Operate at Peak Efficiency with Juli Quinn

Imagine a world where medical practices operate at peak efficiency, where medical billing is no longer a source of confusion but a streamlined process. Can you envision the financial stability this could bring to your practice? That's exactly what we're addressing in our latest episode with Juli Quinn, the president of GoSource. We're giving you a front-row seat to a conversation that medical school never prepared you for - strategies for increasing profit margins in your physician practice.

We dive deep into the intricacies of revenue cycle management and efficiency, where Julie shares invaluable insights on how to increase revenue and reduce expenses. We also explore the game-changing role of technology in healthcare, discussing the potential of artificial intelligence and remote patient monitoring in boosting revenue. Learn how verifying insurance benefits can ensure proper payment and prevent costly errors. Discover how remote patient monitoring can provide additional revenue streams and how you can navigate the coding complexities for payment submission.

Finally, we unravel the enigma that is medical billing. We all know it's a necessary part of healthcare, but it doesn't have to be a source of frustration. Julie offers her expertise on how GoSource can streamline this process, balance the act of providing medical services and receiving financial payment, and increase revenue for your practice. Listen in as we tackle the art of medical billing and learn how GoSource can be a game-changer for your practice. This episode is your ticket to better understand these vital aspects of medicine that often get overlooked, so tune in and let's uncover how GoSource can make a positive impact on your practice.

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Though I am a physician, this is not medical advice. This is only a tool that physicians can use to get ideas on how to deal with burnout and/or know they are not alone. If you are in need of medical assistance talk to your physician.


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Transcript

Dr. Shah-Haque: 0:00

Welcome to another episode of the Worthy Physician Reigniting Europe, humanity and Passion for Medicine. Today I have Juli Quinn, who is back with us and here for another part of our I would say, a lot of what we didn't get taught in medical school that probably should have. So this is part four of our series, and Julie is the president of Go Source. And why would I bring that on a podcast about physician burnout? Again, these are things that were not taught in medical school. These are things that happen in the real world as far as revenue cycle management, looking at efficiency and scheduling, because these were not things were taught in medical school. But this is the way the real world of medicine operates. So this is a look into what can we do to exist within the system and play by their rules. So I don't know about you, julie, but I just. I love the ability to say you wrote the rules and I'm just playing by them.

Juli Quinn: 1:07

Yes, and that's what the insurance companies are counting on. They're very strong, very powerful right now in policy setting and we have to live in it. So there's two In any business. There's two sides to having a successful business. One is you have to either make more money or reduce your expenses. So that's pretty basic as far as a physician practice.

Juli Quinn: 1:39

To make more money means to see more patients, and that's not always possible. You have, however, many hours in a day, which equates to a certain number of appointment slots in your schedule, and you have staff limitations. You can't see patients by yourself. So if you, it's a fine balance. If you cannot afford to hire more staff, you cannot see more patients. You can't see more patients if you don't have the support staff. So we need to sometimes look at the other side of where can I be more efficient, where can I reduce overhead and maximize my time and my space and the resources that I have? And one of the areas is We've talked about DAPI.

Juli Quinn: 2:35

It's very difficult right now to attract and retain qualified staff and although I am certainly an advocate for hiring someone with a good personality and intelligence and have foundation and teaching them, I love that model that you have to be able to keep them, and that means they're expecting a pay raise annually, they're expecting benefits and the person down the road might offer a better package and just when you got them all trained, they jumped to this other opportunity because it's better for them. We want to be able to keep these people and I see a trend now where outsourcing is much more successful than it used to be. I always had a bit of a negative connotation and that's not the case anymore. We can be super efficient by outsourcing some of not all, but some of the steps necessary to running a good practice. So the staff we have in-house are less and we can pay them more and give them more ownership in feeling like they are an important part of this family, of this community that's delivering medical care to our patients. So we can elevate our in-house staff to a higher caliber and use outsourcing staff, and the bottom line is we're still can save money. I'm with GoSource, as you mentioned, and we have both onshore and offshore staff, and it makes our model be the same knowledge base as the folks you're hiring, but with a much more affordable TE rate, and this is something that we're seeing is really a game changer for many practices.

Juli Quinn: 4:44

An example is you're gonna want your in-house person we were talking about scheduling be very in tuned with your workflow and make appropriate appointments. That should be your person that you communicate with on a daily basis. Let's look at the schedule. This is what's working, this is what is it. So it's always being perfected.

