Transcript
Hassan Zahir (00:00) morning. Good morning. I’m coming off of a back to back. So I need you to buy me five minutes of time to set this demo up. You got it. Thank you.
Cliff Marg (01:43) All right. She just joined. I’m gonna let her in but I’ll get… a little chatter going all.
Hassan Zahir (01:50) Right. Thank you, sir.
Cliff Marg (02:01) Hi Mandy. Hey… how are you? How’s your day going? It’s been?
Amanda Hedrick (02:07) Busy, but I’m off after 12 o’clock so, remind.
Cliff Marg (02:11) Me, are you on the east coast?
Amanda Hedrick (02:14) Central Time?
Cliff Marg (02:15) Central? Okay. I mean, so it’s still morning? Yes. Okay. Lovely. Well, yeah, thanks, for hopping on. I mean, we have, we both work for five minutes for today. We’re trying to stay closer to the minutes mark, but just want to do a quick time check. I.
Amanda Hedrick (02:35) Only have 30 minutes, so I don’t know if we can squeeze it into that. Okay?
Hassan Zahir (02:42) Yeah, we’ll make it work. Let’s do.
Cliff Marg (02:44) It let’s do it. Yeah. So 30 minutes… no problem. Just to kind of quickly recap conversation from the other week. And then, you know, I’m gonna hand it to Hassan and we’ll kind of jump into the demo but it sounds like today, you know, just in terms of like the telehealth business unit, credentialing is really kind of done separately and kind of operates independently.
Cliff Marg (03:08) You’ve got, you know, two people that are kind of managing processes somewhat manual for about 75, up to maybe 100 providers. I think in terms of challenge as I was kind of relisting to the call, I think all in all, what you said was like, you know, the process is going well, just kind of big picture. The biggest bottleneck you mentioned was like mainly on the provider side anytime you need like a new signature from them, you mentioned, you know, for like getting you had a day where you had like a notary come on site, and help them with their, get their fingerprints done. So, I think our goal for today is to really walk you through the medallion process from the perspective of like, how can we reduce some of that provider abrasion? How can we automate just the ability to like pull in as much as many documents from the providers as possible? And then just specifically, kind of ask them for the, a couple of things? Right? Like there’s no, there’s really no magic bullet. There’s always going to be those kind of times where we do need some engagement from, the providers. But our goal is like, how do we, how do we minimize that? And then, you know, how do we make it easy for the two ftes on your team to, yeah, gather what they need and then get these applications out to, you know, the multiple health systems that you all are partnering with? That sound right? Exactly. Okay. Cool. So, I’m gonna hand it to Hassan. We’ll jump into the product. I think our only goal really Mandy is just to get some of your candid feedback, it in terms of like where you think it could be helpful. And then like if you think this moves the needle enough to warrant further conversations or not, and, we’re not attached to any outcome, totally open to your candor. Perfect. Sounds good. Okay.
Hassan Zahir (05:00) And so, Mandy, we’ll just kind of go high level. We got 30 minutes. We won’t be able to really get into the weeds, but I think you’ll be able to get a feel for the platform and make a decision like, hey, is this something where it’s worth us jointly burning calories on love, the Easter egg background by the way, April, feeling like spring. So figured I’d share that and let me go ahead and share my screen.
