Transcript
Mike Manson (00:16) Hey, Jared.
Jared Arnott (00:17) Good morning. Good.
Mike Manson (00:19) Morning. How are you?
Jared Arnott (00:21) I’m doing well. How are you doing? I’m, doing good, just kicking.
Mike Manson (00:25) Off the week and about to head to the airport. Actually, we’re getting together for our quarterly reviews in Austin, Texas. I’m in Boston. So it’ll be nice to get some sun.
Jared Arnott (00:36) I hear you. I’m in the central Ohio area. So we’ve had a nice week but it’s definitely spring very up and down.
Mike Manson (00:44) Yeah, I mean, it’s classic new england weather. I’m sure you have similar, but we had a couple of days that gave us hope that was 65 and sunny. And then it was like 32. I saw some snow last week again. I’m like, all right, I’m sick of this.
Jared Arnott (00:58) Not quite as bad here, but still, like I said, we’ve had some eighties. We’ve had some forties we’ve had some rain. It’s all over the place, but maybe a little bit better.
Mike Manson (01:09) Very good. Awesome. I appreciate you making some time for us. I’ve got 30 minutes on the calendar for us and I’ll try and keep us tight to that. I’ve got a few slides that I may use if I think it’s relevant, but I think really wanted to keep it conversational today and just get a better understanding of what today looks like for you.
Mike Manson (01:27) Where are the pain points? And then kind of diagnose where I think we can help. I got some. I did, you know, did some homework on the organization. I got some information from Nicole. I don’t know, did you speak with Nicole or was it just kind of virtual?
Jared Arnott (01:46) I think it was just email and a quick virtual chat.
Mike Manson (01:49) Okay. Cool. So she let me know. I think she pulled some information that you’re basically, you’re right now running the licensing and credentialing process for 50 providers, adding two to three dentists a week and really just starting to investigate ways to, you know, bring in some software to help streamline things?
Jared Arnott (02:10) Okay.
Mike Manson (02:11) Cool. Well, I guess I know you’re sounds like you’re in the early stages. Have you looked into medallion at all? What, what had you interested in us?
Jared Arnott (02:22) No, honestly, no, not done a whole lot of in depth research and trying to figure it out. Just kind of started last week, with this kind of idea. Obviously, we’re I’m going to say we’re starting, but we’ve been around for a little while, yeah, getting to the point of expansion and finally kind of got to the point with myself and then talking with, you know, my boss from there as far as hey, we need, to pick up the pace as far as recruiting wise, keep up with some of the marketing we’re doing. And then we need to invest some in how we organize that, how we, you know, overhaul from an entire structure standpoint, how, we go about from the provider relations side?
Mike Manson (03:01) Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. And it’s all telehealth, obviously, in the name, right? Yes.
Jared Arnott (03:07) I mean, it’s exclusively what we do. So, it’s teledentistry. We exclusively work in the dental space, with virtual providers across the country. So, we’re operational in all 50 states. We partner with most of the major dental insurance companies, as far as, you know, the delta dental’s of the world. I think there’s 30 of them just depending on which states you want to throw after delta dental. Yeah, stuff like that. So, we do a lot of partnering credential wise. We are not credentialed with every insurance out there. And then, I don’t think we have any hopes of being credentialed with every dental insurance out there. But major ones, a lot of our dentists are licensed in multiple states, you know, some with one or two, some that have as many as, you know, 35 or 40, different state licenses. So it’s a pretty wide variety there. Like I said, you can go up 50 or so on the platform. Probably half, that are what I would consider like super active, which are seeing patients on a day to day basis. Some of them are very, part time and active, they’ll work a few days, they’ll work a couple hours. They’ll work, take a week off. Maybe they only work on vacation days. Yeah, we don’t have set requirements. As far as that goes for our providers. They’re very much kind of the side… gig, type of a deal that they can work with. So.
