Transcript
Amy Walsh (00:00) hey, rich. Sorry, slow.
Rich Weissmark (00:05) Zoom today. How are you doing?
Amy Walsh (00:07) I’m good. How are you? Oh,
Rich Weissmark (00:10) I’m staying busy. I don’t even know where to start.
Amy Walsh (00:13) I hear you?
Rich Weissmark (00:14) We just have to keep it going.
Amy Walsh (00:17) Yeah. End of quarter is a crazy time for us, so.
Rich Weissmark (00:21) Trying to hit those ARR, targets or what?
Amy Walsh (00:24) Yes… luckily, I won’t be bothering you about any of that today, but, yeah.
Rich Weissmark (00:30) Definitely, not today, no.
Amy Walsh (00:31) Not phynet.
Rich Weissmark (00:33) I guess the company really operates like a SaaS, model business. Huh? Very cool.
Amy Walsh (00:39) Yeah, yep. Yep. Exactly. And, you know, we’re still considered a startup. So, yeah, trying to just make a name for ourselves in the industry. We already have a little bit, but obviously need to keep that momentum going. So, it’s an exciting time now.
Rich Weissmark (00:55) I feel like you guys are, I know you’re not a mature business yet, but I definitely feel like you’re you’ve made a name for yourself?
Amy Walsh (01:01) Yes, you’re right? You’re right? Yeah, mature. We’re a mature startup. You’re right? I’m just, I came from Freesia, which I think I’ve told you before, which has been around for like 25 years at this point. Yeah, that’s crazy.
Rich Weissmark (01:15) I’ve met fiam before. Oh, you have, yeah. Oh.
Amy Walsh (01:19) Yeah, he’s the best.
Rich Weissmark (01:20) Yeah, we, I have a friend or a colleague named Barry orsler who was a big customer, right? Of Freesia at other ppms. And he introduced me to fiam. Okay. You know, it’s interesting. They’ve been successful but they’ve also been incredibly rigid and different than a lot of their peers. Yeah, I also met with Sarah a couple times, Sarah dinardo, maybe.
Amy Walsh (01:44) Yeah, she was my, like I was, she was my manager, basically manager’s manager. Yeah, she was oversaw the client solutions team. Yeah.
Rich Weissmark (01:52) Yeah, no, I wanted to try to work with them at one point. But when it came to scheduling and all of the nuances and complexity of reading schedules from ehrs, he said, I’m not going to do any of that. Like, he was very disciplined like not wanting to do certain things now. I’m sure. By now, they probably do all of.
Amy Walsh (02:13) Those things, yes, they do self scheduling now for certain ehrs. Yeah, I forget. What is phynet on again? This?
Rich Weissmark (02:21) Was all before phynet? Oh, this was when I, we’re on ecw primarily. Okay?
Amy Walsh (02:26) Yep. We do this. Yeah.
Rich Weissmark (02:28) Yeah. When I was at gastro, I was, I partnered with Luma?
Amy Walsh (02:32) Oh, cool. Yep. Because Luma,
Rich Weissmark (02:34) was the only one at the time was willing to have the capability to like navigate white space and time deleted scheduling and all of the stuff that like the freezers of the world weren’t willing to do.
Amy Walsh (02:47) Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Luma’s, a big competitor and I used to work at ecw a lot. So, all of these terms are just bringing me back to my last job. I.
Rich Weissmark (02:58) Think you’re in a better place now, but I.
Amy Walsh (03:00) hope you, I am.
Rich Weissmark (03:03) So what I wanted to focus on for today? Yes. So we have like a bi weekly board call, you know, they’re focused on things that boards typically don’t take an interest in. Okay? But what I wanted to get your support on is understanding now, I pulled some reports already so I could show you one. But yeah, I want to see the easiest way to pull like cycle time data from your perspective out of the UI because, you know, part of how I got them to sign up for medallion is guys symplr’s broken.
Rich Weissmark (03:39) Yep, there’s no magic in the credentialing world. Don’t think everything is going to suddenly be 20 days. I said that 60 to 120 day timeframe could very well still be for some payers, but they’re struggling to understand why some of these earlier credentialing activities that started like the providers, we started like right away, like even before we onboarded all the stuff Kathleen’s done, some of them are just taking a really long time and I’m like I can’t believe you want to talk about this at the board level, but I better be ready.
Amy Walsh (04:07) You know, okay, yeah, great. So we can look at that together. Do you want, do you want me to drive? Do you want to drive? We’ll kind of just go go through the payroll report. But, okay.