Hassan Zahir (05:30) And what you’re looking at is the medallion platform. You can see my platform. Okay, thumbs up, maybe Mandy, since you’re on mute. Okay, perfect. And so what we’re looking at is the medallion platform. Medallion is designed to be the single pane of glass to be able to get this provider data in here, really reduce that provider abrasion, give the providers a portal and then give you like really increase visibility into what’s going on from that onboarding process. And then have a complete profile for any of those downstream workflows, right? So whether it is, I know there’s like 40 different sites and mapping the information and tracking that, and getting those applications out the door, or managing the license of the providers, whatever the case may be, we want you to be able to do that from a single pane of glass while giving increased visibility. And so that starts with getting the providers into the system steady state is kind of what we’re going to look at. I want to highlight the fact that we can pull existing data and really from any source, we have our standard import template. So all existing data, we’ll be able to pull that in new providers. We can pull data in through via a couple of methods. I’m going to kind of start with let’s imagine a new provider starting. I’ll say let’s say it’s a, you know, a cohort of providers, or maybe it’s two providers, maybe even a single provider. We can do that in a couple of different ways. First and foremost, we can do a bulk caqh import. But generally, what happens is we give them access to the provider portal through medallion and expedites the process and really gives them the ability, to log in to log in one time, provide all of the information one time that’s going to be needed downstream because we can map out all of those requirements and onboarding like you onboarding you onto medallion. So they get kind of a cohesive and really smooth experience. I’m not quite sure what that looks like today. But with medallion, you would log into the platform and you would make an invite to the provider, five simple pieces of information, first name, last name, email, address, their start date, and their profession. Obviously the start date. We want to know how close we’re getting with the work that needs to be done on their behalf, to when they’re expected to start. And then obviously their profession dictates what the various requirements are for any of the downstream workflows. Be that licensing license renewal, credentialing enrollment, whatever the case may be. But really easy to invite a member. You would come in, populate that information and it’s going to send them an email that doesn’t look too dissimilar from this. Essentially, they’re going to say, you’re partnering with medallion to really simplify and expedite this process, lets them know who we are. So when they start saying medallion, they understand that medallion is working as a partner or really of an extension of ochsner, in this case, to be able to get us going through this process, they’ll click through it’ll, tell them they’re partnering with us, allow them to kind of click through and get their profile set up. You’ll see here, this is where the medallion automation really starts to kick in, not quite in hybrid gear yet. But this is where the automation starts to kick in. We are a participating organization. The only platform… organization in the space that’s a participating org with caqh. And so what it allows us to do is to pull in their caqh information directly into their provider profile. Super important down the road, if medallion was helping with like payer enrollment or something like that, because you ensure parity between what’s in the medallion platform and what’s in caqh. Because we have a direct integration. We’re also the only ones who can update caqh so not only can we update caqh, but we can attest to the product provider’s profile. They’ve got that 120 day schedule. We’ll do that every 90 days to make sure that they’re compliant, but we can pull down all of that information and really start getting that provider’s profile completed. Medallion also has the ability to extract data from documents way too often. And I’m sure this is something that you see, I hope maybe you don’t see it as much but I’m sure everyone sees it. It’s like we ask providers for documents and then we ask them for the same information that’s on those documents. And it’s like, hey, well, if I give giving you this document, why can’t you guys do it? And so with medallion, we’re able to extract the data from those documents and use that to complete their profiles, and then use that to complete these downstream workflows. Whether that’s an application to one of the sites where they need to get privileges at, or a license application, and a direct enrollment application, whatever the case may be. And then the providers can also fill out their profiles manually. When they go to caqh, they’ll put in the information. So the caqh id social their last name, and then we run a pre check to verify that this provider does exist and has a profile in caqh and that has been recently attested to. If it hasn’t then this verification fails. We let them know that they need to attest to their caqh profile before we can pull the data in. But now we’re getting so much of the information that’s going to be needed that we’re you know, we’re reducing the amount of data we’re going to have to ask the provider for from this large swath of data to really like a focused amount of data based upon, you know, the applications that they’re going to need to complete. A lot of me talking. I know I’m trying to go quickly because we’re short on time, but just curious here, Amanda, is that making sense as far as like how we’re doing this process?
Amanda Hedrick (11:11) Yeah. I would say the only concern like I have is that the like right now for the providers when we’re doing like our external sites, like they don’t complete anything, they like, my team completes it for them and then they just sign. So to ask them then to like do anything is probably like going to be another whole challenge. So, so.
Hassan Zahir (11:38) That’s fair. And I’m glad that you shared that because we also have the ability, as I was saying, we have the ability to where we could do this a couple of different ways. So first and foremost, we can create this process. We don’t have to send an invitation email out to the provider. So they still will ultimately have that portal where they need to go in and attest to the data being correct. They’ll have a profile that’s created. And as opposed to sending them an email, it’ll create a shale profile. We would also then request their mpi and their caqh id. And then we could come in and we could say actually even without the provider’s interaction, start the bulk import and pull down all of their data from caqh. The difference here is like if it fails and we don’t have all of the data for a provider, then the follow up becomes a little bit different because we’ll see there was an unexpected error. There’s a connection error. And that just means that they don’t have a profile or the profile wasn’t complete. If they do have updated and complete profiles, we’ll pull all of this data down and all they have to do at that point in time is attest to the information being correct. So we actually could run it in the same way that you run it today. Your administrator would then have to perform some kind of outreach if a provider doesn’t have to have an up to date caqh profile. I’m curious what does that look like today? Providers hand off until it’s time to sign. How are you capturing the data? How are you getting that information from them today?