Mike Manson (04:24) All 10 99, every one of them. Yep. Okay, cool. That makes sense. Yeah, I don’t know if you’re they’re not dental, they’re therapy, but spring health. I don’t know if that name rings a bell. They’re a customer that I brought on last year. They’ve got 12,000 providers. All 10 99 therapists. And part of why they partner with us is because their process was pretty slow and they, you know, there’s some, it’s a competitive space. You see a ton of telehealth… therapy places out there betterhelp. You know, you hear their ads everywhere and they were looking at a way to like attract and retain providers by giving them a much easier onboarding and credentialing process, which is, I assume is kind of maybe what brought you to this as well. So I can kind of talk you through a little bit about what we did with them. But why don’t I kind of go through a little, you know, overview of who we are, what we do… what we see, common challenges are for customers that come to us and we can kind of take it from there and see if this is a good fit. I think the ultimate goal for today is like, do you have a problem? We think we can solve if, yes, we’d want to take a next step and actually get you in front of the platform. I’d bring in a solutions engineer with me and give you a good overview of what the software actually looks like. Yeah. So we were founded in 2019 and we are a SaaS platform software system, provider data management. So storing and keeping all of your providers data in the software. And then we actually have like basically lines of services that you can add on top of that for whatever it is that you need. So if it’s licensing, we’ll do that. We’ll do credentialing. We’ll do pair enrollment as well. So we’ll actually like submit applications on your behalf and work directly with the payers. But yeah, this is kind of the a la carte menu if you will of kind of everything that we do. So the foundation is the software itself. This is, you know, us storing all of your payer information, all of your providers data work, you know, every all of their licenses, everything would be stored in medallion. We have ongoing monitoring available as well. So that’s basically ongoing checks of, you know, making sure that they don’t have any sanctions or like legal action against them that would prohibit them from seeing patients. We’ll go ahead and do like I said, direct payer. Enrollment for you as well. So we would actually, we like to go automation first. So we’ve got, you know, a lot of engineering effort into trying to solve this with technology. So there’s a lot of and we can show you this in the demo, but there’s a lot of things we can do with bots that we’ve built that will actually like take information from our system. You would essentially from your side. If you’re the admin of medallion, you would say, hey, I want this provider enrolled with these three payers, click a button request and then we take it from there. And then you’ll have full visibility into the status and, you know, where things stand and as soon as that they are, as soon as they are par status and billable, you’ll know exactly when that happens as well so that you can have them start seeing patients. So like I said, we try and automate as much as possible when there is not automation available. And I’m sure you’re probably seeing this as you’re doing this. Every payer is a snowflake, they all have very specific requirements. They’re all different. So we do have humans on the back end as well that do quality control and making sure that, you know, data is accurate. If there’s a need for us to intervene from a human level, we’ll keep you in the know on that. But we, you know, we’ll essentially take that work off your hands. We do, we are an ncqa certified cvo, meaning we credential all of our providers to ncqa standards. Privileging would not be applicable here. But licensing is, we actually started as a licensing company. So we’ve got a lot of experience doing licenses in all 50 states. So, are you, it sounds like from the notes that I had, you don’t have any kind of software in place today? Can you maybe tell me a little bit about how things look today? Like how are you? Like walk me through? I’m a dentist and I sign up with you guys. Like what does it take for me to get billable on with payr’s through you guys? Yeah, fairly.
Jared Arnott (09:03) Simple. Really. It’s just manual process on my end. So we have a kind of a standard three bits of information, paperwork that is actually sent out email from me. One’s just basic payment stuff, W, nine direct deposit crap like that. Yeah, other than standard agreements. And then probably the most one that we call the credentialing packet, which is going to go through the basic questions of, you know, all the yes, no’s as far as if you had litigation, have you had malpractice issues, those types of things? And then it goes through all the educational background, work, histories, licensing information, Dea information, all that kind of stuff. Again, the three to five pages of every generic question you’re going to see on a credentialing packet everywhere. Yeah. So we have that they upload that through our, we have secure file downloading capabilities. So they upload that through there. It’s stored on our back end just as far as our drives. Yeah. And then from there, we can start having them see patients. Some of them won’t be able to see certain patients specifically medicaid insurances, stuff like that obviously require credentialing processes.
Jared Arnott (10:07) But we have enough insurances a, that we aren’t credentialed with anyways. So it doesn’t matter. We’re just going to build out a network or B cash paying type patients from there. Okay? If we do go through and want to get them on board with… certain insurances that depend upon what state they’re in. So if they’re a licensed California dentist, we work heavily with medi cal. So we’ll need to get them on board with that. We work heavily with delta dental California. So we need to get them on board with that. So go through with those. They either have a portal that can be filled out which is typically done by me or paperwork that is filled in again manually by me and then emailed it. Okay.
Mike Manson (10:47) Okay. And that’s helpful? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a lot of emails back and forth and then you actually having to go in and manually do the information transfer. Do you have a rough idea of like from start to? So I guess just with credentialing alone and then take the payer side out of, it sounds like, do you have an idea of like how much of the business is cash pay versus?
Jared Arnott (11:18) Maybe… 15, 20 percent? Maybe. Okay. 15.
