Transcript
Josh Brunell (00:00) Ann, how are you? Sorry about the delay there? I think, hey, can you hear me okay?
Ann Martel (00:05) Yeah, I can.
Josh Brunell (00:07) Sorry about that. I saw you join the waiting room and I think I might have hit decline by mistake. I don’t know. I was sitting here kind of like I joined and I was working on my other screen and I looked back and said, and I apologize for.
Ann Martel (00:22) that, it’s all right. I’m like I can do other stuff. It’s all good.
Josh Brunell (00:25) No, all good. How’s your day going?
Ann Martel (00:28) It’s crazy because I’m leaving town tomorrow, but it’s okay.
Josh Brunell (00:32) Oh, hopefully for something good, are you going on vacation? Yeah.
Ann Martel (00:35) I’m going to Mexico for two weeks?
Josh Brunell (00:37) Nice. Where.
Ann Martel (00:38) the Mexican riviera?
Josh Brunell (00:40) Nice. I’ve never been, I’ve been to cabo, Cancun riviera is just south of Cancun, correct?
Ann Martel (00:49) It’s on the west side. So it’s like,
Josh Brunell (00:52) puerto vallarta, kind of, yeah.
Ann Martel (00:53) I’m doing a cruise throughout the whole area. So it’s a 12 day cruise. So it goes all the way around the peninsula and hits all the highlights. Hopefully I’m.
Josh Brunell (01:04) jealous. That sounds amazing. I’m in need of a vacation. I know we just had, I don’t know we first on a personal level. I’ve been, I had to move out. We had to move out of our house for a while because we had a flood. And so we were living out in an airbnb and we just like this whole week, we’ve been moving everything back into our house. And then that’s what my whole weekend was basically. So it’s like, I feel like I didn’t really actually get a weekend to relax like I usually do. But awesome. Thank you for your time today. It’s a pleasure meeting you. Yeah, josh Burnell, on the medallion side, I’m on our partnerships team and so excited to just discuss, you know, what brought you to medallion, what kind of, you know, piqued your interest, and then maybe discuss a little bit more about your role at women’s health associates, leading revcycle, and how we can best support you. Yeah.
Ann Martel (02:00) So, I’ve been here a little over a month. I’m the new director of revcycle here. Previously, I was with zoomcare and zoomcare just started a partnership with medallion before I left. So I knew a little bit about it and I reached out to the credentialing manager over there to see what her thoughts were about your partnership there. We have a very small credentialing team at women’s health. And so we have about.
Ann Martel (02:29) They have and because it’s an obgyn, women’s health care practice, they have to do credentialing as well as privileging at the, at a couple of three four hospitals in the Portland metro area. So that’s a lot of, a lot of paperwork and a lot of mundane… routine stuff.
Ann Martel (02:50) So I’m just looking for ways to help ease their burden. So, ways to maybe take some of the administrative load off of them?
Josh Brunell (02:58) Yeah. I mean, that is, yeah, that’s, our value proposition there, right? Is, is some of the things you mentioned. So taking healthcare backed office functions, automating everything from provider data management. So getting obviously and collecting all that paperwork up front from a clinician that’s going to be needed to do those downstream actions, whether it’s credentialing or privileging housing that all in a database monitoring, you know, sanction checks, license expirations, all those things are included as well as the ability to handle direct payer enrollments as well as delegated payer enrollments. Now, you said credentialing just want to kind of clarify just because, you know, everyone says credentialing kind of the broader kind of way of this process. But do you also, I imagine the team that’s doing this work today on top of the privileging piece, are they doing payer enrollments to the health plans as well?
Ann Martel (03:59) Yeah, they do direct payer enrollments. We don’t we’re not big enough to do delegated with our payers currently.
Josh Brunell (04:04) So, yeah, awesome. And then the last piece licensing, is that something that your clinicians typically do themselves? Yes. Okay. But yeah, I mean, yeah, to your point, I would love to understand. So, it’s a small team today where’s the biggest kind of bottleneck or friction point in their process based off what you’ve learned in your month or two on?