Amanda Hedrick (13:19) So, most of the stuff they’re doing it initially within our mdstaff, like within our central office. And so all that information is within the mdstaff, but we can’t just like export it from there. So they go in there, take the information that’s in the mdstaff and then use it to complete the applications for the external.
Hassan Zahir (13:39) Partners and what platform are you using for your mdstaff credentialing today.
Amanda Hedrick (13:44) Oh, okay. It’s I mean, I thought it was called medstaff. I’ll bet it’s, mdstaff. Yeah, that’s it. All right. Yep.
Hassan Zahir (13:54) Okay. So, mdstaff, and then that data, your team is manually getting that data. Yeah.
Amanda Hedrick (14:00) So, they go into the provider’s profile and then that’s where like there’s like a lot of their stuff is already uploaded like, you know, license. And some things, they’re able to pull other things they have to request. And then we have a folder for them that just keeps all the information stored in one place once we get everything we need from them. But yeah, they’re pulling that information from mdstaff. Sorry.
Hassan Zahir (14:23) Okay. I’m close, no worries. Mdstaff and mdstaff, like the departments are called mdstaff sometimes, but then they’re using an application for mdstaff. So it’s like, trust me, that was just me trying to make sure I was clear a couple of different things can happen there. First. Medallion does have a bi directional API. I’m not familiar enough with mdstaff to know if they’ve got a bi directional API, but medallion has the ability to push and pull information out of any system. The fact that we have the caqh integration though means we still can operate independently of mdstaff, and we can pull down everything from caqh admin would then go into the provider’s profile and they would complete that profile on behalf of the provider. So your admin would still go in. Obviously the goal or the intent. The ideal way is that we’re automating as much of this as possible to reduce people admin’s needing to go in and manually do it. The challenge that comes about when you’re performing work manually is errors of omission, copying the wrong thing, missing something like having to go back and forth so that’s a conversation we could have later. If what you see afterwards is appealing to you. The goal of medallion is to reduce the amount of manual information that has to be brought in. Again, in the instance that I showed you, the provider would essentially say, hey, this is my caqh id. This is my information and the provider could upload it. If you’re trying to reduce that abrasion. Then the connection could occur from an admin. We could do the bulk import of data. And then from there, the admin could come in and capture that data. Ultimately, the goal is that we end up with a provider profile that is essentially completed to the point where we have the basic information, we have all of their personal information that’s in here, their professional history, all of their license information, certifications, all of the data that’s required in order for you to complete these applications on their behalf. And what they simply do is they would log in that first time and they would attest to the information being correct. Allow us to potentially update caqh. If we were going to do caqh management to make sure that there’s parity between what’s in caqh and what’s in medallion. If your med staff team is doing that today, then that wouldn’t necessarily be a requirement but the provider just comes in signs and they would just come in and accept that. Do? Want to highlight the fact that we also have like mobile capability. So we make it easy. We have a task based system where we can perform outreach via SMS messages as well. And so we would be able to go in and I can say, okay, this task needs to be completed or this access station needs to be completed, and we could perform that task for them as well. I would go into these agreements and then just use my finger and sign… the attestation. But ultimately, what happens is the provider comes in, they save it, save and finish their profile is now complete. And once their profile is complete, we can perform any of those. We can perform any of those downstream workflows on their behalf because they have a completed profile. So.
Amanda Hedrick (17:57) I guess my question would be then what happens? So, okay, we get 15 applications from all these different organizations, what happens next?