Juli Quinn: 5:10

But the next step is we need to verify these patients insurance. We need to. After you see them, we need to submit their claim. Perhaps they need an authorization or pre-certification.

Juli Quinn: 5:25

Those are steps that could be done outsourced, especially now in the world of EHR. It's just a matter of logging in to your cloud-based EHR. I could be sitting anywhere and performing that task. I could be in your business office or I could be in India and effectively get those jobs done. So that's one. So AI this is the era of artificial intelligence, which is like a little scary at first to think oh, is this going to replace me? Absolutely not. It's to enhance really good chance that there are functions, important functions not being done in your office because of lack of resources, lack of staff time and by them not getting done is affecting the whole process, the whole RCM process. Ai it can perform these functions often at a very minimal cost, and now the in-house staff is more prepared for treating that patient and more successful in what we're going to recover as payment. So those are two really exciting innovations right now offering being offered to the medical fields.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 6:53

So one way is by delegating either to AI or to outsourcing, which it's, again, it's not a taboo topic because it's also looking at being cost effective, cutting overhead costs, which it's reality. It's going up, but this is one possible solution and GoSource is one of those. But you have not only offshore, you have onshore as well, which I believe in the power of choice, and so there are choices. But again, this can make believe in the power of choice. And so now what you have? A solution to potentially decreasing the overhead cost and also delegating to AI, such as those callback reminders for office visits. Going back to scheduling, if you don't get a confirmation, then open that up to be more effective. So there are ways to decrease cost, increase the profit margins with what we're already doing, but also embracing technology, and some of these things might be able to be done by EHR, like you said. So how much pushback in your consultation work, how much pushback have you seen from physicians regarding such functions or tasks, especially like with AI?

Juli Quinn: 8:16

Yes, we are very traditional, slower to come up with the times. We, meaning the medical profession, we have seen these types of, say, ai services. As consumers, we're seeing it in all aspects of our lives and it doesn't bother us. But yet the doctor feel that it's not, that's not us or that seems too complicated, or oh, that's another expense. But let's take an example of verifying insurance benefits. If you see 35 patients in a day and all of their benefits were verified in advance so that when they show up, their insurance is effective and this is the amount that needs to be collected from the patient, average is $25 copay. If half your patients are making that $25 copay, that's $5, $600 cash flow per day supplemented to your insurance billing. That's significant at the end of the month. If you're not, if you don't have that information, you're not collecting that.

Juli Quinn: 9:36

Now, not only is it not in your bank account, but you're spending money to send statements to try to collect it and that's costing you. It can cost anywhere from $3 to $8 per statement, depending on. Again, if you're doing it in-house, it's very expensive. If you're using a statement fulfillment center, it's still coming out of that $25. That is your payment. That should be in your bank account and then take it a step further.

Juli Quinn: 10:10

Let's say, one patient per day. Their insurance was not in effect. You see the patient, you're going to pay nothing and they're not responding to the statement. So now you've lost reimbursement for that one spot and had you known in advance, then you could let the patient know you're going to be paying. This is our rate at the time of the visit or if they opt out. Then you can now fill it with a patient who really wants to get in and that is going to result in payment for you. So you can see how it just dominos into a very important function just to confirm those benefits.

Juli Quinn: 10:56

Now let's talk about the cost of confirming benefits. If I have one of my staff on the phone trying to do all these benefit verification some have online, it's still going to take 10 minutes perhaps to confirm one patient online. If we have to pick up the phone and call, count on 30, 40 minutes per patient and you now have 35 patients every day that we're asking somebody to confirm, this could mean a full-time job for one staff person just to confirm your benefits for tomorrow. Ai can do it automatically in the background 35 cents per patient and the information is just there waiting for you when you come in the morning for your day schedule. So that's not a hard sell once I can present it that way to the decision makers in the medical field.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 11:55

And for those that are bad at math, if we just take five days of an average of $500 of collecting copies, times four weeks, that's 10,000 a month and that's on average. But let's say if we did 35 cents, that's a fraction of the amount that you're potentially missing out on. So it's pennies on the dollar really to make money upfront. So that is one way to try and capture again what we're already getting paid for, what we're already getting paid for what we're already doing. And then what about other things that we keep seeing coming up, like remote patient monitoring? I know that was one thing we used at the VA and it was a great tool.

