Transcript
Addie Oh (00:00) hey, Amy, how’s it going?
Amy Barfield (00:03) Hey, how are you?
Addie Oh (00:05) I’m pretty good. It’s Thursday. So, can’t complain? I know. Alright… how’s your week been? Oh, I’m hoping not too. Chaotic.
Amy Barfield (00:14) I hate Fridays. I hate Mondays and I hate Fridays.
Addie Oh (00:18) You hate Fridays I,
Amy Barfield (00:20) do, because I, it’s like I’m waiting on things all week long. And then I’m trying to like chase people down for updates and stuff because I’ve got to get end of week statuses out to my clients.
Addie Oh (00:33) And I see. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. It’s like you have a big push on Monday to like get everything. I.
Amy Barfield (00:40) Never get out on time on Fridays. There’s not such a thing as leaving early on a Friday for me.
Addie Oh (00:46) Oh, my God. Yeah. Now, I, it’s rough. So, yeah, is Thursday better then? Is this the highlight of your week? Like what’s the best day for you? Not the weekend? Well?
Amy Barfield (00:57) Wednesdays, I have a hard stop at five. So, like I’m forced to leave at five. So Wednesdays are better. Nice. But, yeah, Thursday’s just gearing up for Fridays.
Addie Oh (01:10) Oh, yeah. I don’t.
Amy Barfield (01:11) really know what day is best to be on.
Addie Oh (01:16) That’s so tough, Amy, Saturday.
Amy Barfield (01:18) Saturday is the best. Yeah.
Addie Oh (01:20) Because Sunday you’re thinking about Monday, right? Yes.
Amy Barfield (01:23) Yes, rough. Okay. It looks like we have Kalia in here, so I’ll go ahead and add her and did you, did Maureen say she was going to join today? Oh, you’re on mute.
Addie Oh (01:41) Sorry, I don’t know.
Amy Barfield (01:45) Okay. Oh, here’s, Sheila.
Sheila Hankins (01:47) Hello?
Amy Barfield (01:49) Hi, Kalia.
Khalia.Freeman (01:50) How are you today?
Amy Barfield (01:52) Doing good. How are you doing?
Khalia.Freeman (01:55) I’m doing good. Another lovely day in Paradise?
Amy Barfield (01:59) Yes.
Amy Barfield (02:06) Hi, Sheila.
Khalia.Freeman (02:13) You’re on mute, Sheila? I.
Sheila Hankins (02:15) was trying to get the volume turned up. I could see your face like your mouth moving and I’m like what? This is weird. Something’s going on. I can’t hear you. Hi, apologies. I am back to back.
Amy Barfield (02:34) I understand. Yes, my.
Sheila Hankins (02:36) Last meeting ends at 10 P. M tonight.
Amy Barfield (02:39) Oh, my word. That’s insane the life.
Khalia.Freeman (02:42) Of a VP you?
Sheila Hankins (02:44) Know what? Let me tell you, I told my husband this weekend. This is exactly why I said I never wanted to be a VP and I fought it for like eight years and I stayed as a director there’s, way too much crap at this level way, just, I don’t want it anymore.
Amy Barfield (03:01) I don’t want.
Khalia.Freeman (03:02) To.
Sheila Hankins (03:05) give up. I don’t want to give up.
Khalia.Freeman (03:07) Sorry, you’re not allowed to do that. Next step is CEO?
Amy Barfield (03:10) Well, let me tell you this. This.
Sheila Hankins (03:12) Is not bad. And I know I can tell y’all, this because y’all, are going to laugh at this. I have been back to back all day since eight o’clock this morning. Okay. It is now two 35. I had to pee so bad. I took my laptop into the bathroom with me and put it on me and went to the bathroom. Oh, my God. I couldn’t help it. I mean, I’m sorry, but that’s I was like, y’all, are going to have to wait a minute. I got to go to the bathroom. You.
Amy Barfield (03:37) Got to do what you got to do. I’m.
Addie Oh (03:39) bolder than you though.
Khalia.Freeman (03:40) That’s what you call dedication.
Addie Oh (03:42) Yeah, I feel like if that happens to me instead, I like mute myself, turn my camera off and then crank my audio all the way up. And then I run because I’m terrified I.