Hassan Zahir (18:06) And so now it’s like how do we get these provider, the provider profile data onto these applications? Yeah. And so what happens is from medallion, you would make a request in the platform within medallion and I’ll show you essentially how that works. And so medallion’s privileging platform supports both getting internal privileges and completing what we call hospital applications or third party care site applications. You would make a request for the initial appointment… and then we would choose who that initial appointment is going to be for. And when you’re making these requests, since this is essentially just one of the hospitals or one of the locations within the system, tell me a little as I click through that I want to understand like a little bit more about what all is required. Are you completing the application only? Are you completing the application including psvs? Are you, like, what does that process look like for you?
Amanda Hedrick (19:05) So, like if it’s so one of our external partners that we provide services to, they’re typically sending an electronic application and they’re putting, you know, filling it out, probably all the same things, you know, like, you know, npi personal… information, like licenses, you know, board certification, you know, like all the typical things that have to go on it. And then depending on which organization it is like, they want certain documents included as part of that application. So whether it’s their diploma, their board certificate, like all the things. So then they’re sending that as well, with the applications. Yep. Perfect.
Hassan Zahir (19:57) And so that’s how it would work with medallion is, let me try to choose one of these. We would choose who, whichever entity it is that provider needs to get an application completed for you can see anytime that it’s like not there home site or whatever the case may be. It’s going to say, hey, this is a partner. So I need to complete a partner’s application, and we’re going to completely fill out the app as known as like a direct application in the medallion system. And so we’re going to say, hey, this is this application that needs to be completed. Now, behind the scenes, medallion keeps a mapping of those applications. And what we do is we translate, we map the data from the provider’s profile to the application. And we can do that whether it’s a direct partner app, or if this is like one of those one time links at ochsner, are there any of those one time links? Does a provider get a one time link? And then they follow that link and complete an online application or are these generally like predefined applications?
Amanda Hedrick (20:57) Yeah, there is oftentimes where they have to go to a link and then log in or create an account and do all that again and again. Yeah.
Hassan Zahir (21:07) And so, medallion, in most instances that we’re doing this for they get the one time link the account has to be created. And so what the process looks like in medallion is the one time link is created, the provider and their profile or the admin and the provider’s profile, puts that in under external accounts. I’ll jump there and then just jump back here really quickly. In any provider’s profile, we track what’s known as an external account that’s where we securely save like the username and password for a provider to then be able to take some form of action on their behalf. We would store it under and I’m jumping through here. I probably could have just jumped. No, you’re fine. We store that under external accounts. And now my laptop wants to freeze nothing like a demo on April fool’s day. We store that information under external accounts. And under external accounts is where we, that’s where we normally save like the caqh information. It’s like the username and password to update caqh that’s where we would save like licensing board, usernames, passwords, all those sorts of things. We would do the same thing… for when we’re submitting that initial application. So we store that information. I just say that to say that we make the request, we choose who the appointment is going to be with or what hospital that’s going to be with. We’ll track all of their information. We’ll… make the request. We’ll choose like how many of these places that we need to be able to make that request for we can do it, you know, for however many that they’re going to be partnered with. That could be, you know, one, two, three, four, five 30. I’m probably guessing on average like each provider’s probably not more than like seven sites that they would be completing applications for. But you’re looking at me like Hasan, you’re crazy. It’s way more here.
Amanda Hedrick (23:12) Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot, it’s I mean, for like our telestroke providers, we have a network of 55 hospitals. And now probably half of those are internal. So like not relevant here. But I mean, probably the other 20 25 would be… okay.
Hassan Zahir (23:29) So a significant amount nonetheless, you would be able to choose all of those entities where applications are needed to be completed for medallion is then going to say, hey, these are in progress. So these are all providers who all need applications completed for these entities. We are going to do this and you’ll be able to say like, okay, these are all of the partner sites where an initial appointment needs to occur. We’re going to map the application the prior to data to the application. I can show you on the subsequent demo, just how we do that form mapping or how we do kind of mapping to a portal. But I know I’ve only got five minutes left right now. And so what we do is we map that information and then we’ll track like, are there any additional pieces of documentation or data that needs to be requested? That request will go out? It’s going to go out on behalf of the provider. So the provider will get a notification, but also the admin will get a notification. So the admin could go and get that data especially if it already exists in mdstaff. This is like if we needed to include like psvs, then we could include psvs. In this case, there’s not going to be a committee for these initial appointments because this is a third party application. But what we will do is we will perform the follow up. I’m not quite sure what my computer is doing. We will perform the follow up with that site until we’re notified that those privileges have been approved by the third party site. We’ll update the medallion platform automatically and then indicate… yeah, I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what my computer’s doing, but I’ll show you this here. Momentarily. We’ll track through the application submission to the third party site. Medallion will perform the outreach. We’ll add any notes if anything is coming back from those systems or from those partners as they update their systems. And we’ll update it in medallion and show you all the way until all of those privileges have been completed. And then what we’ll do is we’ll have kind of like the lookup available to you again. I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what’s happening with this demo environment. We’ll have those available to you for a lookup. So essentially, what happens is we get the provider’s profile complete. Once the profile is complete, we’ll auto map from the provider’s profile to those applications. We’ll do the subsequent follow up with those third party sites, until those initial privileges have been issued. Once those have been issued. We make them available for you to be able to view and track in medallion. And then you can always go and do any kind of lookup on which providers have privileges at which third party sites. And that is the end to end workflow. Again, I’ve got to apologize for what happened.
