SALT LAKE CITY, UT – Jim Pack, the CEO of AdvancedMD Software, Inc., figures that his company has never seen most of its customers. And that’s just fine with him.
“Currently, 95 percent of our users, we’ve never met them face-to-face,” he offers.
Located in Salt Lake City, AdvancedMD offers medical billing and practice management solutions for physicians’ offices. The software is Web-based, meaning the company’s 8,000 clients need only a user name and password to gain access, bypassing the expensive hardware and software that might take weeks to install and force the closure of a doctor’s office for days.
Pack measures his success in contracts rather than face-time, and he’s feeling pretty good right now. Just last fall, AdvancedMD announced that, due to customer demand, it was expanding its marketing efforts to management service organizations (MSOs), independent physician associations (IPAs) and physician hospital organizations (PHOs). That effort bore fruit in December, when the company announced that the Advanced Medical Group, a subsidiary of Xenia, Ohio-based Greene Memorial Hospital, will use AdvancedMD’s revenue cycle management solution to help manage 25 hospital-employed physicians.
According to Howard Drenth, Advanced Medical’s director, the company’s two medical groups use four separate medical billing software solutions, making it difficult to standardize management and reporting across the practice.
“The easiest thing would have been to unify all of our billing under one of our existing vendors,” he said. “Unfortunately, none of those solutions were able to meet the specific needs of our multi-specialty group. AdvancedMD was the only practice management software solution that provided the advanced billing features we needed.”
With doctor’s offices and clinics seeing an upsurge in visits, more healthcare providers are turning to revenue cycle and practice management solutions to separate the clinical side from the business and help doctors focus on healthcare. And that kind of assistance is sorely needed, for according to the Medical Group Management Association, healthcare organizations are sustaining average group practice losses ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 per hospital-employed physician.
According to Pack, a typical clinic loses 10 percent of its charges because they aren’t entered into the PM system, for one reason or another. By keeping an accurate log of all patients and procedures, he said, AdvancedMD helps that clinic immediately realize a 10 percent improvement. In addition, he said, studies show that 20 percent to 30 percent of all charges submitted to insurance payers are denied. With its PM products, Pack says, AdvancedMD reduces that denial rate to 5 percent.