Mike Manson (11:23) 20 percent insurance, cash pay. Okay. The reason I ask is just because, you know, we’re trying to build a business case around this to, you know, go to your CFO and ask for funding like trying to understand what we can impact that would show a return on investment. And that’ll actually kind of good segue into my next slide here. Like these are kind of the three overall columns that customers look at when they’re trying to evaluate whether or not we’re going to be the right fit. I can tell you, I can tell you up front, we’re probably not the cheapest option. Like if you’re just looking for software that, you know, you can store information in and, you know, it’s probably going to get you 10 percent better than what you’re doing today and have a kind of a clean database to store everything. Digitally. There are going to be a cheaper solution. We’re kind of more of like the overall end to end and taking the really taking the work off your hands completely, not completely. You’ll still have some admin capability but it will dramatically reduce the amount of manual work you’re doing today on this. So like we look at turnaround times to affect accelerating revenue, right? So, like if it takes you three to four weeks to get somebody ready to see patients today, and we can do it in 10 days or less than that, that’s potentially three weeks of extra billable revenue for the new providers that are coming on board, you multiply that by how many providers you’re bringing on board for the year?
Mike Manson (12:55) And, you know, that’s real impact on revenue… reducing operational costs. Like I, you know, I talk to a lot of organizations that have, you know, this work outsourced to teams or they’ve got, you know, sort of a bloated team of folks doing this manually and they’re looking to reduce headcount. It sounds like that’s probably not the case here. But if you’re going to continue to scale and grow, you can think about like, all right, I don’t have to go out and hire two more people to come in and do this. And then revenue leakage. Like I don’t, on the payer side, we see a lot of folks that are dealing with issues where, you know, they’ve got a provider that sees patients when they’re not in network, they submit an application before their credential, you know, all kinds of issues there that impact revenue leakage. So, I guess for you guys, like, do you have an idea? Of from start to finish on your turnaround time for when a new dentist can start seeing patients. I mean.
Jared Arnott (14:02) If you’re specifically talking as far as like the insurance side of it from there, as I said with the example before, for trying to get them on board with medi, cal or with, you know, delta California, that kind of stuff, we’re probably looking at four to six weeks, okay? And.
Mike Manson (14:15) Then just on the just on the credentialing side alone. So like from the time that they sign a contract before they’re even before you submit a payer application. So… you sign a contract to when they’re credentialed. Do you have an idea of what? Yeah.
Jared Arnott (14:34) I mean, if you take into account probably our onboarding process from there, getting information back, probably another couple of weeks on top of that from there, but four to six weeks probably from the time that I can fill out an application for them, get signatures and all that kind of fun stuff on it with a payer, the credential, packet and then get it out to them. And then obviously, they’ll do their adjudication process and get it back.
Mike Manson (14:57) Yeah. Then you got to, wait for them to come back, which is always a fun game. Yes, this is what we’re seeing from across our customer base is kind of industry standard for just turnaround time. So, you know, a lot of back and forth upfront just to get providers data collected.
Mike Manson (15:16) Sure, 25 days usually, typically, which sounds pretty close to what I’m hearing on your side to get, a payer application submitted, usually around three weeks to get an ncqa credentialing packet, put together 10 percent resubmission rate. And then this is kind of like, the team size that we see per, provider size. Sure. So, what we look to do is just kind of simplify this for you. Like I said, so, we, you know, all that we would require on your side for 50 providers, or even up to like a couple 100 providers, we would call it usually typically half an fte. So, you know, there would, it’s not no work on your part like you’ll still have to kind of be the admin of medallion. You would be on the other side, you know, hitting requests on providers, where they want to be submitted. Probably, for the payer side. And then you, we would have, that all tracked for you in the system. It’s not a black box. You’ll be able to see where everybody’s at. But, I would say probably less than half an fte, like I don’t think it would be half of your week, especially, you know, maybe some upfront lift to get started, but it would be a lot less work on your side. And we put in our contract, we put guarantees around our turnaround time. So, for our cred packet, once we have the provider’s data uploaded, that’s kind of the first step of the process is getting all their information into our system. You click, you know, hit request on a cred file. We would guarantee that we would have a packet ready for you within three days. We actually average one day. We give ourself a little bit of buffer if we don’t if we breach that SLA, you get, you know, we wouldn’t charge you essentially for, that cred request.
Mike Manson (17:07) And then, with payer applications, you know, once you hit submit, on a payer application, we will guarantee 10 days, we’re seeing an average of five days from the time it takes us from, you hit submit to us getting a payer application out the door. And then we deliver on 99 point five percent accuracy for our cred files as well.
