Why do we use it?

Business Needs

Like many other rheumatology practices, infusions, billing, and some other capabilities were outsourced to a number of vendor partners. These partners took a percent of the profits as renumeration for their services. The lack of regular communication and proof that service levels resulted in increased costs, poor oversight and a number of other inefficiencies. There were also ongoing challenges with identifying, communicating, and resolving deficiencies with companies that were managing billing and infusion services. CEO, Stacy Yonker reports, “I would look at accounts receivable and by doing a quick estimate in my head, the current level seemed to be too low. The results from an audit two weeks ago should have been resolved by now. Without data, it was unclear where there were opportunities and what to do to resolve them.”

While Sarasota's existing practice management system did have some existing dashboard capabilities in the base product, they were laborious to use. It usually took 6 – 8 hours on average to run reports, cull through data, create graphs and build the monthly board report. Timeliness of data was also important. Sarasota was working with data from the previous month. It was all they had to run their practice; this delay did not support their needs. There had to be a better way and Sarasota began looking for a platform to provide all the necessary information to effectively run their business.

Keeping More Profit

Because healthcare margins are so slim, giving away a few percent to every vendor was impacting margins. Sarasota had a business goal of keeping more for themselves. To do this, Sarasota wanted to bring infusions and their billing back in-house and eliminate the need for managed services. However, the information needed to do this was locked up in static reports housed in their current practice management system. Further, there was no tracking or management capabilities and no scalability to meet expanding informational needs. Sarasota needed an analytics platform that would support their goal of returning various service lines back inside their walls. The leadership decided it was time to figure this and keep the profits. After a quick Google search and reading information from several vendor websites, Yonker decided to pursue MGMA Analytics, powered by WhiteSpace Health. While it was important to obtain high quality dashboards that allowed immediate visibility to Sarasota’s KPIs, the CEO soon learned that tremendous value could be gained by using the platform to understand the factors that influenced these results.

RevIntel

The machine learning capabilities (ML) in the platform, known as RevIntel, were a huge differentiator. By applying sophisticated ML to customer data, RevIntel finds areas of Whitespacehealth opportunity and translates this information into human readable steps that guide staff to successfully resolve issues. These capabilities were far superior to competing products in market, taking the concept of dashboards to an entirely new level. Even with all this value, Stacy knew that her board wanted a return on their investment - and she was able to do just that.

Return on Investment

• The platform had more capabilities than the competitors’ products – and for a better price. Sarasota was also able to save $500,000 in payroll costs that were required to operate a competitor’s platform.
• At go-live, Sarasota found an entire week’s worth of claims that were not billed by their vendor. This information allowed Sarasota to effectively communicate with the vendor who was managing infusion and billing services.
• A short while later, another batch of 1,100 unbilled claims were discovered by the platform that had experienced extreme delays. That is money Sarasota was not likely to have found with the most basic tools offered by our practice management system. The platform helped isolate the root cause of the unbilled claims, and the evidence was taken back to their outsourced vendor to stop it from reoccurring.
• Data also revealed how well doctors, mid-levels and revenue cycle staff were performing. It created transparency and is not used to hold team accountable for achieving productivity goals. The platform is also used in determine wages and how many employees will be needed to support growth.
• Quarterly reporting dropped from 8+ hours a month to less than an hour, effectively giving the CEO an extra work day each month.
• By having data at the ready, Sarasota was able to bring infusion and billing services in-house and eliminate MSOs. Through these efforts they have increased our profit margin for each of these items by 3 – 5%.