Two themes emerged from the exhibit floor of this year’s MGMA annual conference (1) Practices are spending money on improving Revenue Cycle Management – RCM and (2) Practice managers are looking for more comprehensive ways to communicate with patients.
The exhibit hall of the 2018 MGMA Annual Conference (#MGMA18Annual) came to a close today and as the booths were quickly deconstructed, I took time to reflect on 25 pages of notes that I took from the various conversations I had. As I flipped through my blue-ink chicken scratches, I kept seeing two words in the margins: “PtComm” (my short hand for Patient Communication) and “RCM” (Revenue Cycle Management). On page after page, I scrawled these words to summarize the conversations.
In the Health iPASS booth, I had the chance to speak with one of their customers – Judith Basile, MSM, FACMPE, Practice Administrator at Associates in Orthopedics. Basile told me that implementing Health iPass’s RCM platform made “a huge impact on the financial health” of their practice and that it allowed them to “catch up to the consumer experience patients have outside of healthcare, where they can make payments quickly and easily”. With Health iPASS, Associates in Orthopedics experienced a 35% improvement in patient payments. They had only been on the platform for 18 months.
Over in the Pulse Systems booth, I spoke with Dar Griffeth, the company’s new SVP of RCM Services. Griffeth’s role was created because the company recognized the need their customer had for expert RCM advice. His job is to work with customers to identify how components of the Pulse solution can be adapted to improve the RCM process. This is in contrast to the common approach of deploying technology and then redesigning the workflow to fit – an approach that often results in slow adoption or outright failure. Griffeth’s role would not exist if RCM was a low priority for physician practices.
Matthew Hawkins, CEO of Waystar, the company that resulted from the combination of ZirMed and Navicure, shared where they had been focusing some of their development efforts. “Lately we have been focused on helping reduce or eliminate claim denials,” said Hawkins. “Having a claim denied is terribly inefficient. Practices have to spend precious time and effort investigating and correcting the claim. We thought – why does it have to be this way? What if we could eliminate denials altogether? That’s what we’ve been working on and our customers are happy we have made significant strides in this area.”
The exclamation point was Waystar’s announcement that it was acquiring Ovation – a claims monitoring technology from UPMC to further enhance Waystar’s claims processing platform.
The conversation turned to patient communications when I stopped to speak with Rick Halton, VP of Product and Marketing at Lumeon. I was unfamiliar with Lumeon and was curious to find out more. Halton argued convincingly that the current paradigm of care coordination was flawed – that the top-down approach where a central care coordinator is expected to shoulder the work to gather data from patients and keep patients adherent to their care programs. was doomed to fail. Instead, an approach where patients are full partners in their care was needed. In Halton’s opinion, the key was two-way communication between patients and their care teams.
Lumeon’s Care Pathways Management platform allows for a more automated and orchestrated approach to care delivery. One that is centered on the ability for patients and care teams to communicate in a seamless manner via text and in-app messages. “Everything from discharge to pre-operative readiness to lifestyle coaching is possible through the platform,” said Halton.
In prior years at MGMA, whenever I talked to people about patient communications my conversations were only about sending out appointment reminders and links to patient educational materials. What Lumeon was showing me was true 2-way communication with patients across many care scenarios.
Further evidence of this shift in patient communications came from my conversations with Well Health, Rhinogram and CareCloud.
Well Health makes a platform that consolidates all patient communications in one place – and allows for seamless transition from broadcast message delivery to real-time two-way communication with patients. Their interface looked intuitive and because they system stored all prior communications, it allows practices to quickly reference prior conversations, helping staff get to the heart of the issue more quickly than having to search through the EHR.
“It’s all about making it easy for both the patient AND the staff in the healthcare organization,” said Bill Kinner, President of Well Health. “We have to realize that in the world of value based care, effective 2-way communication with patients is the cornerstone to keeping people healthy. It’s the last mile of any population health, medication adherence or mental health program.”
Rhinogram had a similar philosophy. A relative newcomer to the ambulatory space, the company has enjoyed years of success with dental practices. I asked Dr Keith Dressler, Chairman & CEO of Rhinogram what set their system apart from all the others on display at MGMA: “Quite simply we see ourselves not as a communication platform, but as an asynchronous telehealth platform that uses text, Facebook Messages and other channels rather than real-time video to connect with patients”
Dressler’s response was a great way to reframe the entire patient communication space and showed me that vendors were moving away from their provider-initiated communication roots to include patient-initiated communication as well.
Nowhere was this shift more apparent than in the CareCloud booth. A year ago I wrote a post about the launch of the company’s then-new Breeze platform – a patient experience platform built in partnership with First Data. Breeze was designed to be the backbone for all sorts of new patient engagement applications. At MGMA18, CareCloud announced the launch of a customizable survey tool for capturing patient satisfaction information on Breeze.
“Our new survey capability is very exciting,” said Juan Molina, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at CareCloud. “The surveys are customizable by the practice without the need for development resources. This allows our customers to quickly construct surveys that can gather patient feedback on anything – new programs they want to offer or changes they want to make to the practice itself. The sky is the limit. But at the core, this survey capability means our customers have another way to engage patients in a 2-way conversation about their experience.”
I must admit, prior to MGMA18 I had thought the patient communication space was played out. But having spoken with every patient communication vendor on the exhibit floor, I have a new appreciation about where the technology is headed. I’m actually excited to see what advancements will be made in the next 12 months.
PS: I also had great conversations with Kevin Pho MD – founder of KevinMD.com, Todd Evenson – COO at MGMA, Corinne Proctor Boudreau – Senior Manager at MEDITECH and Niko Skievaski – cofounder & President at Redox. Those conversations will be the subject of upcoming articles.
Nice writeup, Colin! MGMA18 was a blast and there was certainly a resurgence of focus on growth, revenue and the patient experience. Exciting time indeed for independent medical groups!