Sheila Hankins (03:50) tried that accidentally turning.
Addie Oh (03:51) The.
Amy Barfield (03:51) camera off.
Addie Oh (03:53) But it.
Sheila Hankins (03:54) Didn’t like, I was like they’re going to need to talk to me while I’m in the middle of my pee that’s exactly what I thought to myself.
Addie Oh (04:02) Oh,
Amy Barfield (04:03) my goodness.
Sheila Hankins (04:04) I’m so sorry, I’m just, I’m tired, right? Like it’s like, can I not have five minutes to go to the restroom?
Amy Barfield (04:11) That’s fine. Yeah. So, Addie’s on our call today, Addie. If you want to go ahead and introduce yourself, I know you have some things that you wanted to discuss today.
Addie Oh (04:22) Yeah, nice to meet both of y’all, I don’t think we’ve ever chatted. I’m one of the product managers here. I’ve been at medallion for like five. I think next month is my four year anniversary. So I’ve been here for a hot second and I work on our payr enrollment product specifically on follow up. And so once y’all, get your app submitted, making sure that, you know, we’re following up on those lines. And one thing that my team is trying to better understand is like how we can give you all better visibility and like, you know, if you’re getting the information you need from the platform. So I’ve got a handful of questions around, that I would love to ask but Amy and Nick, I don’t know what else is on the agenda. Is it okay if I go first?
Amy Barfield (05:05) Yeah, go right ahead.
Addie Oh (05:06) Amazing. Okie. Dokes, cool. And then I guess for both of y’all, I’m actually not familiar with your roles too. So if you don’t mind maybe doing like super quick intros just for me too.
Khalia.Freeman (05:15) Sure. Oh, yeah. Hi, Addy. I’m Kalia, I’m the credentialing manager here at unio.
Addie Oh (05:24) Nice to meet you. I.
Sheila Hankins (05:26) Guess I’m you can call me the catcher. I’m the one that catches everything. No, I’m just kidding. I am obviously Sheila hankins. I am the VP over the revenue cycle management team. And so I manage everything from credentialing a payer enrollment, all the way hospital privileging, to all the way to the back end, you know, billing, collections, payment, posting, customer service, some prior auth, you name it. I own it. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Anything anybody else doesn’t want to do? They chuck it over the fence and it lands on me.
Amy Barfield (06:01) I’m.
Addie Oh (06:02) sure. It means it’s because you do a good job then. So, yeah, I.
Sheila Hankins (06:05) don’t want to, I want to give up, no.
Khalia.Freeman (06:08) Keep.
Addie Oh (06:09) on hanging in there, so amazing. Well, it’s nice to meet both of y’alls and so, I guess, yeah, for context, we’re just, I’m just trying to better understand like, you know, how we can improve, giving admins more like visibility into like requests, the progress of requests like particularly once they’re in follow up, but maybe also just more generally and I think just,
Khalia.Freeman (06:33) yeah.
Addie Oh (06:34) Things that like we can do to better serve you all. So I think to start and also, so I can like kind of better understand how unio uses the platform today. Just like curious what you all are kind of like maybe like goal us towards and like, or another way of thinking about it is like kind of like what metrics and goals that you think about in the context of medallion, maybe you share out to the rest of your company and like what you expect, you know, to be able to get out of this relationship.
Khalia.Freeman (07:05) Okay. I’ll go first.
Addie Oh (07:07) So, I.
Sheila Hankins (07:10) I.
Khalia.Freeman (07:11) would like for all of the past applications that are still out there to finally get a approval date. I know there was some issues where there were applications that were submitted and maybe you guys had the wrong contact, but I know there’s still like a lot of applications that are still out there from last year and I joined in July. So I don’t really have any context before my joining, but I just know that there’s a lot of past applications out there. And maybe if I could get like some kind of report… like a monthly report on where you are, your payr enrollment team is, I’m sorry. Did you say you were a part of the payr enrollment team? Okay. Maybe I could get like some type of report of where those old applications are, you know, like are you unable to get in contact with the payr? You know, we may have an updated contact but there’s just so many enrollments out there that honestly, I don’t really know what’s… going on with all of them? Yeah.
