Medical Advantage’s Financial Dashboards are a powerful way to save time, benchmark KPI’s, and improve performance for your medical practice. As one of the top solutions for financial management in healthcare, it represents one of the leading medical practice management software options.
OrthoBethesda, one of the leading orthopedic surgeon groups in the country, decided to put Medical Advantage’s software to the test in their own practices. Listen in to hear how it gave them a huge advantage. Features like labor-reducing automation, benchmarking and comparison capabilities, consolidation and integration of diverse data sources, customizability of layouts and reporting frameworks, and dynamic, real-time KPI tracking empowered OrthoBethesda to take closer control of its organization and improve both profitability and quality of care.
This is the fourth episode in the Medical Advantage Podcast, where each we take time each episode to discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare, and the best practices your organization can take to stay productive and profitable. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
More on this episode’s discussion:
- Financial Dashboards: The Next-Level Data Analytics and Reporting Tool for Medical Practice Profitability and Growth
- Medical Advantage Podcast EP 2: Financial Dashboards with Peter McCann
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Full Episode Transcript
Medical Advantage Podcast: Welcome to the Medical Advantage Podcast where you can hear healthcare professionals, expert consultants, and industry thought leaders discuss the exciting new ideas and technologies that are changing the business of healthcare. Tune in to each episode as we hear from some of the most innovative minds in medicine about the future of healthcare and how your organization can stay profitable, efficient, and on top of industry best practice.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Welcome back to the Medical Advantage Podcast on this week’s episode, we have a special feature for you. We’ve selected some of the highlights for Medical Advantage’s recent webinar with Ortho Bethesda, one of the country’s leading orthopedic surgery groups listening to hear Ortho Bethesda’s Vice President of Finance. Richard Cooper discussed the ways that our financial dashboard tool has revolutionized the reporting process around KPIs and other metrics at this group, empowering group leadership to make more informed business decisions. This conversation was part of a larger webinar series. To watch this and previous episodes, visit our website at medicaladvantage.com. Or just sit back, relax, and enjoy the highlights we’ve assembled for you here in podcast form. Thanks for listening.
Hello, everyone. My name is Celina Dusseau, and on behalf of everybody here at Medical Advantage, I would like to thank you for joining our webinar today, discussing financial dashboards with Ortho Bethesda and for those of you who may not know who Medical Advantage is, we are a wholly owned subsidiary of The Doctor’s Company or TDC, and following an acquisition in the state of New York last year, TDC is now the largest physician owned medical malpractice insurer in the country, with a presence in all 50 states and well over 90,000 physician members.
Now, while most of the business units under TDC are focused on medical malpractice or patient safety products, Medical Advantage is the arm that provides consulting and training services directly at the point of care. All right, so before we jump into our content for today, I would like to introduce our panelists. So, we are pleased to be joined by Mr. Richard Cooper, Vice President of Finance for Ortho Bethesda. So, Richard would you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself and your role?
Richard Cooper: Yeah. Thank you, Celina. Pleasure to meet you. So, I joined Ortho Bethesda as a consultant in December of 2018 roughly 90 to 120 days after Atlantic Street Capital had acquired Ortho Bethesda, which is a single site business orthopedic surgeon practice that has 14 board certified orthopedic surgeons across the 6 sub specialties of health care, which is trauma, sports, spine, back, neck, joints, upper extremity, and then obviously lower extremity and my 1st task was really to come in and to take them from cash based to accrued based accounting implement, you know, the structure payroll structure that’s needed for them to scale in the future and now having almost 2 years of experience with Ortho Bethesda, we’ve really been able to do a lot to improve workflow functionality from intake to patient self-scheduling. A lot of inner departmental workflow processes are allowing us to manage the business with less to FTE and we’ve been able to use COVID, although a terrible event and big setback to basically accelerate our long-term growth and it’s been a great time to work with Atlantic Street Capital. Their team is great. I’m super excited about the organic growth that’s about to come along with the development of our ambulatory surgical center. It’s an exciting time to be involved with Ortho Bethesda.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Great. Thank you so much. We’re very excited to have you with us today. And today we are also joined by Mr. Peter McCann, who is our VP and private equity advisor here at Medical Advantage. So Pete, would you mind introducing yourself and a little bit about your role with us?