Rich Weissmark (04:20) Let me just get to have it open. So let me just share my.
Amy Walsh (04:24) Screen. Okay, perfect. So would it be helpful just to make sure we’re doing what you want, like finding the outliers to see why some numbers are getting driven? Or do you want to see more of like an average across the board? Like what?
Rich Weissmark (04:38) Yeah. Let’s look at averages, or like forget about specific drill downs right now. Like if you, if I said to you, how do I look at like the data you prepared, like median from app submitted to par or like that type?
Amy Walsh (04:53) Of thing. Sure. Okay. Yeah, that’s super easy. Okay. So go to analytics on the left, pay your enrollment second tab and then it’ll load and you’ll scroll down. So just to give you, we’ll just scroll down to write what you want. And I can explain the last the rest later, but go down to yep. And then you see turnaround times, completed enrollment. So those turnaround times are what you’re looking for on a median basis and calendar days is on the left and business days is on the right.
Rich Weissmark (05:23) So, is this currently aggregate for everything that’s in the system?
Amy Walsh (05:28) This is everything that is completed in the system. Yes. Okay.
Rich Weissmark (05:32) So, if I wanted to drill in to this, how would I do, could I do that or?
Amy Walsh (05:40) Yeah. So give me a sec, cause we did just changes recently… and.
Rich Weissmark (05:47) The milestones that I think are most kind of interesting. You tell me cause you talk to everybody. So you have a really different perspective. I think for apps submitted, I don’t know why it says first I’ll question in a minute, but apps submitted to requested complete to me means you guys submitted the app to the payer and complete means par, right? Exactly. Okay. That’s how I think about it all.
Amy Walsh (06:10) Right. And yeah, and if you, so just to take that a step further, you see actually, no, that’s a perfect summary of it. I won’t go more into that. Let me just see when I export the file.
Rich Weissmark (06:26) And if you have like a definitions, a data definitions document for all this stuff, I.
Amy Walsh (06:32) don’t need it, but it would.
Rich Weissmark (06:33) Be nice if you have it. Yeah.
Amy Walsh (06:35) Absolutely. I can get that together. So the way that you can see all the data for like and how it’s getting up to the aggregate is if you keep going down on the file and,
Rich Weissmark (06:52) keep going. No?
Amy Walsh (06:53) You’re good. I’m just making sure that this is what I want to be showing you. Okay. Yes. So in this petat or detail, this will show you all of the requests that.
Rich Weissmark (07:08) Are.
Amy Walsh (07:09) making up that aggregate. But the one step though that we’d have to do and I wish we had better filtering within the system to be honest with you. But current status, we should be able to exclude any status that’s still in intake and follow up like we want to just be getting out the successful enrollments to show you where that like the underlying data in that median timeline. I believe the only way to do that right now is by exporting this into an excel spreadsheet, which you can do by hitting the three yep, and then export excel. And then you’ll be able to filter again. It’s a few steps. I know that there’s.
Rich Weissmark (07:53) I’m not worried about a few steps. You guys are light years ahead of everyone else, but I would say that the reporting is still a little bit clunky given I agree.
Amy Walsh (08:02) Yeah. How?
Rich Weissmark (08:02) Sophisticated you guys are, you know?
Amy Walsh (08:04) I agree for sure. And then if you go into filtering just your excel file?
Rich Weissmark (08:11) Oh, you want me to filter the excel if?
Amy Walsh (08:13) You want? So you would be able to filter the status under C and you could just get rid of anything.
Rich Weissmark (08:20) I hate that. I have to make it less secure. So I don’t have to get frustrated with these things.
Amy Walsh (08:25) Yeah, no problem. Filter. And then current status, let’s the C column. And if I think we filter out everything except successful enrollment… yeah, that should give you all of the completed enrollments and like the data behind when, how long all of these different enrollments took?
Rich Weissmark (08:46) Gotcha. So if I wanted to calculate this myself, I would just use these and extend some formulas. These are business days or calendar days.
Amy Walsh (08:55) These are great question, cal.
Rich Weissmark (09:01) Okay. It’s easier with calendar days all.
Amy Walsh (09:04) Of this data though. Like to your point, it should like if you were to aggregate this and, you know, do averages and whatnot, it should match those medians. I’m showing you that I already showed you above, but this is how you can drill down to the data if you want instead of a median, I don’t know. Like if you wanted to pull a mean, I don’t think you would do that, but like if you wanted to pull other types of data from?