Addie Oh (08:28) That doesn’t make a lot of sense and maybe to drill down on that a little bit internally? Are you all tracking like overall requests to completion times? Are you looking at like a list of your top requests and just following those like how like maybe help me understand like how you all track progress internally and whether that’s like through the platform or you’re doing things off platform also to kind of keep track of those.
Khalia.Freeman (08:51) Yeah. So I actually have a spreadsheet, a credentialing spreadsheet. I pulled a lot of the information that was already in medallion, like the current effective dates and applications that you guys submitted way back when, and some of them, when I do go and look at the older ones, they still have like reached out will follow up in a week or two weeks, something around that timeframe and I mean, it looks like we have the same contacts, but I’m not sure. I do have my team follow up on it as well. And some of them, we do receive notifications back from. And then some of them, we don’t and when we do receive a notification, we do try to reach out to medallion and be like, hey, effective such and such date this provider is in that work. Got it. Some of those payers do come back and say that they are in network now, so.
Addie Oh (09:48) You are separately having your internal team do follow up to understand the actual progress or status of these applications.
Khalia.Freeman (10:00) Yeah, because just sometimes a payer, I’m going to be honest, sometimes a payer doesn’t want to talk to medallion. So that’s why you guys aren’t getting a response. And so I’ll have my team also reach out.
Amy Barfield (10:13) Can I add something Addie?
Addie Oh (10:15) Yeah, of course. So.
Amy Barfield (10:17) There are pair, it would be good to have in the follow up process or way to flag a pair that shows?
Amy Barfield (10:32) The follow up process specific to, I know we’ve got project plans, internal project plans, but I don’t know that if there’s like a quick way to review, like this pair is only followed up every 30 days by roster or the pair responds to us by roster monthly or, you know, just like a quick flag for follow up because there are clients that have certain processes in order for follow up because of how much we’re sending them. And because medallion has so many customers, they get overwhelmed by our two week every two week, you know, and so they find a new solution to work with medallion because they have such an influx from us. So it’d be nice to have like, so somewhere to flag, you know, like this follow up is done every 30 days because it, not every payer is every two weeks. Yeah.
Addie Oh (11:29) We do have the process guides that do exactly that. It basically says like for this payer?
Khalia.Freeman (11:34) For.
Addie Oh (11:35) this like type of request do this type of follow up, but I think we probably could be refreshing those with the latest and data latest and greatest. And like especially when we get info from clients that are like, hey, like with our particular like payer contacts, you should follow up in this way. I think we could be better about like having that feedback loop. So that definitely makes a ton of sense. Let’s see. I think, I guess I’m curious. Yeah. Like do you mind kind of describing the spreadsheet system that you all are using a little bit more? Is that just like a list of all of the apps that have been submitted and you’re just like sorting by how old they are or like is it just the aged ones? Like curious what that looks like and also maybe how you’re generating the spreadsheet? That seems like a lot of work for you all. So you.
Sheila Hankins (12:24) pull it up in shower. Yeah. So let me give you something Addie to add that you understand one of the biggest issues and items that we hear from clinics. Like we’re different. You’re talking to Kalia and Sheila who have major credentialing contracting, provider, enrollment, hospital privileging backgrounds. Okay? The clinics do not, that’s what got us in the situation with some of the problems we have today because they don’t understand even the right payer naming convention. They don’t even know how to read a card. So we have to air quotes, dumb things down for them. That’s why this spreadsheet works because Kalia and I’ve worked together for a couple of jobs and we use now we’ve tweeted a little bit for this because every location is a little bit different but we’ve had to, we gotta dumb things down because they cannot and do not understand a medallion. It confuses them so much. I.
Addie Oh (13:29) See, and your clinics are they that’s those are like the groups or whatever, and they all have access to the platform theoretically, but your suspicion is they don’t.
Sheila Hankins (13:39) Or.
Khalia.Freeman (13:39) can’t.