Jared Arnott (17:31) So,
Mike Manson (17:31) I think that’s one of the bigger, you know, when you think about like, all right, do I want to just buy a piece of software and kind of continue to run this process myself or partner with somebody like us where we’re really kind of taking the process off of your hands? You know, part of the, what differentiates us is that we actually put this contractually like we’re not just saying, hey, we’re great. Look at us, look at all our happy customers, like we actually put money behind it. We will contractually commit to these turnaround times for you. What are your, What are your thoughts so far… when you’re hitting?
Jared Arnott (18:09) The needs I mean, coming into this, my biggest needs are simplify onboarding process, get some sort of automation in there. So it’s just not me manually doing it. Yeah. The storage which is, I mean, what we do now is fine, but obviously having something slightly more organized would be great. And then the next biggest need was obviously just the credential packets. Yeah, the process there for me filling them out, obviously, manually sending them in getting signatures. That kind of crap is a time waste, for sure. So, like I said, we’re looking at additional people to help, or some sort of automation process to help, but those are always kind of my biggest three things. The licensing process is interesting. We have different providers that are always, claiming to be interested in getting multiple state licenses, you know, they’re like, hey, if I was, you know, whatever licensed in California, if I got two or three more states, would I be busier? And my answer is simply, yes. But I’m not going to do that for them. Just because it’s a huge time sink on my end of things, there’s not a huge return especially for, from our side of things. If we have a massive need, whatever we were short providers in whatever certain states, you know, maybe I’ll jump in and do something. But if that option was available to them, where they would reduce their work because ultimately, what happens is they just don’t do it whatever from a time cost, whatever different type of a thing. And that’s fine. And it’s not been a huge detriment to us, but it’s certainly interesting if there was something available to say, hey, this option’s out there or whatever the case may be, we could find a use case for that, I think potentially, yeah.
Mike Manson (19:43) Yeah, that is something that we do and it’s you know, you, can, you’ve been opt in, or not totally up to you. But it is an interesting conversation because I talk to a lot of telehealth companies. Like I mentioned spring and that is an interesting part of the recruiting piece. It’s like, all right. Do we, do we, we’ve got a spike in demand and leads in California? Do we go out and hire telehealth and more providers in California or do we find 10 that we have today and just get them licensed there? And we can fill that need. So it’s a little bit of an egg in the chicken and the egg if you will. But, that is an option. So, if that’s we can certainly explore that. We’ve definitely.
Jared Arnott (20:20) Played that game before and then we’ve paid for providers to go through the licensing process. Currently, I try to avoid doing it just because of the amount of, personal information they have to need. Usually, it’s more, you know, school education background, stuff, that they require more than just, hey, fill this out on a sheet of paper. They actually want something from the school, they want something from other states, that kind of stuff. So, I usually try to avoid it, but we certainly paid for providers to do it. We’ve utilized that exact thought where, hey, if we’re expanding into whatever, if you sign a contract with delta, Oregon, Alaska, we need more providers there. Potentially, it’s not easy to hire people who live in Alaska. Let’s just license a few different providers in Alaska, make it simple. Yep, we.
Mike Manson (21:04) Can show you what the process looks like. Again, very simple on your side and we make it simple for the providers as well. Yeah.
Jared Arnott (21:11) See, that was kind of the last thing on my mind. The first things were always, it was the onboarding, the credential paperwork, the payer applications, that kind of stuff was kind of the primaries, but certainly, if there’s other use cases, it’s worth looking at cool. We’ve got eight.
Mike Manson (21:27) Minutes left. It sounds like there’s at least a good fit to continue the conversation. I’d love to show you what this looks like. So, I’d love to schedule more time with you if you’re open to it.
Jared Arnott (21:40) Yeah, that’s fine. Okay?
Mike Manson (21:43) Can you walk me through a little bit of kind of how you’re thinking about the evaluation process? I’m sure you’re talking to other folks? How are you stacking medallion versus whoever else is out there?
Jared Arnott (21:56) Yeah. So not very far along in the process. I have another meeting set up. I think Wednesday with… I’m going to forget the name verified. Does that sound right? Verifiable, verifiable, there you go. Yeah.
Mike Manson (22:14) I took 12,000 providers. That was spring health. They’re using verifiable, we moved them off of them. We hear that quite a bit. I’ve got a time.
Jared Arnott (22:25) Set up with them. I’ve worked with in the past, a small company called, they just changed their name. It was 32 health. Now, it’s lights. Fun.
Mike Manson (22:35) Heard of 32 health. Yep. I.
Jared Arnott (22:38) did more of that when I worked in the medical world, but I’ve had conversations with them. So, I mean, honestly, what I’m looking for is what can essentially be the.
Mike Manson (22:50) simplest.
