Transcript
Aubry Baird (00:00) hi, Kristen or Kirsten. How are you?
Kirsten Neville (00:03) Hi, Aubry. Good morning. I’m doing well. How are you?
Aubry Baird (00:06) I’m sorry, I’m driving back from donuts with mom at my child’s school. So, oh my gosh. I love this. I know well, you know what? I love? That? They just say donuts with a grown up because so many times they do donuts with mom or donuts with dad, and it’s like, you know, for some people they don’t have that, you know, or they’ve got different roles.
Aubry Baird (00:28) And so, oh, that’s adorable. I thought that was very neutral of them to just say a grown up. So that’s.
Kirsten Neville (00:34) adorable. Yes, very inclusive of any grown ups that want to join the donuts. I would love to have a donut right now, so.
Aubry Baird (00:41) Oh, my goodness. Well, my child had three, my child had three. So he had yours. So, oh my.
Kirsten Neville (00:47) Gosh that’s so cute. Sounds like so much fun. Well, I’m glad you can make it all work. It sounds like you’re super busy. So, thanks for making the time this morning, yeah.
Aubry Baird (00:56) Yeah. So my C, my, so he’s kind of got a unique role. He’s my CTO, my chief technology officer, but he also has like a revenue cycle management background. So, Jim laidley, he sent me a link for your software. So I haven’t done a whole bunch of research about it. I was kind of looking at some of what it does. I can tell you a little bit more about like what I’m needing and a little bit about our company and our footprint. And then let me know if your software, your system, you know, sounds like it would be a solution for us. So I’m the VP of our behavioral health division. My management company is spectrum medical partners. Spectrum is a platform company that acquires different healthcare businesses and does like payroll and staffing and credentialing and software marketing, and provides the capital through, you know, like a team of investors. So, you know, we do acute medicine. We do post acute medicine. We have specialties like podiatry and wound care, and addiction and substance abuse. My team is the largest in the whole company. So we’ve been doing psych for six and a half years. We’ve got a team of about probably 60 psych nurse practitioners, three MDS. We have 15 therapists, 30 medical assistants, 15 lpns. We have some behavioral health case managers for our behavioral health integration team, which is like, you know, behavioral coordination essentially for patients. But recently, we also acquired another psychology practice. So I just inherited like 80 more therapists. So they’re either psychologists, lcws or lmhcs so I almost have probably like 100 providers now. Wow. Now they’re because of the acquisition. We just did our partnership, you know, some of their existing practices will stay the way they’ve been right? But, you know, spectrum’s goal is to always kind of have those consistencies. So, you know, those 80 providers will transfer to our payroll and our credentialing and our systems at some point.
Aubry Baird (03:23) So with my team, I have had a few people do facility credentials… you know, we would probably I’m in 180 nursing homes in Florida. We have probably some opportunities to grow out of state within the next, you know, probably year. And so, you know, with our previous growth with picking up maybe three nursing homes every month, you know, having maybe, you know, 20 new nurse practitioners every year, having, you know, the 15 therapists start that was manageable, you know, using like excel and having a few people processing facility credentials. I will say since we started behavioral health integration, I have to have about five to 10 new hires every month to meet our trajectory. Of that program, I think our goal is to be in like 100 facilities every year and to have like probably 10,000 patients enrolled in that.
Aubry Baird (04:30) I have about 25,000 encounters every month between my team. So pretty high volume. I do have on the spectrum side a payer credentialing team. I know they use modio for a lot of their upkeep of documents. However, we’re not really using modio as like a credentialing platform. To my knowledge. I don’t think we’re really using all of the things that it provides. My team doesn’t really do anything with payer credentials. We’re just predominantly focused on facility credentials, onboarding, new providers to be ready to get into the nursing homes. You know, we do some like inpatient Rehab hospitals like encompasses select, and Pam, we do some assisted livings, but most of our business is the nursing homes, the skilled nursing. So what I found is we’ve really outgrown the excel spreadsheet. It’s not really a good. I’m sure. Yeah, yeah, it’s and I’m so sorry, I thought you were on speaker and you’re not. And so if you’ve been talking, I’ve just been talking and I have,, no, no, please. This is.
Kirsten Neville (05:45) Great information. Keep going please Aubry.
Aubry Baird (05:47) Thank you. Let me figure out how I’m not used to. I’m such a teams person now that like I forget how to use zoom. Yeah, yeah, I do. I know.
Kirsten Neville (05:58) Yeah.