Sheila Hankins (13:39) really use it. Well, they did. We pulled a lot of their access away because they caused us some of our problems in the beginning and we locked it down but they don’t know, they can’t understand, they can’t go in and say, pick a tab. Okay? They can’t go in and say where’s my like a provider? I’m looking for a provider. Can you like give me a provider… here? We go at the top at the top. So like for George Holman, P, right? Column P, they can’t go into medallion and say, okay, he started 12 120 25. What is he credentialed with? What can he start seeing what patients can they schedule? So that’s why we had to create this spreadsheet because green means go, red means no. And gray means we’re never gonna that’s not something, that they, at that location, they need to be credentialed with. And we took months to put this together because we couldn’t get this data out of medallion. Medallion. Couldn’t help us say, okay, this is what George like George is gonna be at this practice. This is what he should be credentialed with because that’s what we’ve done in the past. We couldn’t get that data out of medallion. So we had to create and it took Kalia six, probably six months to put this together and get it right? And it may not even still be right.
Addie Oh (14:57) And so we, are you updating this manually, Kalia, based off of what’s in the platform because it’s not like integrated like you’re not using our apis or anything. This is like you go in, you check it and then you’re literally manually updating cells as you see things change. Yeah.
Khalia.Freeman (15:14) And when I said earlier to go back, I was going into medallion looking for approvals that you may have already had. And I also incorporated that into this as well. But yes, we’re definitely always using medallion to look for any approvals that you may have in there that we don’t have on our side whenever we’re reaching out to the payer as well.
Amy Barfield (15:40) Maddie, I’d like to add here like this format is very, this is used like how she has it for a lot of companies like they’re green and red go. This would be like good to.
Sheila Hankins (15:55) Have, I would agree. Amy, this came out in our advisory council stuff like the call. Something like this came out and I was in the reporting piece. You are correct. Amy, this is a lot of people use manual tracking.
Amy Barfield (16:09) Yeah. I mean, this is like industry like I’ve seen this in several different companies, not with my just companies I’ve worked with before.
Sheila Hankins (16:19) We’ve used it for several jobs too. Amy, you’re right? Like we’ve had it in different, not even having medallions. So it just, it helps it’s very easy to read it’s.
Amy Barfield (16:31) a good visual? Yeah.
Addie Oh (16:32) What is the main thing that you all feel like this gets you? That’s hard to get from the platform? Is it like specifically like the color coding that’s most helpful? Or is it like, I guess like instead of, I guess this is like one table for like all your providers? Like what about this format in particular, I think is like easiest for the clinics to understand just so I can also wrap my head around it.
Khalia.Freeman (16:56) The red and the green that’s the easiest for the platform. I mean for the practice managers? Excuse me?
Addie Oh (17:03) Okay. And the scheduling?
Khalia.Freeman (17:05) Team, so this spreadsheet that I’m showing it’s used company wide. So like practice managers, scheduling, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know, but I know for sure scheduling and practice managers and providers, they get on here to see what they’re in network with as well. But we have this thing called unioverse. And like all of the company has access to this and this is what they use to do whatever it is that they need to do patient wise. So then.
Addie Oh (17:34) But for this, you’re only really tracking if they’re in network or they can, yeah, they’re in network with the pay or not. You don’t track like in progress or anything on the sheet? No?
Khalia.Freeman (17:47) No. So let’s say this alignment from 10 one, I would go, I would then go to medallion, but we’ve started submitting rosters to alignment. So I’m just going to use this as an example. But let’s say medallion had submitted this 10 one. I would then go to medallion to see the progress of it. Look at the current notes that’s on it. And typically they’re just like this little template that I guess you guys use and it’ll say who you talked to, what day you followed up and the result of it.
Addie Oh (18:25) I see. So would.
Amy Barfield (18:27) You say the ones in red are ones that you have requested medallion for?
Khalia.Freeman (18:32) Honestly, I don’t 100 percent know. I’m still going through that very long request enrollment a file that I downloaded out of medallion because I know when we first got this system, everybody was just picking random, payers that were not applicable to certain clinics. So, I don’t know 100 percent what’s in medallion versus what I have on this spreadsheet. Okay?
Addie Oh (19:01) Oh, I see. So there are people before you who are making requests that you’re trying to like reconcile the sheet?
Khalia.Freeman (19:06) Yes, yes, I see. It wasn’t clear which practices needed, which payers, all the practice managers had access to medallion. So they were just clicking on all different requests… and they shouldn’t have been, but they did.
