Transcript
Jaz Kemp (00:00) hey, Nicolle?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (00:01) Hey.
Jaz Kemp (00:02) How are you?
Nicolle Hepp (00:03) I’m good. How are you doing?
Jaz Kemp (00:07) I’m good. I had the day trip to SF yesterday. Nice. I’m recovering because it was low key, brutal I had, I was delayed like, I mean, you know, this, you’re flying so much this month. I was delayed like twice like, I mean, I, so I like took the early flight because the director didn’t tell me the time because it’s Ea’s, hours, things a little bit more like he’s just like, you know, like managing a lot more.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (00:33) So.
Jaz Kemp (00:34) Like I woke up at like five 30 but then I got delayed. So I was like, at, luckily, I went to the lounge, so I was able to work there, but like I didn’t get into SF until like… 11. Yeah.
Nicolle Hepp (00:48) That’s a long time. What were you doing there?
Jaz Kemp (00:50) I did headshots because we hired like Aaron, Leah, needed one, Amanda and Keith.
Nicolle Hepp (00:59) So nice. Yeah, that.
Jaz Kemp (01:02) Was cool. I mean, I saw everyone for a quick second. And then I was like in the other room making cold calls.
Nicolle Hepp (01:07) And then you flew back that night last night?
Jaz Kemp (01:10) No, literally. Like I went. And then I took the five o’clock so, I like left the office at like three 30, but then it got delayed. So we were on the runway for like over an hour. So it was longer than my flight. Ugh. Yeah, the worst, it’s just like I was like, this is a vibe kill. That’s.
Nicolle Hepp (01:31) a long day.
Jaz Kemp (01:32) Yeah. So, okay. But anyway, I need to edit the photos this weekend actually.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (01:45) Hi, good afternoon. Hi.
Nicolle Hepp (01:47) Dr. Harrop. How are you? I’m.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (01:49) good. How are you?
Nicolle Hepp (01:50) I’m great. Thanks for joining. Yeah.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (01:52) Thanks for having time. This was… a very fast response time, so I greatly appreciate it.
Nicolle Hepp (02:01) Yeah, of course. Glad we could meet today. Well, I’m Nicolle, malkery, I’m on the partnerships development team and my colleague jazz is here to shadow today’s, call as well.
Nicolle Hepp (02:10) Good morning. But we just have 15 minutes here today. It’s just gonna be a very high level call. Yes. Really, the goal is to understand your needs with any website inquiry. We like to hear exactly what you’re looking for, and then I’ll be able to provide a brief overview of medallion, sure. If everything is aligned then I’ll be able to pass you through for a 30 minute deeper dive at a later date.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (02:30) So, great. Okay. Yeah. So, jefferson health is a 32 hospital health system in the greater Philadelphia area. We are large. We just underwent a essentially doubling of our size from a roughly 16 hospitals to 32 with a merger with lehigh valley health network. And in doing so, you know, really have an effort underway to do some standardization around our medical staff offices. We have embarked on a pilot this past year, not on a pilot on a plan with a vendor this past year, with the goals to streamline and increase efficiency as far as the onboarding credentialing privilege. Sorry, privileging credentialing and re… credentialing process with both the hospitals and the payers, as when we join lehigh valley, they have one medical staff office and we have 16. So, lehigh valley utilizes credentialstream as their, as one of their platforms for delineation of privileges. And we use Symplr as our, for Symplr and, or Healthstream depending on which side of the lehigh valley uses Healthstream, legacy, jefferson uses Symplr. And we’re ready, we’re readying ourselves for an implementation of credentialstream. The process has been incredibly laborious and we understand that by the end of June, we will have a standard application for privileges that’ll work across any of our hospitals. But we are looking really for the next step. You know, and one of my colleagues this morning suggested I take a look at medallion. We do not have a central verification office. We have, you know, we really honestly are just been working with a outside consultant to standardize the application process and get credentialstream implemented. And in terms of a plan beyond that, we don’t have one and we need one. So would like to understand how medallion could potentially… interface with any of the products we have currently replace any of the products we have currently and assist us with our goals. And ultimately, our goals are to be able to flex staff from site to site and also speed up the, or optimize, shall we say the initial onboarding process?
Nicolle Hepp (05:35) Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that context. That was super helpful. And I’m actually from the Philadelphia area myself. Oh, are you? Yeah, I live in Dallas right now, but I grew up in New Jersey. So, oh, there.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (05:45) You go.
Nicolle Hepp (05:46) Super familiar. Yeah, and exciting to hear that you guys merged with lehigh valley certainly going to experience a lot of growth there.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (05:55) Yes, yeah.
