Transcript
Samantha Bouchard (00:00) hey, josh, you get to hear the daily evolution of Sam’s daycare illness still going strong.
Josh Brunell (00:09) Sorry, it.
Samantha Bouchard (00:11) Must have been the flu because I was like body aches and all that this weekend.
Josh Brunell (00:15) Not great. When do you live for your trip?
Samantha Bouchard (00:19) Friday. So I should be good, but just worried my immune system is going to be down and I’m going to get the next thing, but I’ve been eating. I took your advice and bought like the biggest bag of clementines and I’m just like eating so many of them.
Josh Brunell (00:34) Good. They’re waiting in the waiting room. Okay?
Samantha Bouchard (00:37) Let’s let them in.
Josh Brunell (01:01) Hey, Michael. Hey.
Michael Santos (01:02) Josh. How are you?
Josh Brunell (01:04) Good. How was your weekend?
Michael Santos (01:05) Good. How about yourself?
Josh Brunell (01:08) It was really?
Michael Santos (01:08) Nice. Good. Yeah. Well, I’m trying to confirm that William is still able to attend. This is his first day back from pto, but let’s give him a couple minutes.
Josh Brunell (01:22) Yeah. And if he’s playing catch up and we need to move this out for later in the week, happy to do that too. So just let us know.
Michael Santos (01:31) Sounds good. Let’s stay on a couple minutes, maybe five minutes, cool.
Josh Brunell (01:35) Let me check and see if he accepted. Let me see.
Michael Santos (01:38) He did okay, because it was like your invite. It wouldn’t show me that I forwarded. So then I was like, did I forget? But I think I did send it to him last week.
Josh Brunell (01:48) Yep. He accepted it perfect.
Michael Santos (01:51) Okay. Give him a sec. It’s also lunchtime over here.
Josh Brunell (01:55) Yeah, I hear you. Okay… while he waits to join, just to make sure. So William, his role is, he leads the provider onboarding and enrollment team. Is that right?
Michael Santos (02:10) Exactly. Well, so, his title is, he’s our senior manager of, yeah, I think it’s provider onboarding. Cool. So like the enrollment credentialing piece, his team will do certain steps of it. And then it gets handed off to our corporate team and that’s where we get stuck with the bottleneck, but even then, right? It’s even if we have the right number of bodies, it’s operationally very complex there’s so many providers there’s terms there’s, transfers and they’re all currently credentialed at the location level, not the tin level, which I think is up to debate in the future if we really want it to be like that, right? So, even a transfer to another one of our own locations, creates a lot of work. Got it.
Josh Brunell (03:05) Yeah, we’ll give a few minutes. I guess we could just start with maybe introductions on our side since obviously, Sam, you haven’t had the opportunity to connect with Michael yet. So maybe we could do that and then just in the sake of time. So, Sam, you want to say a few words about yourself?
Samantha Bouchard (03:19) Yeah. Hi, Michael. Sam Bouchard got a little bit of a cold going on, but I sound worse than I feel. I’m located south of Boston, Massachusetts. So it’s about 35 rainy and gross, just kind of waiting for spring to start over here. But I’m josh’s counterpart from a technical and product side of the house. So I came from our implementation team. I would be giving you all a demo today if time allows for that. And yeah, just looking forward to working with you and answering any questions you might have.
Michael Santos (03:56) Perfect. I have been to Boston a few times but before I went late December after Christmas, I hadn’t been there in like 10, 15 years. So I’m like I was kind of a child the last time I was like high school. So I need to go because I keep hearing cool things about Boston. So I went after Christmas for like two days and I kind of made it like a work slash vacation. Like I’d work half a day and I’d go out and explore and it would get cold. I’d go back in and all that stuff, but I really enjoyed it up there. I need to go back during the summer as well.
Samantha Bouchard (04:23) Yeah, I’d say spring or fall. Definitely that way you can like get some seafood by the ocean, not be like completely freezing, go to the north end, get a cannoli from the famous spot. So, yeah, it’s a cool city but the weather certainly puts a damper on things at some times.