Aubry Baird (06:00) But, you know, we like right now, I’ve got like 120 applications, which applications are packets and documents that we’ve submitted to a facility. When I bring on a new nurse practitioner or a provider, I typically at a minimum have to have them credentialed in about five facilities to be productive, right? It’s like a facility a day, but I am always credentialing them in a couple other like backup facilities. So a lot of times for each provider, I’m credentialing them in about eight to nine facilities. And so that’s about, I mean, and then you have 10 people coming on that’s about 80 applications, right? For about eight new people a month. So it’s really exploded. You know, I think we’ve lost sight of where we’re at in the application process. I have a team of about four ladies that are splitting that, so to even see like their progress to see what’s on track to see what’s off track to really kind of see the time frame of how long it’s taking. I just had a preview of a different software yesterday and it actually used AI to pre fill some of the information in the applications. And, you know, I think that’s a time saving thing, too, right? That info exists. Right now. My team is copying and pasting the info from modio into the packet or they have a separate spreadsheet open. And then they’re putting that information in the packet. My team will do all the applications for the providers. We don’t have the providers do it. It would not happen if it would not be successful, yeah.
Kirsten Neville (07:39) Yeah.
Aubry Baird (07:40) So, you know, there’s probably other benefits or opportunities within spectrum like I know from like a payer credentialing perspective, like they’re sending my billing team like an excel spreadsheet to show approvals. So, I think some of our stuff could be a little outdated, you know, with some of our efficiencies, you know, for me, if I have a provider that’s starting and they’re still not approved at a facility or they’re not approved with an insurance that’s lost money, right? Like I’m losing the opportunity for building counters, right?
Kirsten Neville (08:17) Precisely. Yeah, exactly. So so we can get, you know, time to billable just so much faster. So, okay, cool. That’s where we’d be able to help for sure. And it sounds like you guys just have like a massive scale going on right now and you’ve definitely outgrown the spreadsheet like for sure. I can’t believe you’re still doing some of this manually. It’s actually, I actually.
Aubry Baird (08:39) Just created a new spreadsheet because my, for like and we’ve just we’ve grown so much like I started with the practice six and a half years ago. You know, when we first started, we were in 15 nursing homes and had five employees. And so wow, we’ve grown. I think we do our best to keep up with that growth. But if we’re going to continue to have the same growth, greater growth, we’re just not operating at the most efficient capacity. And so like, you know, the person I had that was supporting credentialing, she’s now transitioning into a business development role. And so I’ve lost that oversight of credentials and it’s not something as the VP, I have the ability to like go back in and insert myself and manage that team. I actually hired a full time credentialer to kind of be that project manager and to really oversee and support that credential team. I did hear on a call that you can outsource some of that. I really feel like the biggest barrier is working with the nursing home. Like we can do a great job sending out the information. But if we’re not following up on it, if we’re not aggressive, if we don’t have, the updated contact information, a lot of times. It’s the facility that’s the reason for the delay, not our process, not our communication, not our team, but you have to have somebody that really knows where things are at. So, and then you have re credentialing and jco accreditation. And yeah, it’s just it’s I like started raising my hand to spectrum. I’m like I need more help. I’m like I spent time looking at AI softwares. I’ve started doing things for me. It’s like I am not a programmer.
Aubry Baird (10:28) I’m not a developer. It’s taking me way too long to try to create something when there’s probably something that we can use or pay for to help and your time.
Kirsten Neville (10:37) Can be used so much more efficiently especially as you grow. Like if you’re expecting to see this kind of growth continuing this year, maybe next year. It sounds like, I mean it’s kind of just a no brainer at this point that you guys have really outgrown the current system. And that happens with growth. Of course, also sounds like licensing as you expand to different states is going to be something that you’re interested in as well.
Kirsten Neville (10:58) And then I mean you’ve shared so much already about like providers, do you know how many payers you’re working with?