Ann Martel (04:28) The job in my very short time here.
Josh Brunell (04:30) Yeah.
Ann Martel (04:31) I think the biggest struggle they have is getting the, you know, when they have new providers, we’re constantly growing. We’re always getting new providers and we get a lot of new providers right out of med school or right before, you know, they get licensed and they join us. So we get a lot of new providers as well as people who have established in other markets. So getting the providers to provide the information in a timely manner is always a challenge. But I don’t you know, that’s a personal issue with most providers. I guess they’re busy. They don’t have time, I don’t know.
Josh Brunell (05:06) So you said a portion of them are coming out of school or residency, and then some are, you know, ones that are more tenured. Yeah. Do you find that? Are you also for the, I mean, I guess for the new ones, are you helping to create and manage like their caqh kind of profile as part of this process? Yes. And I assume that’s a pretty daunting task when you have 140 providers or clinicians and then you’re doing quarterly attestations on their behalf as well?
Ann Martel (05:44) Correct. Yeah.
Josh Brunell (05:46) So a big piece on that we help organizations save when it comes to collecting that provider data. So you’re not having to be as reliant on the clinicians getting you the paperwork up front is that we do have a proprietary relationship with caqh that’s a little unique than some of the other vendors in our space, and that we have, we can link their caqh profile with medallion. And then medallion becomes a single source of truth. So that one, we can import all that data over. So say we create a profile for one of your clinicians that just started. We link it to caqh instead of you sending a welcome packet asking for 20 documents for the provider. We import a lot of what’s in there because we know that most payers need that up to date to submit enrollment applications. Yeah, we pull all that in and say we have 80 90 percent of what we need all we then need the provider to do at that point is attest that the information is accurate. Maybe, hey, we might need an updated license or whatever, maybe a single kind of task from there. So you’re starting ahead of the curve opposed to just asking for everything at once. Probably happening by HR. It’s probably happening by the credentialing team, right? Yeah. It gives a better experience for the provider, but also just helps get the enrollments out the door faster. So that’s one of the ways we automate that process. We also have the ability to kind of use other technology too if they don’t have caqh to get data into medallion more quickly, kind of like a QR Code type technology. They just take a, they literally take a picture of their phone of any documents, automatically links it to the medallion profile and ports all that information over. So you’re not having to copy and paste all that, do all that document management as well. So a few different ways, typically, the process that we see like… on the, from a current state standpoint, is that process could take anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks to chase down that info. And we’re typically able to get that in just about an hour or two… on the… so that’s kind of like the front end of the process. Are there any kind of challenging payers or follow up issues or things that are happening downstream that, or maybe it’s just a kind of bandwidth issue of like keeping track of everything is, what are some other things that, you would hope that the team’s looking to improve… you know?
Ann Martel (08:12) I think most of the payer issues have been resolved. There were a couple that were outstanding, but I think most of them have been resolved with the credentialing manager meeting with some of the payers individually. I think, you know, they have lots of different things they need to track and manage like, their BLS certificates and things like that. It’s and different payers have different requirements and it’s just keeping track of what each payer needs and each payer needs… wants. So, I think that’s just the biggest bandwidth is they have lots of manual processes to track everything right now.
Josh Brunell (08:50) Are they all tracking them in spreadsheets? Yeah. Okay. Real quick. Before I keep going here, do you have a couple more minutes or a hard stop at this time?
Ann Martel (09:00) I have a couple more minutes, okay?