Rich Weissmark (09:25) These numbers, yeah, I mean, I typically look at mean and median. Yeah, I mean, sure. For what I’m doing here, I don’t need to get that granular but just to kind of go back, so.
Amy Walsh (09:35) Yeah, and you can kind of see the outliers are here too. Like, yeah, one sets up really quick, one sets up longer. I.
Rich Weissmark (09:41) like data. I just don’t have enough time. So, first you’re good request complete. I just want to go flip back here for a second. So that’s what I wanted to see. So that column there could show me. I don’t know whether there’s some zeros, but I guess that’s because I don’t want to get too granular, but we switched it to completed. How could something only take? How could something take zero days? But, okay.
Amy Walsh (10:11) Request, can you go back request where’s the zero showing? Sorry, I’m trying to.
Rich Weissmark (10:17) Follow your screen. I was looking at row 98 Joan levin’s medicare, so, intake.
Amy Walsh (10:21) Completed on the fifth request, completed on the eighteenth… where’s the zero, oh, intake to intake complete.
Rich Weissmark (10:31) Request to request completed means the day we submitted it to a medallion to let me do this again. Sorry, I’m crazy today, you’re.
Amy Walsh (10:42) good. First.
Rich Weissmark (10:43) App submitted to request complete is what I want. So, first app is what I want to understand because I’m not sure if I want to use X or y for some of my efforts here. Because first app means it assumes that many to one like more than one payer, I’m guessing.
Amy Walsh (11:03) Yes, I believe, and I’ll double check this for you because I want to be thorough, but I’m pretty sure it means that you submit your first app right? Once from there to completed that first app that you may submit, you may have to come back. And if there’s like an issue with it making changes and like a resubmission, I don’t know if that’s why we’re using that verbiage there, I think it’s why, but I would have to double check, don’t.
Rich Weissmark (11:27) Worry about it. Just seeing that column y has no null values makes me feel like this is the one we should use.
Amy Walsh (11:34) Yeah, I would agree to be honest with you. Yeah, yeah.
Rich Weissmark (11:38) So I could play around with this and I could basically show them the mean and the median and the min and the max and kind of get them to feel some level of confidence that turnaround times have improved, but it’s not a miracle. It’s.
Amy Walsh (11:53) kind of what we’re.
Rich Weissmark (11:53) going for because, you know, they’re focused… a little too much on that where I’m basically saying our other partner was deteriorating to the point where I thought they could cause like business failure. Like, so the decision to switch wasn’t just about a pathway to delegated credentialing and faster start times for providers. All those things are huge. But it was like, I think this company is going to like deteriorate… and we’re not going to have anybody.
Amy Walsh (12:26) It was kind of, yeah, do you remember your, and something that I’m trying to get ahead of more with execs especially with ones who are so willing to meet. So I appreciate it is, you know, numbers pre medallion. So you’re saying that the board is having concerns like what were you seeing with symplr? Like were you seeing a quicker turnaround time?
Rich Weissmark (12:46) No, well, keep in mind the board didn’t even know what provider enrollment was. And I mean, like they were, this has only risen to a level of interest for other for a number of other reasons.
Rich Weissmark (12:58) But the way it wasn’t managed in a very serious way before, I mean that was, you know, which you probably have heard before. They basically just told everyone it takes 90 to 120 days and we’ll get it when we get it. And I’m trying to, you know, improve upon those management approaches and say, no, no. If we start looking at the data from medallion and we start seeing trends by market and by payer, we should be able to start moving start dates up for providers. And totally the schedule like it’s just trying to make it a better managed business with data that’s what I’m after. But historically the timeframe was 90 to 120 days. I would say.
Amy Walsh (13:42) Okay. Yeah. Because even looking, it looks like we’re at 58 calendar days as our median already.
Rich Weissmark (13:47) Okay. You know what? Amy, a lot of the breakdowns before if you asked me were even pre peat like enrollment partners. So for example, like some of these link letter ones like when they’re just adding a new location for an existing provider? Yeah, those are the ones where we’re seeing an incredible speed with medallion. And I suspect we’re seeing improvement not just because of you guys have a better process but because people are not like, it’s not running through a whole bunch of other steps at the organization. Is what I’m getting at? Yeah.
Amy Walsh (14:18) Totally. That makes sense. I agree. Yeah. Okay, great. I just was curious, you know, if you were being told like six days with your previous vendor because I’d be like, okay, we got to work on this but no.