Nicolle Hepp (05:57) And we hear this often where there’s transitional periods where you’re merging systems and vendors, and there’s certainly an opportunity to look at streamlining processes during these transitions.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (06:09) So you,
Nicolle Hepp (06:11) mentioned it’s 32 hospitals. Do you know about how many providers you guys currently manage?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (06:17) Well, yes, we’re about 3,000 advanced practice clinicians and about almost 5,000 physicians.
Nicolle Hepp (06:25) Okay, great. 3,000.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (06:27) Yeah. So advanced practice clinicians being our pas, our physician’s assistants, certified, nurse anesthetists, and our nurse practitioners.
Nicolle Hepp (06:39) Okay. Super helpful. And at this stage, are you guys doing a full evaluation? Like is this going to be an ongoing project or are you more like information gathering right now? Where are you hearing guidance on?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (06:56) This? So we’re as I mentioned, we are in the process of standardizing our application. So it has involved going around to each individual med staff and say, getting a group of colorectal surgeons together from across our enterprise and saying, okay guys as colorectal surgeons, what do you need from a privileging standpoint? What do you need to have on that application? And it’s herding cats and getting everybody to define, okay, this is what we need and then moving forward and we’re doing that on a specialty by specialty basis so that by the thirtieth, we will have one standard application completed. What, you know, when I was poking around with medallion, you know, I certainly saw some of the pieces that were missing which is a central verification office, a cvo. We don’t have that process in place. We haven’t we know we need a process like that. We’ve recently run into problems with understanding that people lost their board privileges and we weren’t notified. So I was very interested in your kind of change in status, you know, that you’ve you advertise. So there are bits and pieces that I think medallion has to offer that we’re certainly very interested in. I guess what I need to know is like, what are you guys capable of? You know, what’s the, you know, I see you’re partnered with some large systems and it’s really an overview that more than what I can get on your webpage that I’m interested in. Yeah, for.
Nicolle Hepp (08:39) Sure. Yeah. And medallion is a ncqa certified cvo organization? Okay? So we do handle delegated credentialing agreements and credentialing of all sorts for most of our customers to date. Great. Are you guys, do you follow joint commission or ncqa both?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (08:59) Okay. Ncqa for our legacy, lehigh valley, and joint commission, but just joint commission on the legacy jefferson side. Great.
Nicolle Hepp (09:12) And I’ll get into an overview in just a minute. But when you talk about the challenges with the existing vendors, is it a pretty manual process? Are they automating any work? You mentioned that there’s maybe a gap with letting you know, people aren’t in compliance. So curious like how their platform is working and where there’s room to improve.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (09:34) Sure. So truthfully, so I’m at a senior executive level, so I can tell you that we are implementing Healthstream. Where what Healthstream has in comparison to medallion, I’m not quite sure but what I can tell you it’s a very manual data entry process and it’s and it does not have the central verification piece yet. Could they provide it in the future? I don’t know but certainly would love to know in comparison to Healthstream, what do you offer that’s more?
Nicolle Hepp (10:14) Absolutely. Yeah. And we do get a lot of initial customers that started with Healthstream and they experience the kind of challenges you just described. I’ve also heard about really long implementation timelines which I believe you mentioned initially so certainly a common challenge. Well, I guess I can let you know where medallion is more unique. So medallion does perform the processes that you mentioned. So we even do medical state licensure, ncqa, credentialing files all the way through to privileging and payer enrollment. And we provide all of this in our platform. So where we differ is where Healthstream and other vendors might be more of just a self service platform where they say, hey, jefferson build your own team, use our platform, but we can’t really… give you guys the outcomes it’s really on your own team. So medallion is different where we do have the platform in place, but we also have our own operational teams in house as well. So we can really guarantee things like speed accuracy, turnaround times. And with the software, we’ve been able to automate about 80 percent of these existing workflows. Yes. So eliminating a lot of that manual work for your teams and really just ensuring compliance throughout the entire process. So where we rely on your teams is to let us know, hey, we have these new providers joining, they need to be appointed privileges here, join with certain payers, and then medallion will actually finish out the rest of that workflow. Okay? And.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (11:56) Then on average, like can, you know, we always say like it’s about 90 days to get payer credentialed for with the vais, payers for our new hires? Does medallion ever, does it have an ability to shorten that process? You know, because you have the delegated option or talk to me through that?
Nicolle Hepp (12:19) Absolutely. Yeah. So we typically see for direct enrollments from your starting point, we shrink it. Each payer is different. So we can typically shrink that by about 45 days. Wow. So if you’re already at 90 days, you know, cutting that time in half with the delegated piece that’s where you can have the quickest turnaround. So because we are a cvo for these payers and we actually have payers as our clients as well. So we know what they’re looking for and they trust us. I saw.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (12:46) That, yeah.