Michael Santos (04:44) I discovered, well, one of my friends told me I need to go to bova’s bakery. Oh, okay. The lobster tail pastry at the crino is so good. I.
Samantha Bouchard (04:55) Have never had one of those, which is so funny because I think I always just like default to the cannoli but they’re huge and they do look so good. Yeah.
Michael Santos (05:06) It’s really good. What?
Samantha Bouchard (05:08) About you, Michael, where are you located? Hopefully, you have some better weather than I do here?
Michael Santos (05:14) Don’t be jealous. We’re here in Orlando, Florida. It is sunny and it’s 78 degrees or so… I am.
Samantha Bouchard (05:22) Jealous. I’m actually going to be there Friday though. I’m taking my little ones to disney for quick little four night thing. So we’re getting some good weather. I’ve been like diligently tracking. So, I’m excited.
Michael Santos (05:34) For that, that’ll be great. That should be good weather for you. Yeah, but yeah, most of our current business line is in the state of Florida, but we’re quickly expanding to other parts where adventhealth is.
Michael Santos (05:44) So in a few years, we’ll be in a few other states as well. So that’s also why I’m like, well, this is a good time to have a conversation, just know what’s out there, you know, what’s the potential for a collaboration, all of that stuff… as well.
Samantha Bouchard (05:59) Awesome. Yeah, we talked to a lot of groups that are kind of like scratching the surface or have been, you know, kind of adding a lot of, you know, staff manually over the years and then kind of get to the point that they break and then they’re kind of looking to leverage technology. So, yeah, we hear your situation a lot and happy to provide some more context.
Josh Brunell (06:25) Yeah. And, and Michael, I do have like a kind of quick.
Michael Santos (06:31) Like,
Josh Brunell (06:33) kind of one shooter on like what we’ve heard from you so far, so as soon as.
Michael Santos (06:38) William.
Josh Brunell (06:39) Joins, we should be able to dive into the demo fairly quickly, but I guess the one thing that we heard from you is kind of more of the business related challenges, but we probably want to speak to him more about like operationally, where are they? Where’s, the bottlenecks occurring like within the specific workflow? I would imagine that William has more privy to that, knowing exactly what’s going on as far as collecting the data, submitting it to the cred team where there might be challenges with them, unless you have more insight into that after speaking, with him internally, no?
Michael Santos (07:14) That’s a him thing cause I think when we talked Tuesday Wednesday, he’s been out since and I just, so he did accept, I would expect, so we’ll give another minute or two, but if not, yeah, we’ll reschedule. But that’s where I’m coming from is I hear a lot of the issues and I think even right, if there was the other team that they work with internally, even if that team was optimized, I still think there’s a lot of room for opportunity and just write, the amount of templates they’re having to fill out the number of payer portals and all of that. That’s why I want to just write, just know what are our options. And right, even if you fix the other team, I think there’s still issues there’s still delays and it’s just a very complex operation with the number of payers that we’ve got, you know?
Josh Brunell (07:57) And, do you happen to know… roughly how many payers you’re enrolling each provider with?
Michael Santos (08:06) I don’t know, but we accept, I will say we accept most insurances, it’s.
Josh Brunell (08:13) usually anywhere from like 10 to 20, but that’s I was just wondering what that might look like. I.
Michael Santos (08:19) don’t know what it is. All I know is there’s yeah, there’s a handful of insurances though that we stopped taking for different reasons like simply and stuff like that. But he might be able to give you a better context. Cool. And I.
Josh Brunell (08:32) I think you already answered this for me before. It sounds like obviously, there’s like some spreadsheets being used and kind of silent systems is, do you know if there’s like a central database where all this information is being tracked on your providers?
Michael Santos (08:47) I think there is, I don’t know what it’s called, but I’m pretty sure there is some kind of system or tool that they are using, because more or less our team, the parts that we do, we’re on top of it, we know what forms we need to get where we need to do all the timing and thinking about, okay, here’s, what you said their start date was, and here’s what we need to do before then. But then I think on the credentialing and the enrollment side that’s where we have a lot of delays and issues, got it.