Rich Weissmark (14:32) No, these are comments really just for you. You know, I took this. Okay. Yeah, I took this job. I’m kind of a short term fixer role here like this isn’t a long, you know, I usually stay at companies many years, but like I came here to just kind of do some fixer work and this is one of them like, and so I just try to be a good partner and I’m honest. So I’m just giving them some information that’s all.
Amy Walsh (14:54) Okay, perfect. Yeah, that sounds great. Cool. Anything else on this report that you want me to show you? No?
Rich Weissmark (15:02) This is what I needed. I’m clear that you did everything I wanted help with, which was now, I know what the raw data is and I could just use the roll up and if they matched, I could use both of them in my information and I could just, I’ll do a couple little excel calculations and kind of get them off my back because when you look at some of these, I don’t know. Am I still sharing? No?
Amy Walsh (15:24) Stop sharing. Nope. Yeah.
Rich Weissmark (15:25) Let me, like I said, I’m absolutely insane today. So take it away. You’re good. We all have those days, right?
Amy Walsh (15:33) Yes.
Rich Weissmark (15:34) Like look at this like let’s just focus on the good for a sec. Like what is happening that we’re getting things in 14 days? Like that’s yeah, like sometimes you gotta, you know, catch people doing something right? As they say.
Amy Walsh (15:50) Totally. Yeah. We’ve.
Rich Weissmark (15:51) never seen an average of 20… nine happen in recent years. So, I know what I need to do now and this is all I really was looking for. So thank you for it was easier than I expected and I will confess that I probably didn’t scroll down far enough and that’s where I went awry, you’re.
Amy Walsh (16:11) so, fine on the report too, just in case you’re curious. I heard you say something about markets and payers, we do show you a breakdown of average by payer and by state too within that same dashboard on medallion in case that’s interesting to you. Yeah.
Rich Weissmark (16:26) I have it up on the screen now, which.
Amy Walsh (16:29) Can you share your screen just so I can see where you’re at? I’m.
Rich Weissmark (16:32) sorry, I’m so quick to take away access here. What’s.
Amy Walsh (16:35) going on, it’s okay. Okay. So let’s go up. I think from where you are… yep right there, payer and state, okay?
Rich Weissmark (16:47) And it’s the same endpoints that’s what I was kind of.
Amy Walsh (16:50) Exactly. Okay. So, we have the app submitted and the request completed.
Rich Weissmark (16:55) And if there’s a zero, it means we haven’t had any volume yet or it’s still, it wouldn’t be, well, why would it show? I guess the zero throws me off, but I’m not going to get hung up on the zero right now. I’m.
Amy Walsh (17:06) going to find out because I want to know for my own sake and I can follow up with you, no.
Rich Weissmark (17:10) I think I can see where it could catch you and like when people are drilling you with questions, but if it’s completed and it’s a zero, it kind of will make people question the data’s accuracy is what I was.
Amy Walsh (17:20) Thinking, no, totally. Yeah, I’ll find out about that one because I’m curious for myself. Okay, perfect. And then before we wrap, I just have a quick question for you, a product manager reached out to me and I thought I could ask you because we had this call today. She was asking me, you know, for the different sanction monitoring that we do for oig, Sam, et cetera. And PDD. So, do you happen to know? And I can direct this to Kathleen, but I’m not sure if you had any conversations internally about this or even with your industry knowledge, how these administrative folks are typically handling sanction alert review. So if they get an alert that something is, you know, not looking good on a sanction if they’re if the specialist is reviewing internally, and then someone like a medical director will make the final call on what to do about it. Like would love to hear your.
Rich Weissmark (18:13) Process, I could share a little bit. I can’t share so much about how it happens at phynet because I, that’s fine. That’s fine because like I’ve been working on so many different like opex and improvement initiatives at phynet, I’m like I’m spread pretty thin and I’m like jumping around like a maniac, but.
Amy Walsh (18:28) At other companies, yeah, that’s totally fine at.
Rich Weissmark (18:30) Other companies, I’ve seen it done quite specifically. Like most of those companies were acquisition oriented growth. And so I’d say there’s like two parts to it. There’s the… you’re acquiring a practice and you have to do primary source verification to make sure that their files are clean as part of kind of the acquisition review committee and understand if they’re not, and if they’re not, you have to bring them to a credentialing committee that’s typically organized within a group even if you don’t do delegated credentialing, good management practices or have a credentialing committee and involve physicians and unfavorable… findings. And then from an ongoing basis, once they’re like part of an organization, I’ve just seen it be done as kind of an annual monitoring process. Some people do it like once a year. And then depending on the software people are using, some people just have a job set up that does it and has kind of an event driven notice when something unfavorable pops up.