Josh Brunell (09:04) On the payer side, so, yeah, we see it often spreadsheets being used to track the process. Obviously payer requirements can change and vary quite often. And so, what, one thing that is unique about medallion is that we have the concept of like payer process guide. So we do the research upfront. We have a whole research team that will essentially say, hey, these are all, the things that we need to have a clean application for. I don’t know. Let’s just say united healthcare, you know, so we have that built into the medallion platform. And anytime we’re about to submit an application, say we’re missing a piece of data that, you know, is not aligned with that clean application, then we actually won’t, let you submit it. So that there’s no, you know, application that gets bounced back and then delay in the process. So, yeah, that’s one thing that we’ll take off the team’s plate is like having to try to keep up with all those requirements. It’s all built into the platform. Same when it goes to like actually submitting the applications like instead of copy and pasting or kind of filling it out manually on a payr portal. We actually use robotic process automation to just take whatever is on the medallion profile and automatically send that to. It could be a, you could do a bulk essentially, hey, we got this new provider. I want to do a bulk request of having all these enrollments done up front and our automation will take it from there. So a lot of different areas I could imagine could help the team from a capacity standpoint, you mentioned there’s one credentialing kind of manager. Does she oversee like a team of people or just her?
Ann Martel (10:44) So, there’s one manager, and then there’s a team of four below her.
Josh Brunell (10:48) Okay. Yeah. I mean, I know we’re short on time here but would love to continue the discussion and maybe even set up a demo where I bring in my solutions consultant to walk you through it end to end and kind of get your feedback and see if it makes sense to loop them in as well to the discussion.
Josh Brunell (11:05) But, yeah… sorry, I know that these, when you book these meetings through our website, it only does like these 15 minute blocks I’m available for more time if needed, but I just want to be respectful of your time as well. Yeah.
Ann Martel (11:21) Let me look at my calendar real quick. I just have so much to do before the end of the day.
Josh Brunell (11:24) That’s my problem. Yeah, I feel you. And so, yeah, I want to be respectful of that. So you can let’s.
Ann Martel (11:32) try and schedule some more time. When, I’m back the week of the twentieth. Okay. So anytime after looks like the twentieth, I’m pretty… book solid. I’m like look at that. Someone puts like a five hour meeting on my afternoon. I’m like, okay, then I’m like what’s going on there?
Josh Brunell (11:52) Are you in Oregon? I.
Ann Martel (11:54) am in Oregon? Yes. Okay.
Josh Brunell (11:57) Yeah. Let’s do, would the 20 first work?
Ann Martel (12:00) Let me look at that real quick. I’m just so shocked at the twentieth. I was like it just turned off my head. Looks like I’m pretty booked. So the 20 second would be the first day that I have time and it looks like it’s in the afternoon.
Josh Brunell (12:11) Okay. Yeah, we could do noon or one o’clock let’s.
Ann Martel (12:16) Do one? Okay?
Josh Brunell (12:19) And just to make sure we’re aligned on the agenda, do you want to reconnect for a call with my solutions consultant? And we walk through a demo and then we bring in the broader team from there.
Ann Martel (12:31) Yeah. Let’s do a quick demo for me and then I will, if it’s something I want to continue on, I will bring in the manager sweet.
Josh Brunell (12:40) Sounds good. I’ll get this invite sent out on Wednesday. In the meantime, I’ll send you some content as well around some of the like some customer case studies I think can maybe align with your current size situation and challenges and how we’re able to solve them. Any other kind of pressing questions you have related to medallion or things that I could help with while I have you.
Ann Martel (13:02) Not right now. I’m just, it’s very preliminary looking into it. She was my manager was like, I really need more people and I’m like, do you really need more people or can we find a different solution? So, I’m just so at the very beginning of the discussion of what I want to do for the credentialing team. So, I’m just starting to research things out right now.
Josh Brunell (13:21) Okay, perfect. Yeah. And our mission really is just to allow just like one or two operators to handle on limited scale. So, yeah, that capacity issue won’t be an issue anymore, hopefully. So, yeah, I’ll get this sent over and appreciate you guys meeting with me for a few. I hope you enjoy your vacation. I’m very jealous. I’m.
Ann Martel (13:45) sure, I will please.
Josh Brunell (13:46) Unplug and have a good time and we’ll talk on the 20 second.
Ann Martel (13:50) Thanks so much. Bye bye.