Samantha Bouchard (09:16) And Mike, I’m just curious like you said, you like, you know, you have obviously, it’s very complex, right? There’s lots of forms. There’s lots of things. But when does something like go wrong that you then are kind of notified or pulled up? Like when do things get kind of like bubbled up to you that, you know, that there could, there is potential for improvement. Yeah.
Michael Santos (09:37) And a lot of times what it is we’ll kind of just kind of rounded our building here. It’s all CM, a couple of times a month in person. And he’ll kind of talk to me about some of the problems and frustrations that he has with the credentialing and the enrollment. And a lot of times, what happens, right? Is we’re always thinking provider and operations first, so we might extend it off and say, hey, you’re going to start on June third and we go back and we think about all the delays and the standard timelines that other teams have asked us to give them. And we’re like we don’t know if that’s possible. And then, right? If, especially if you need a 12 or a 16 week lead, if there’s one little hiccup in that process, right? It could really impact their start date or what you’re able to collect for on day one. Basically, so it’s a lot of kind of word of mouth things that I’m hearing where I’m like I think we can do better here, but I’m not getting specific like every single time, you know, someone’s coming to me kind of thing, but I know it’s enough of a problem to at least have the conversation.
Samantha Bouchard (10:41) Yeah. And will you place a provider on the floor in that case? Like if you committed them a start date and they’re not enrolled, will you all just try to manage? Maybe they see less patients or, you know, only the patients they’re in par with or write off some of those services?
Michael Santos (10:58) I think that’s a nuanced answer. But I think if there’s right? If there’s payers where we know we can get paid after and afterward and they’re just going to retro and just hold all the claims, I think, yes, and then they probably would just not accept patients where we can’t get billed. We can’t get reimbursed until we actually are fully credentialed with that payer. So it’s probably a little bit of a mixed bag especially as we’re kind of moving so quickly on there. Yeah.
Samantha Bouchard (11:26) No, we hear that a lot. And then like one of the challenge comes to like scheduling and then the front desk is then trying to figure out who can we place this person with? And that causes like lots of downstream things. And then, you know, the RCM team is trying to figure out like where they need to backdate, where they don’t and so yeah, we definitely feel your pain and we hear it a lot and have some solutions in place that I think would be really beneficial to you all.
Michael Santos (11:51) For sure. I.
Josh Brunell (11:54) sent him an email and I haven’t heard back.
Michael Santos (11:58) Yeah, I just last seen 20 minutes ago, which is not that long ago. So I’m like I’m not sure.
Josh Brunell (12:04) Yeah.
Michael Santos (12:07) Well, why don’t we adjourn for now? And if he is able to email us back quickly and we can just jump back on, we can definitely do that. You would have to send me an email too because I won’t get.
Josh Brunell (12:18) Like I’m going to send the two of you an email as soon as we drop off here and just let you know, like, hey, we’re still available till the top of the hour. If he’s available, great. If not, then I’ll ask for William and yourself to just send some availability for later this week?
Michael Santos (12:33) Yeah, let’s do it. Cool.
Josh Brunell (12:36) Sounds good. Yeah, I mean, as far as like days go, like, I mean, me and Sam have availability issues as soon as tomorrow and Wednesday. Well, it’s Thursday afternoon. So, but Sam is off on Friday because she’s traveling as she mentioned to Orlando.
Michael Santos (12:51) Sure.
Josh Brunell (12:52) She’s coming down coming.
Samantha Bouchard (12:54) Down your way. This is sunshine. I can’t wait.
Josh Brunell (12:59) Cool. I will send that out and then, yeah, I’ll work with you offline Michael if we need to reschedule… but yeah, as far as like time goes, if we’re able to jump on the next 10 or 15 minutes, I think we could still knock out quite a bit of the demo and discussion with William just to make sure that there’s a fit here.
Michael Santos (13:22) Perfect. All right, talk.
Josh Brunell (13:23) Soon, Michael. Thank you.
Samantha Bouchard (13:25) Nice meeting you, Michael. Bye.
Michael Santos (13:26) Bye.