Pete McCann: Great. Thanks, Celina and thanks to Richard for joining us today. So my name is Pete McCann. I’ve about 30 years in the health care industry from all makes and sizes from running the medical group at Henry Schein, which is a major distributor in town in the space to doing private equity roll ups for physician groups, distribution companies and the like in full disclosure, I actually worked for Atlantic street capital and one of their investments in the ophthalmology world, which was Lombard. So I, sat in a very similar seat to where Richard is running the 1 of the investment companies for Atlantic Street and new kind of a lot of what Atlantic Street and all general private equities are kind of requiring just from the information flow. I kind of knew the pain points, knew the opportunities and really brought the 2 together in this project. But I really worked with seeing the consolidation of private equity over the last 10 years on the physician side. It’s created. New challenges, new opportunities and new large groups that can effectively manage better. I think better patient care and really produce better efforts for for their patients. Happy to have Richard on as a customer and also as a colleague in this venture as we put this project together.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Great. Thank you both so much. So with that, Pete, I will turn it over to you.
Pete McCann: So what we’re going to discuss today is 1 project that we work with Ortho Bethesda and the Atlantic Street group, which was KPI and financial dashboard reporting 1. again, knowing from sitting in the seat of being a kind of an operating partner, operating member of a private equity back organization. You realize that when you step onto the seat, there’s a lot of information and data that comes by after the due diligence. There’s a lot of due diligence prior to the acquisition, but when you really turn that switch and own it, you’ve got data coming from 10, 12, 15 sources that really needs to be consolidated into one or two real snapshots of dashboards and reports so that you can effectively run the business more efficiently. Also said you can report up to them to the directing physicians and also back to the private equity group.
So we entered this relationship with Ortho Bethesda to help them design and their KPI reporting and dashboards through bringing. Automating a lot of those processes. That was kind of how we started the process and you know Richard, if I could just ask you a few questions about it and your experience. As you came aboard, you mentioned 2 years ago. What was that need? What was the current state of the reporting structure when you got to the data side when you got to Ortho Bethesda?
Richard Cooper: Pete, I think you know, coming from familiar kind of positions within a platform business with private equity back demands after 1st round of private equity funding. The cost of due diligence that 1st go around is so expensive because. The entrepreneur owner is so inexperienced of preparing this type of data that’s required to run a business super efficiently. Obviously the first step is to understand the growing pains you had to go through and due diligence and what you would kind of do. That kind of serves as the playbook, right? You try to knock out things, whether it’s compliance related, financial related, payroll related, you know, sales and marketing, business development, whatever it may be. But in the end, you know, you’ve got to immediately develop technology that gives you accurate real time data so that the organization is not only being, run the most effective way it possibly can, but it also continues to give you areas where you can continue to advance not only the technologies you use, but how that serves the people within your organization and creating value for them as employees and giving them the education they need to further their career and whatever it is they’re trying to do.
Technology is a big driver of private equity desire, right? It’s a lot of fragmentation in the beginning. But groups like Medical Advantage Group and how you’re using information to reduce workforce related needs, once you know what you want, you’ve got to set a structure of reporting that you want to run. Partnering with Medical Advantage Group has given us a tremendous advantage because although right now it’s not that much different because we’re a single source practice when we acquire that second practice or that third practice we’re going to have the capability to scale this thing right away and that’s invaluable for just taking advantage of synergies as you grow. Reducing the MSO cost, driving more direct sales. That’s how you create gross profit. It’s a big piece of what you guys are doing.
Pete McCann: I appreciate that and from your vantage point when we started the project, we realized that you had a lot of that data captured and a lot of it was a manual process that you were aggregating this together for either daily, weekly or monthly reports to run the business. So you had a good snapshot for us to understand where you want it to go. Maybe talk a little bit about. That manual process prior to us kind of engaging and and where you saw some efficiencies ELT wise from there.
