So it’s cenovia and they’re based in Virginia cenavia. Yeah.
Cynthia Sturdevant (25:07) CENEVI a, so tell me again, so your automations that you are doing is your automations on the provider onboarding, process, provider enrollment to help plan. And what is what other things that these automations actually work? Yeah?
Josh Brunell (25:34) So, correct. So we’re automating all these processes. So when it comes to, for provider data management, for example, okay, we can automate the intake of the data and paperwork up front. Like I just mentioned through things like caqh and other methods where we can tie in the databases and pull those into medallion. From there, we typically will build like a profile for that provider. Okay? In medallion. And then all of our customers do is say, hi, I have this provider I rec, I’m requesting you to, you know, credit them credential that generate a cred file for me, run primary source verification. We have automation to all the primary sources. So like that typically comes back in less than a day and that’s our value proposition is that we can actually get the primary source verification done in a day. And then we have SLA commitments to have that done in under three days contractually. And then on the payer enrollment side. So whether it’s government or commercial payers, we get the applications out the door typically under that three day threshold as well. And we can inter, we actually have automation where we time it, we take the data from that medallion profile of that provider. And then we can automatically do automated form filling on all the payer sites. So my.
Cynthia Sturdevant (26:57) credentialing specialist doesn’t have to fill out all those forms.
Josh Brunell (27:00) No, no, yeah. Like that. Goes, that goes away with medallion. And then, okay, and then from there, once it’s submitted it, you’re essentially using medallion to track the status. And then we have automated emails, AI phone calling to the payers and that’s all tracked, in the platform. And we have analytics as well to be able to check things like par status and effective dates of all your providers. We also do privileging that’s more for the hospitals and health system side. But if you’re doing like facilities credentialing or facilities enrollment, we support that as well. We could also help secure new state licenses or license renewals in our platform as well. Similar process. You just make the request, select the state, select the provider, and then we automate the process from there.
Cynthia Sturdevant (27:42) Wow. Okay.
Josh Brunell (27:44) That’s pretty good. Yeah. And I mean, really like simple kind of value proposition is like we typically see providers get in network anywhere from like 30 to 45 days faster. And we guarantee these outcomes in our contracts. So we contractually commit to how quickly we get the work out the door and the accuracy behind it. And so those are the reasons why organizations partner with us. It reduces obviously like claim styles and write offs from any sort of credentialing related delays or errors. So, right?
Cynthia Sturdevant (28:16) Got it. Okay.
Josh Brunell (28:18) Yeah. Thank you for taking the time to learn about it. I know, thank you. But, you know, I mean, I will, you sound like, yeah, no.
Cynthia Sturdevant (28:27) I’m just saying that like, you know, since we’re growing and then we try to also like automate a lot of things that we do here at neighborhood health, but, you know, I’m going to keep you in mind, you know, in case like, you know, we have to, you know, because we also, you know, we’re also joint commissions accredited, right? So, all of these like, you know, when joint commissions come in on board and they want to see, you know, when the provider credentialing, when the provider privileging, and then with that time is actually aligned with a requirement, you know, things like that. And, you know, I mean our credentialing specialists are still having provider file in the paper in the map. Okay? So I’ll keep in mind if one day like we know we have, we probably want to decide it to like improve our, you know, in house credentialing… department. I think this is, this sounds good to go with.
Josh Brunell (29:25) Us. Yeah, I appreciate that, Cynthia. Yeah. And especially as you continue to scale and grow if you expand into also new states that adds more complexity as well.
Josh Brunell (29:37) Yeah. Appreciate the time. I’m going to see, I’m going to reach out to samavia… and see what they say, but yeah, keep us in mind. I’ll connect with you on LinkedIn, if you ever feel the need of like, hey, we, I think this is the fit and timing might be better. Feel free to reach out. We will, we’ll leave that up to you but appreciate you connecting with us.
Cynthia Sturdevant (30:02) Yeah, sounds good. Thank you so much. Thanks.
Josh Brunell (30:05) Take care. Have a great day. All right. Bye. Thank.
Cynthia Sturdevant (30:07) You, you too. Bye bye.