Addie Oh (19:23) Anyway, that makes sense. And.
Khalia.Freeman (19:25) I’ll get tasks from medallion, I’m sorry, I’ll get tasks from medallion and they’re like per the payer, this isn’t in their service area and I’ll go and I’ll look and I’ll be like, yeah, this definitely isn’t and I’ll ask them to cancel it.
Addie Oh (19:37) That makes sense. But for the ones that you have marked in red with a date under it, that means that it hasn’t been issued yet. So it’s in progress. But the date is when the request was made.
Khalia.Freeman (19:49) Yeah. When it was submitted to the payer, yes.
Addie Oh (19:52) Oh, when it was submitted to the payer, okay. And then these are the ones that like if it’s been a while like the October one, these are the ones that’s how you’re figuring out like, okay, I need to check on this particular request.
Khalia.Freeman (20:01) Correct. I.
Addie Oh (20:03) see. Okay. That is super helpful. And yeah, definitely feels a lot of manual work for you that we would love, to try to solve. And then just so I understand when you identify these like let’s say that alignment request for like Lisa hertz, you’re directing somebody on your team internally to go to the platform and read the notes, right? To understand what’s happening. And then they also perform their own follow up if we haven’t had an update, correct?
Khalia.Freeman (20:34) If it’s if it’s a recent update, of course, we’re not going to reach out to the payr because that doesn’t make any sense. But I mean, if it hasn’t been touched in over a month, then we’ll just go in and do a follow up. We’ll reach out to the payr ourselves.
Addie Oh (20:55) Okay. That is super helpful and obviously not a great pattern for your team to have to spend time doing. And then if you are able to get an update, like let’s say you are doing your own follow up and you get an update from the payr, is that the case that you’re then sharing that info with like Amy or Nick or like how are you getting that reflected back into the platform? Do you just post a note?
Khalia.Freeman (21:20) Yeah, I will go to that payr line item and go to the, I think it says contact us or something like that and I will just provide an update. I’ll click the, provide an update option and let them know what I found and send them the email.
Addie Oh (21:47) Amazing. That is super helpful. Cool. Well, I guess I only have one question which is like really open ended, which is really just like, is there anything that we could be doing that would help you improve this process of like tracking and managing these requests? It sounds like there’s some element of like being able, I definitely hear you on like better visualizations to understand when providers are enrolled payers and not. But is there anything else that would be that we didn’t discuss in this call that either of y’all can think of that would be make this less painful for you or allow you to do more of the work in the platform versus having to basically maintain your own system outside of the platform?
Khalia.Freeman (22:30) I just ask that whenever the payer enrollments are being completed out, that it is actually linked to the right payer, I sent Amy a couple of examples earlier this week just to show her like, you know, this says kaiser, but the attachment, no, this says prospect. But the attachment is for kaiser. It just gives off conflicting information because whenever we receive the approval, we’re like, okay, this is for prospect, but then your team attaches an attachment for kaiser, and then we’re like are we in network or not?
Addie Oh (23:05) Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Amy, I might ask you to forward me a couple of those too, if you don’t mind just so I can take a look.
Nic Schisler (23:12) Amy and I can do that. We have a couple that have bubbled up in the last week or so Maddy.
Addie Oh (23:18) Amazing. That would be perfect. Anything else from either y’all, Sheila, Kalia?
Nic Schisler (23:25) I think the only thing for me not to like trying to partner with unio. And as we move forward, like I guess Abby, now that we did this discovery, like what are our next steps? Are you going back internally to chat with Leah? To kind of give her some insight into what we discussed today and how they’re currently utilizing medallion and also doing some manual tracking. I think I’m just trying to understand, you know, where are we going from here essentially?