Juli Quinn: 12:44

Yes, absolutely. Remote monitoring is beneficial in two ways. It actually is a revenue generator. There are codes that you can get paid. You submit one per month if the patient qualified to be paid for this added service. That's one benefit. But then there's the main reason. The benefit to the patient. The patient is a very common one would be blood pressure monitoring. Patient is unstable and you want to be able to detect an issue before it's a hospitalization. Remote monitoring can be doing. This is an AI technology can be doing a daily blood pressure reading for the patient and, if it is elevated, can even drop into the patient answering triage questions and then this information is sent to the office for physician or nurse to review and you then have your protocols of saying, okay, this one, I want it in my office, I need to see this patient and the others. You can say, okay, you guys are doing great, keep monitoring, it's good medicine. It's very affordable as opposed to you paying a nurse to talk to every patient. They're only talking to the one that had elevated responses of concern.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 14:13

And one of the reasons why I bring that up is because correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was designed for exactly that the chronic diseases that needed management more closely than the well controlled. But also it's a way of keeping in touch with the patients and having that real time information and trying to keep the patient out of the hospital and trying to keep them at home, where everybody's more comfortable at home.

Juli Quinn: 14:39

Yes, absolutely, and it's more affordable to the entire health system. Hospitals are going to be the most expensive. That being said, the mid caregivers are the and I don't want to confuse it with mid level which are your PAs and your nurse practitioners. What I'm referring to and I mean I'm choosing the wrong word is our primary care physicians. They are the ones that are monitoring these patients to say I need to intervene before this gets any more escalated and you end up in the hospital. And that is such a critical function and you really should be paid a whole lot more for serving that function, because you're saving so much money to the entire system of health care expenses by doing a good job at that level of intervention, and remote monitoring is a fabulous tool.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 15:40

I think one of those things that we had talked about previously is that the system pays for procedures and not prevention. Having said that, it's also a tool that could be used to help again with triage, with keeping monitoring those patients that are high risk, and also it's really a win-win because you reduce the overhead as far as overall resources not necessarily to the practice, maybe to the practice, but overall, and also it's about patient safety. But you can also keep good tabs, and my understanding is that in 2024, there will be reimbursement for that. Is that correct?

Juli Quinn: 16:20

There is reimbursement now. Actually it's not as many of the chronic conditions as what will be coming, so more are coming on. But congestive hard disease definitely is being monitored High blood pressure, diabetes. We will see this expanding into the types of diagnosis that will be reimbursed.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 16:45

Really trying to mean really trying to mainstream the flow of the office, ensuring that upfront we're communicating with our patients and we're also collecting that co-pay. And again, it's not that money is a bad thing. You're talking about doing things with the conscience, because you're communicating clearly with the patient about what their financial responsibility is, or even, to some, a financial burden. But at least there's clear communication whether, okay, this is what it's going to be. Do you want to continue? Okay, if we can verify this, then we can capture this co-pay. If we can mainstream our scheduling, then we can optimize for not only the patients but also the staff and the physician. So it's a win-win and still optimizing for the business flow. And GoSource can also be optimized as far as overhead reduction because of the onshore and offshore. Is that correct?

Juli Quinn: 17:58

That is correct. Yes, so we are support services in the RCM part of medicine Anything from the first contact to the end. We can do any part of it, and this is one of the things I love about GoSource is that because our focus is to make you more successful and to be able to serve patients better. However, we can serve you if it's one part, three parts or the entire end-to-end revenue cycle management, we are happy to participate in that. It's not a one-size-fits-all and we do customize to each practice's needs.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 18:46

Thank you for that, and the listener can reach out to you at gosourcein, and I would encourage the listener to set up that discovery call, because I've learned so much from you in our conversations over the last few months, and even more so on this podcast series, so thank you for that.

Juli Quinn: 19:07

Oh, thank you so much. I enjoyed being here with you and your listeners.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 19:11

What is one last pearl of wisdom you would like to leave our listeners?

Juli Quinn: 19:15

I would say get paid for what you're doing and look at ways that you're maybe spending too much that could be outsourced so that your folks in-house can be the top quality best folks and you can afford them, and that's gonna make the whole system look better.

Dr. Shah-Haque: 19:41

Thank you for that, and there's so much truth to that, because by making things efficient, by decreasing that overhead, by making sure we're capturing again, we've already provided the medical service. Let's get paid for what we have actually done and what we do, and it really isn't. As medicine is an art, so is recouping financial payment for services rendered. That's an art in and of itself, and GoSource can be the solution to that gap. So thank you very much, and this will all be in the show notes. Thanks again, julie.