Aubry Baird (11:05) We credential with almost every payer, to be honest with you, we have some issues. We don’t have as many anymore, but prior in our business model, we had a lot of like fnps that were doing psych NP or they were in school. And so there were certain payers where we would not be able to credential them until they got the psych certifications. We basically have all psych NP’s I think I only have five out of 60 who are not, and from that five, three are in school and on the trajectory of getting certified. But there are certain payers where we have like longer delays like beacon and carillon, longevity, you know. And that’s honestly just Ar, right? Like it just becomes like a write off. And because for me, my goal is that provider is approved with medicare by day one and my population is so medicare heavy that it’s not a huge loss for me. It doesn’t outweigh the risk of having them go and be further credentialed with medicaid or unite. But you do see like denials of insurance. And then sometimes the patient may be billed, sent a bill because the provider’s out of network. And so, you know, there’s and we outsource our revenue cycle system to like a party or people in India for us. They do, they do a great job. I mean, they, they’re how they’re compensated as a percentage of our collection. So obviously they’re very motivated to make sure that we’re getting collections, right? Yes. But yeah, I think we only have like two people doing payer credentialing for the whole spectrum company. And there’s 14 healthcare businesses.
Kirsten Neville (12:51) Wow. This is I, I’m kind of amazed. So, you called us at the right time for sure. So, and basically Aubry, I just want to clarify, would you ultimately be the decision maker on something like this? I know you mentioned Jim.
Aubry Baird (13:06) So, Jim would be the decision maker for like spectrum wide contracts, things like that. I would tee up any type of contracts, for my entity. So if they did a bigger type of contract, Jim would be setting that up with the different directors with the entities. But I, if I have a need, I’m going to do it.
Kirsten Neville (13:33) Okay, great. Yeah, because you’re also leading a pretty big team yourself, right? Just so I understand correctly. Okay, great. So, yeah, just to kind of clarify the purpose of this call is just to make sure like your business is qualified essentially to move forward with, you know, continuing the conversation, you sound like very well qualified as a great candidate for something like this.
Kirsten Neville (13:54) So what I would love to do is set up a second meeting to dive a little bit deeper, go more into the weeds and then maybe move towards a demo situation. So you can actually see what this would look like. Make sure we’re aligned. We could do as early as this morning. Like if you wanted to set something up with an account specialist for like 11 a. M… I’m.
Aubry Baird (14:17) doing a I’m doing some. My Fridays are pretty crazy. My Monday looks a lot better next week. I’m still in Central Time zone too. Yeah.
Kirsten Neville (14:29) Okay. Monday… I think the earliest we could do next week would be Thursday because we have a team off site. We’re going down to Texas. Oh.
Aubry Baird (14:41) Fun. Yeah. So, so my Tuesday, is good. I’ve got Central Time, nine a. M 10 a M, 12 P. M3 P. M on Thursday.
Kirsten Neville (14:54) Do you want to do 10 a M Thursday? Yeah, perfect. Okay. I’ll send you an invitation right now and then.
Aubry Baird (15:02) Really for like the demo? Like the other company that I looked at yesterday, they really were showing me a lot with payer credentials which I think is great. That’s not really. I don’t do that, you know. So, I mean, I think understanding the connection between that is good for me right now. I just need something that’s going to help me run more efficiently effectively. And then you guys can get connected to spectrum to see where there’s opportunities, you know, for payer credentialing and out of state things. I just need some type of solution now, you know, to kind of help me so that’s really my biggest goal is to see that first I.
Kirsten Neville (15:42) Think, I appreciate you sharing all those details. It’s so helpful for us to like really tailor the call to what your needs are, because people come in with all kinds of different needs, right? So it’s super helpful to know exactly what you need. You just have a big workload. It sounds like. So we can help you just handle some of that. I would love to bring Jim onto the call if you’d be open to it. Yeah, we.
Aubry Baird (16:04) can invite Jim. I can forward him the invite. I can also hold on. I can give you his email too because sometimes I’m if I don’t do it right away, then it doesn’t always happen. So, his email is jlaidley, L a IDLE y. So jlaidley, L a IDLE y at cflim. So CFLIM dot com?
Kirsten Neville (16:35) Perfect. I’ll add him right now. And then I have a setup for Thursday the sixteenth at 10 a M central. Okay?
Aubry Baird (16:45) Perfect. And then I may have like one or two of my credentialing people, hop on that help. Oh, yeah, please. That would be great. But yay, cool. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for getting set up this morning. I’m like, of course, really by like probably like by may first I’d want to have, some type of system set up if not sooner honestly, for my team. So.
Kirsten Neville (17:07) Even better. Yeah, because you know, what you need, you’re ready to dive in. So that’s super helpful. Thank you so much. Aubrey don’t hesitate to be in touch in the meantime if there’s anything else you think of, okay? And we’ll just connect next week. Okay?
Aubry Baird (17:20) Sounds good, Kirsten. Thanks so much. Have a good Friday. You’re welcome. Bye bye.