Richard Cooper: Yeah and actually capital acquires Ortho Bethesda, they deploy a group of operating advisors on the financial side to come in, develop the tools and techniques partner with cloud based technologies so that you can drive the most efficiencies possible. Then once you understand that data. Those same advisors would have to go and kind of reconstruct that includes weekly ELT dashboards, biweekly therapy productivity reports month end doctor compensation true up models, call center technology reports that look at abandonment and customer satisfaction and leakage to urgent care direct labor models. That allow the organization to have more clearly defined roles for individuals that want to advance their career give them an opportunity in a platform to grow themselves.
In piecing that all together and Microsoft Excel is you need to do it once, right? You need to figure it out, but you don’t want to be doing it every week. That’s where Medical Advantage Group came in. Still the 1st asset, the project timeline, I want to say 8 to 10 weeks. We stayed kind of within the confines of that. It ran a little long because we added on a little bit to the original agreement, but we feel like ourselves now having access to a power BI platform. And a number of reports, 10 plus reports that we can go to, whether it’s daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly is really powerful. Especially when you’re looking at individual doctor performance within your own group, based upon what’s the surgical conversion rate? What’s the clinic distribution based upon these certain subspecialties? What’s happening to trauma because of the lack of use of ER and trauma.
What Medical Advantage Group has done for us is they’ve taken the consolidated reporting that Atlanta Street Capital uses to really normalize all these different industries, whether it’s car washes or lab companies or airplane transportation groups, and they get it in a form so that all the partners can understand how to read it or basically understand the model for how it’s to be read and developing that takes a lot of manpower. But once you know what you want, yeah. You need to partner with a group like yours to make it, make it automated enough so that you’re saving hard dollars of people that are just doing mundane work. You guys are removing workflow redundancy, which is a big thing in business.
Pete McCann: Absolutely and overall there was a lot of work done I know to automate those and save some time, same FD so you could actually reposition them to do better functions within the organization, but the final end product, was there any break from what the partners at Atlanta Street Capital we’re seeing, or were they the same , similar reports in a more dynamic fashion. What we’re able to provide seamless kind of transition of that to them where they were looked at and said, this is what we need without even realizing the background what’s going on behind the scenes to get there.
Richard Cooper: Yeah, I mean, Atlanta Street Capital is 100 percent behind this, right? I mean, it required minimal capital investment. That’s going to have great long-term value. Any tuck in acquisition that we acquire is about a tucked in more seamlessly because of this. That’s where they see the value in the end. They want a lot of reporting and so we’ve developed a lot of these reports. Honestly, for Atlantic Street, it’s great because their data just continues to get better. They’re having to spend less money to get it because you produce these workflow redundancies.
Who it’s most important for is the people that need to be focused on operations. Right now, you have the ability to generate download reports in real time without having to collect that data. Put that data in presentable format, present that format, that’s where the biggest synergies we’ve gained are. I mean, it’s not just Medical Advantage COVID made a lot of companies react a lot of groups were forced to really shut down and become a fraction or a shell of what their business was, as early as February of this year and, we used it as an opportunity to really accelerate this setback. We did that in conjunction with your group. We were engaged throughout, like, let’s, let’s find a way to get better for this. I do know that we’ve returned about 95 percent of pre COVID volume. And I do know that we’ve reduced our direct labor by 20 percent and our MSO labor by 25%. So not only is the, is the, you know, the reporting is part of that, right? Is saying, hey, we’re able to get it done with this. Let’s staff at stress points. Let’s reward people that are doing the very best they can and it’s really been game changing for us. The reporting just helps it happen. So you can think instead of, you know, do, which is, which is very important.
Pete McCann: We appreciate it. We appreciate the partnership being engaged really at every level with your organization to get it done efficiently, correctly and really to give you back time and give you back the right data that you needed. So we appreciate it and we just love to see when you do a project like this, put in action the value that it brings to organizations of all shapes and sizes. I know we have some questions that Celina will present from the queue.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Yes, great. Thank you both. So, to get started here, one for Rich. Sounds like the project is going great so far. What does your organization see as coming next when it comes to additional data feeds or additional areas within your firm?