Jared Arnott (22:50) on our end of things, we’re not looking to and really don’t want to increase the headcount on our end of things, it would preferably just stay kind of with me and then whatever automations we can build off of there. So simplicity and then automations are going to be very key.
Jared Arnott (23:08) Honestly, haven’t gotten too far down the cost of any of this. Yeah, as far as setting a plan or a budget or anything else like that, when you look at it and compare it to, you know, hey, do we hire a full time person? Do we do something like that? Then from a budgeting standpoint that’s kind of the comparison to look at, yeah, really haven’t set anything up along those lines. Like I said, I have not talked money with anybody yet. Okay. Yeah, I can.
Mike Manson (23:33) Tell you at your side, it depends on because we price it per provider for the software alone. But then it’s you kind of, and we’ll go over this in more detail. But you basically a la carte add what you need on top of that. So, if you say, hey, Mike, you know what? I think I do need maybe 50 state licenses this year there’ll be a, you know, we’ll go through this, but there’ll be a price for that. If it’s just credentialing packets, we’ll price per that per packet and then payer enrollments would be the other like probably big line item that would affect cost. But… based on what you’re telling me so far, like, I would think we’re probably going to come out net even annually for what it would cost to hire somebody.
Jared Arnott (24:20) So, you know,
Mike Manson (24:21) if you call it a typical cred specialist.
Jared Arnott (24:25) Usually in the.
Mike Manson (24:26) 50 to 60 K range, base salary, and then, you know, comes out to about 70. If you take into account everything and benefits, we’re probably going to be somewhere in, that ballpark depending on what you need.
Mike Manson (24:40) We can, we can cross app range. I think first and foremost, like let’s show you the software, show you what we can do and make sure we’re the right technical fit and meet your needs. And then we’ll talk pricing from there.
Jared Arnott (24:52) Sounds fair. Alrighty.
Mike Manson (24:55) Do you have a calendar up in front of you?
Mike Manson (24:56) Do you want to, I think we’d probably be good to book an hour. We’d probably do it in less than that, but.
Jared Arnott (25:09) That’s fair. I got a schedule up here. Okay? I’m going to be.
Mike Manson (25:13) Like I said, I’m in Austin, the next few days here and flying back on Wednesday night, and I kind of get full days. Are you available on Friday at one… o’clock eastern?
Jared Arnott (25:27) Short trip out Monday back Wednesday?
Mike Manson (25:29) Yeah, yeah. Yep.
Jared Arnott (25:33) More time in the airport than you will in Austin.
Mike Manson (25:35) I know and.
Jared Arnott (25:37) I’ll be in a conference.
Mike Manson (25:38) Room for 90 percent of it. So, I’ll try, I’ll get some barbecue at some point though there.
Jared Arnott (25:43) You go, we’re actually going together out in vegas. We’re spread across there’s. Only six of us full time, and we’re all spread out. So, we got out in vegas here at the end of February. It was nice and warm, but it was the same thing. I think I flew out Monday night and back on Thursday. So, it was short and quick. Yep, but yeah, Wednesday. So, I’m currently booked, not Wednesday, Friday, 12 to one 30 Eastern Time. I am booked. So before or after that is available, okay?
Mike Manson (26:14) Two to three?
Jared Arnott (26:19) Two to three would be fine. Yeah, I gotta get a hard stop at three o’clock to get some kids off of the bus. But as long as we’re done by three, I’m good all.
Mike Manson (26:25) Right. We can, we can, we’ll give you a little breathing room. We’ll do two 30 to three 30 if that’s all right with you?
Jared Arnott (26:31) No earlier would be better. So, three o’clock’s when I gotta go.
Mike Manson (26:34) Oh, sorry. Yeah, I’m what am I thinking? As long?
Jared Arnott (26:38) As it’s three o’clock I usually leave the house at three, to go to get the kids from school. So, as long as we’re done by then, that’s fine or a minute or two sooner, I just can’t go to, you know, 310 wouldn’t work. Okay?
Mike Manson (26:48) All right. That sounds good. I’ll, I’ll make sure, Noah is my SC, he’s going to come in. He’s awesome. He’s we call him, we call him the cred, God here. He’s, he’s extremely knowledgeable on the credentialing side, and, he’s great with the platform like he’ll give you a, good understanding of what we do, what we don’t do. We’ll try and keep it. You know, we’ll take it from there.
Jared Arnott (27:14) That sounds like a plan. All right. I’ll send.
Mike Manson (27:16) out the invite and, I hope you have a great week and we’ll talk to you in a few days.
Jared Arnott (27:20) You do the same. Thanks a lot. All right. Bye bye.