Amy Walsh (19:44) Perfect. Yeah. Good to know. Good to hear your perspective too. And do you know, like for documentation purposes, when something goes awry, I know it’s going to vary by organization, but were people operating in Google sheets, were people writing it on paper? Was it really all over the place? Like just that kind of intel too?
Rich Weissmark (20:04) Yeah. I’ve seen it from people using commercial software, whether it was verity healthstream, or dreaded… intellisoft, to home growth, larger scale organizations that actually, you know, built like on cloud products to manage data. And I guess I’ve seen some people do things in spreadsheets but it’s all over the.
Amy Walsh (20:27) Map. Yeah, makes.
Rich Weissmark (20:29) Sense. Yeah. And then, you know, if you talk to Derek again, I mean, I did follow, I had that call with him and I did send him a follow up note with some other ideas. And I’m gonna be fractional again really soon. I’m wrapping this up here. I mean, I’m gonna keep working with phynet for like several more months, maybe even longer, but like I’ve got other projects that I just need to start working on. So if you guys ever think I could be helpful to you, let me know what I talked to them about last just because you seem very engaged, which is great is, you know, ambulatory surgery centers have a whole universe of different requirements and their ownership models lend themselves to a lot of messiness. And I told him if I were like advising a medallion on where to get in the game, it would be on the asc business.
Amy Walsh (21:20) Nice. Yeah. We’re definitely trying there. I have a client based in North Carolina and they have a ton of ascs and we’re trying to get them to start to use us for the hospital application software. We offer to kind of just be speeding up those applications to the hospitals that the surgeons are working at outpatient wise. So, yeah, we have some, we definitely have room to grow there for sure. I know that’s a big initiative of Derek and the product team to figure out how we’re going to improve there. But yeah, that’s super helpful insight. And I think something that I’ve been talking on like.
Rich Weissmark (21:56) The way to think about it and then we’ll break one up here is there’s corporate asc companies that typically buy 51 or more percent of a asc and then the kind of the management burden becomes theirs and they kind of all use purpose built kind of asc management software some which have kind of a module for credentialing and that ties into kind of like getting ready for their like ambulatory, their ambulatory, credentialing, accreditation process. Excuse me. And then there’s still a ton of ascs that are owned by hospitals, own 51 percent. And then there’s a ton of independent ones where the physicians still own it or own the majority. And so it is a kind of a wild landscape but it’s big and fragmented and full of opportunity because it’s done usually very similar to like what you see in hospitals. So there’s like one person in a medical staff office and then they get sick and everything falls apart or they’re the bottom line for like a gazillion privilege. It’s just such a classic healthcare problem, you know?
Amy Walsh (23:02) Totally. Yeah, yeah, super helpful. Well, I appreciate your insight. Sure. I’m going to be just so, you know, I’m going to be out of office for a few weeks in April.
Amy Walsh (23:11) I’m actually going on my honeymoon. So, I think it’s the last time we’ll speak till I’m back, but yeah, just wanted to, you know, do one. I’m glad we were able to talk about the data and I know Naomi is working on the transition with implementation and everything. So you guys are in great hands but just wanted to give you a heads up about that, no.
Rich Weissmark (23:28) I appreciate it. This was super timely and super helpful and, you know, Kathleen doesn’t know anything about where my time will be spent elsewhere from finance or keep that between us?
Amy Walsh (23:38) Oh, yeah, absolutely. No problem. Yeah, I.
Rich Weissmark (23:40) hope you’re going somewhere special. It has to be.
Amy Walsh (23:43) Yeah, we’re going to Japan wow.
Rich Weissmark (23:45) You’re the third person in a week that’s either gotten from Japan. My neighbor’s going to Japan. I think it may be their honeymoon too, actually, and I just gave her a book to read about the culture.
Amy Walsh (23:56) That’s so nice.
Rich Weissmark (23:57) Yeah.
Amy Walsh (23:59) Enjoy it. We’re super excited. Thank you. Yes, I appreciate it. Well, I’m glad we got to connect and yeah, if you need anything, feel free to shoot me an email and I can get back to you before I head out sounds.
Rich Weissmark (24:10) Good. Thanks so much. Have a great.
Amy Walsh (24:11) Trip. All right. Thank you, rich. Bye bye.