Richard Cooper: Yeah, I mean, I really feel like we’re just at phase 1, right, of our project and working relationship together. We knew what that scope was today, but we planned it for the next steps. Covid obviously slowed down M&A activity. We’re in the process now of getting ready to kind of embark on developing a surgery center for our group and where this data is right now, it’s saving us a lot of time and money. We’ve been able to reduce labor hours are our high performing folks are able to focus on things they really enjoy doing instead of collecting data. But the next step is clearly we would like to acquire other practices.
We would like to introduce their MSOs or what they believe as to be their MSO. Now they’re back office, to introduce them to our best practices. We want to learn from them as well to see if we can improve ourselves. The next step is to continue to add providers to our group and introduced them to the technologies that we’ve spent a lot of time and effort on developing. There’s a lot of power and economies of scale there that drives gross profit on a recently acquired asset. So we’re excited for M&A, and we’re excited to partner up with the folks that help us capitalize on M&A.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Great, thank you, and we do have one other question here. So we are a multi-location specialty group with a growing number of clinical locations throughout Florida and the southeast. As was mentioned, we do a lot of manual reporting today. Are there any lessons learned or free advice that you would offer as we consider similar dashboard solutions?
Richard Cooper: Yeah, I mean, the advice I would, the advice I would give you is that, going from manual to the technologies that are available today. Whether you’re an investor or a worker or you’re involved in a team. It’s gonna help you work better when you’ve gone through this process and that’s worth a lot of money. For individual peace of mind, for knowing that data is at your fingertips and you don’t have to compile it all the time. Like I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this call is working, reducing workflow redundancies and getting able to think more and do less. Is what everyone dreams to do and technology is so good right now that you’d be foolish to keep doing things manually because if you keep doing things manually, frankly, you’re probably going to fall behind a little bit, especially if you’re trying to grow with practice acquisition provider additions and different lines of products for revenue generation. Manual processes will basically just add time to that process. That would be my advice.
Pete McCann: Thanks, Richard and just from my vantage point the acquisition space was slow there from kind of March to the June area. We’re seeing tremendous activity in almost every subspecialty for the private equities that I work with in terms of aggregating and, and adding on or even starting platforms with that dashboard. And KPI reportings is probably one of the top three services that. Medical Advantage is working on with private equities, the second being practice marketing, which is another one that I know, Rich, your group is heavily invested in how to acquire new patients, how to how to restart your practice and get there.
So, you know, that’s another service that we offer and just generally helping organizations with technology enabled consultants to go in there and help you get to where you need to go quickly that have the healthcare experience background. So those are the three kind of. Subject areas that we’re seeing from the private equity base and even the large groups that are rolling up.
You know, you don’t have to do it. You don’t have to be out there alone. You have to understand every technology. There are groups to do it outside of Medical Advantage. You know, we know we’re not the only ones who do this, but, you know, to Rich’s point, use the technology to facilitate that. And that’s that’s where advising to all the private equities that we’re working with currently.
And again, the activities is heightened. So we appreciate. Richard, your partnership, your time, and we look forward to continuing the relationship going forward.
Richard Cooper: Absolutely Pete thank you for all the help you’ve done with the Ortho Bethesda looking forward to our continued growth and working together and it’s been fun so far. So you guys have a great weekend. Thank you.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Thank you both for your time and your insights. As, we begin to wrap up our session today. I would like to provide you with some places to go for more information. We’d like to invite you to reach out directly to Pete McCann if you happen to have any additional questions or would like some more information following our session today. We would also like to invite you to like and follow us on Twitter and Facebook or join us on our website where you will find additional webinars, blog articles, and case studies for additional information about Medical Advantage and what’s happening in the, in the industry. Again, thank you everybody for joining today. We appreciate your time and we hope to see you at another session soon.
Thanks for listening in to some of the key points from our webinar discussion with Ortho Bethesda. To view the full webinar, additional entries in the series, and further resources regarding Medical Advantage’s financial dashboard offerings, please visit our website at medicaladvantage.com.
Medical Advantage Podcast: Thanks for joining us this week on the Medical Advantage Podcast where we discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare and what they mean to your organization. For more information, visit us at medicaladvantage.com and make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, so you never miss a show.