Nicolle Hepp (12:47) Right. Exactly. So with that, we can turn out a credentialing file right now. Our average is under one day.
Nicolle Hepp (12:55) So it really just depends when your committee would meet, but, you know, the quickest turnaround there could be three days or just.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (13:02) A few days. Yeah, that’s this is what we’re looking for and we’re also looking for as you can imagine. I mean, I can say it in this setting like we’ve got at least 16 or 17 individual med staff offices and the staff that comes with that. And so, how can we leverage our scale and produce a product that requires less staff?
Nicolle Hepp (13:29) Exactly, you know, it’s.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (13:32) truthful to.
Nicolle Hepp (13:33) Say that, yeah, for sure. And medallion we scale with you guys. So that’s really our entire goal is, how can you do more with less?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (13:41) Okay.
Nicolle Hepp (13:43) Yeah. How many people do you have? Do you know, you?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (13:46) Know what? I’d have to find out. I don’t know off the top of my head. I mean, I’m really just, I’m involved at the executive sponsorship level which, and I oversee just the vendor, the consultant that’s helping us establish the common application.
Nicolle Hepp (14:04) Yep. Makes sense. Well, do you have any outstanding questions or I’d be happy to book you on that next 30 minute deeper dive. I know we’re just coming up at 15 minutes, but I think it would be.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (14:15) Worth it. I’d love to do a deeper dive and I’d love to bring some folks with me.
Nicolle Hepp (14:19) Absolutely. When would be best? We are actually doing an off site for early next week. So, I’m thinking the earliest we could do would be next Thursday or Friday, which would be April sixteenth or we could even look at the following week.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (14:35) Are you guys going to be at amga at all?
Nicolle Hepp (14:39) I’m not sure where is that one?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (14:41) Vegas? It’s the American medical group association in vegas next week, next Wednesday through Sunday.
Nicolle Hepp (14:48) Okay. I can look into that.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (14:50) That’s okay. The week in Austin, the week of the twentieth would work better for me. Yeah, great.
Nicolle Hepp (15:00) Absolutely. Is there any certain day you have in mind?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (15:03) Can we look at Tuesday? The 20 first? Yes, I have a big swath of time from nine to 12. I mean, that won’t last, yeah. But right now, I do. And that way I can, you know, see if other folks from my team are available.
Nicolle Hepp (15:26) Okay. Do you want to do 10 am your time?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (15:32) Yep, that sounds perfect.
Nicolle Hepp (15:35) Okay, perfect. I will send that over in just a minute. Great. And you’re eastern, right?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (15:42) Eastern. Great. You.
Nicolle Hepp (15:44) Got it. Yeah, we’ll bring in a few folks on our end that are also our executives for our health system specifically. So, I’m going to get with them and just see, do you know how many people you’ll be bringing in on your side? I might three.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (15:57) That’s it. Okay?
Nicolle Hepp (15:58) I might make it to a 45 minute discussion or would you rather keep it at 30?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (16:03) We can make it, hold on if we make it. If we make it for 45 minutes, I just have to move it to 11 a M.
Nicolle Hepp (16:11) Okay. Let’s let’s stick to 30 and I’ll just let them know if we need to book more time after that, we could.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (16:17) Always do that. And we might need to, you know, the chief. So, I’m the associate chief physician executive, the chief physician executive would, will want to hear a pitch at some point. But really only after, if things go well with, you know, the initial meetings… Absolutely.
Nicolle Hepp (16:37) Well, sounds good. Anything else? I can pass on to my executive? Sounds like you just want, you know, a more specific health system overview would be helpful.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (16:48) You got it. That would be very helpful. And if they can answer specifically how they’re different from Healthstream, that would be beneficial for us.
Nicolle Hepp (16:57) Perfect. And just to be clear, so we also do the payor enrollment side. Would that be a conversation you’d be interested in as well?
Dr. Catriona Harrop (17:04) That could be potentially. Okay.
Nicolle Hepp (17:07) But probably focused on mainly credentialing and privileging, yes.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (17:11) But that, yes, but we also too, I should, we also have a health plan, so, you know, there are… there could be benefits on all sides. But I think for now, let’s privileging and credentialing and, you know, and the verification process.
Nicolle Hepp (17:34) Lots of opportunities. Love it. Yes, great. Well, thanks so much for joining dr. Harrop. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk with you in a couple weeks.
Dr. Catriona Harrop (17:42) Okay. Sounds good. Thank you. Bye bye.