Addie Oh (23:54) Yeah. I think for context, our team is working on a like a couple different projects that we’re hoping will improve some of the like experience that unio’s having. I think the majority of our focus has really been on trying to just automate more of the work. I’m sure everyone is aware that like just, you know, as much as we want to train people and like have, you know, folks just like, you know, reteach them a process. I think it’s going to always be a little error prone, right? Like humans will make mistakes. And so, the bulk of our efforts are around trying to just like automate these workflows and so that hopefully will also reduce cases where like incorrect attachment is being provided on the enrollment completion or like, you know, we’re not actually doing a follow up every two weeks or whatever cadence we think we should be doing. But then the other piece that we’re separately trying to understand is like how can we give admins more visibility in the platform? I think the case for unio is a little bit interesting because it’s slightly different from how other admins that we’ve chatted with have been using the platform where you all are using the platform. But you actually are also kind of maintaining a separate system. So I’ll have to give it a little bit more thought and I think it’s helpful research for us to understand that there are different profiles of folks who obviously interact with medallion. But I guess to give you all a sneak peek we were thinking about potentially like I think the long term vision is actually to build like some sort of a PE specific admin homepage that highlights trends on like here are your slowest payers, here are your slowest states, here are the slowest like combinations of the two. Here are the requests that are aged. This is a breakdown of why we think they’re taking longer than expected. Here are the things that we think a client should be able to do for them. Versus here are the things that like medallion is working on and try to centralize more of that within one page and service it proactively versus, I think right now it sounds like Kalia, you’re having to basically figure that out, you’re like hunting and pecking to figure that out across all your requests, which is definitely not where we want you to be spending your time. So it’s a little bit early and we’re still doing some research here. And I think I’d love to come back to you all like we’re working with a design partner to figure out like some mocks of potentially what some of this could look like. So, I’d love to come back and bring some of those if you all are open to it, but definitely doing finishing out this like round of interviews to make sure we’re like chatting with folks and build that perspective before we like actually go crazy and build something that people don’t want. Yeah, that’s.
Nic Schisler (26:13) super helpful. And I don’t want to botch this saying, but maybe when the timing is right, and we have some type of a beta, right to use Sheila Clea, I mean, are you all open to maybe taking part of that? If we get to that point where we’re saying, hey, we could use a test user edge case like obviously from some of the friction that we’ve had, obviously, we’d love to kind of keep moving things in a positive direction. So, are you all open to that when the timing is right? I’m just curious and it’s okay if you don’t want to say yes right now, but just kind of curious and putting it out there.
Khalia.Freeman (26:54) Yeah. I mean, I’m always open to new changes.
Addie Oh (27:00) Cool. And we can also give you examples of what it looked like before you commit to it.
Addie Oh (27:05) So you could take a look like that’s. Not for us. You know, we won’t include you that kind of thing. So.
Khalia.Freeman (27:11) Okay. Sounds good. Yeah, definitely open to it.
Addie Oh (27:15) Amazing. Okay. Yeah, no, that would be great. I think we’re always looking for folks like appreciate you all being really willing to give us feedback and I think that’s most helpful for us to understand like how we can build a better product, so.
Amy Barfield (27:28) Thank you, Addie.
Addie Oh (27:29) Amazing. That was all I had. Sweet. I will talk to you all later then. Thank you so much.
Amy Barfield (27:34) Bye, thank you.
Sheila Hankins (27:35) Thank you. Thank.
Amy Barfield (27:38) You.
Amy Barfield (27:43) Did you guys have anything else or anything you wanted to review today?
Sheila Hankins (27:47) I don’t unless Clea does.
Khalia.Freeman (27:49) No, not me, just wanted to let you know.
Khalia.Freeman (27:53) I’m still working on that spreadsheet with all those requests on there… there are some that I have already canceled out. But there’s also still like a handful of… applications that should have never been submitted. So, really sorry about that for having your team overwork on that kind of stuff.
Amy Barfield (28:15) It happens, you’re not the only customer that does that, you know?
Sheila Hankins (28:20) Like part of it’s like that’s why we pulled people’s access.
Amy Barfield (28:26) There’s.
Khalia.Freeman (28:27) a lot of clicking going on in medallia.
Amy Barfield (28:31) Yeah, just, whenever you’re ready is fine.
Addie Oh (28:33) Okay.
Amy Barfield (28:34) All right. Well, if that is it, I will let you have your day back.
Khalia.Freeman (28:39) Thank you so much.
Nic Schisler (28:40) Talk soon bye.
Sheila Hankins (28:41) Guys.