Amanda Hedrick (26:19) Here it happened. I live in technology. I totally understand.
Hassan Zahir (26:25) And so that’s essentially how it happens with medallion, it would be unique in this instance because you’re utilizing MD-Staff. And so as opposed to it just being like an initial onboarding a lot of times for our customers, we onboard them through medallion because then they have their own portal. They can upload all of their documents like directly. They don’t have to interact with like a person, we can capture everything. And then we push those documents out to other systems with MD-Staff being the front door because you’re doing your med staff credentialing first. What we could do is we could still pull down all of the data from caqh. We could get 70 to 80 percent of what’s going to be needed and admin could get the rest of the data from MD-Staff and upload it into medallion or more realistically, we will want to talk to the technology team and see if we can’t just get an integration into MD-Staff so that there’s no longer a need for manual work. Like we should be able to just grab those documents from MD-Staff, grab the data from MD-Staff programmatically. And then your team is simply at that point in time just making a request. They would go on like I said, choose the provider, choose the partner sites. Medallion maps the information from the profile to the application. Medallion submits the application and performs the follow up until those initial privileges have been achieved. When those have been achieved, it’s documented in the system. And the medallion provides that data available to you in a privileges lookup.
Amanda Hedrick (27:51) okay. This is very interesting. I mean, I feel like y’all, definitely have a well oiled machine here. Like I said, you know, these are conversations I would definitely have to have with our leadership. And, you know, understanding, you know, we kind of talked a little bit about the cost last time, but how that would, you know, impact like our current fte situation. And if, you know, it’s something we wanted to do. So, you know, I think I’m not opposed to additional conversations, but I think I’ll probably need to, you know, bring this to them first and just kind of get some feedback on what their thoughts are as well.
Cliff Marg (28:31) Yeah, totally fair.
Hassan Zahir (28:34) I think.
Cliff Marg (28:35) Like typically, from our perspective, when we’re thinking about, you know, does this make sense for any company we’re working with? It’s? Typically like two things. One of two things has to be true. One is like the number of ftes that they have today, you know, they would look at downsizing or if they’re like, hey, our growth is going to get so crazy. We have to bring on another two ftes over whatever period of time or there’s some sort of pain point around like, you know, lost revenue due to in this case, like errors in the hospital application process or something like that. So it doesn’t sound like either of those are like super like in your face issues right now. So, I think, you know, we can leave you with some follow up information, Mandy. And like if in the future, this becomes more challenging, more burdensome growth is outpacing, you know, current capacity like we’d love to reconnect.
Amanda Hedrick (29:28) One of my team members keeps threatening to retire in four years. So I may you.
Cliff Marg (29:33) Know, I,
Amanda Hedrick (29:33) may need to consider that. Yeah.
Cliff Marg (29:36) It happens and it’s hard to replace them unfortunately and she will.
Amanda Hedrick (29:39) Be irreplaceable, no doubt.
Cliff Marg (29:42) Irreplaceable. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Okay. So we can stay in touch via email in the coming months or years, and if it seems like it’s worth continuing, just let us know.
Amanda Hedrick (29:54) All right. Thank you all so much. I appreciate your time. Yeah.
Cliff Marg (29:57) Likewise. Thanks, Mandy. Thanks bye.