2023-09-16 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AJTgdvWFfU Transcript YouTube English auto-captions. [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] welcome to another edition of bootstrap MD this is the podcast for healthcare and physician entrepreneurs we always love to have guests who are helping other doctors whether it be in their career helping them with their practice maybe helping them for their productivity even their life and I think we found another gem this gentleman is a problem-solving consultant and entrepreneur who enjoys connecting dots to create win-win win solution for clients he's currently working as a managing partner for healthcare Evolution group where he and his Partners have created multiple TurnKey Solutions helping doctors meet Medicare compliance increasing patient engagement increasing Revenue improved RAF and add other new income streams among other things that we're going to be covering on today's podcast and he's always loves to learn new things he likes to cook a horrible cook and he said we I'd probably skip that I can microwave hike re just being in nature and traveling with his wife and family I want to Welcome to the program Andy Grider Andy how are you doing my friend I am fantastic Mike thanks for having me this is a real pleasure I I I'm just uh super thrilled to be here thanks um and same here so just before the program we uh were connected with a mutual friend um uh Justin Green and we were talking about you know uh you know he he has the pulse on like networking and it just he seems to know a lot of folks he says I I need you to meet Andy he uh you know he and I think you need you guys need to connect you got to a lot in common so that's what started the impetus before this podcast episode today but I want to talk about your entrepreneur Beginnings we were just before the call we're talking about possibly going to the same marketing events back in the day we've got mutual friends how did you get involved into entrepreneurship ah wow um well I can thank some big corporations for that um uh I'll try to leave out names to protect the guilty but uh ATT um and uh some other folks that caused me to decide that corporate really wasn't my gig and get into the entrepreneurial world all the way back in the early to mid 90s I helped start a.com I helped do a couple other things along the way kind of fell into Consulting and problem solving because that's kind of the way my brain works but I've done a lot of different things Mike I've got a really wide swath of of background I I made jewelry for a few years I am a big sound fanatic I actually installed home theaters for a couple years um you know some of those were side jobs some of those remain jobs but really my heart has always been in helping other people and the find the easiest way I've found to do that is to solve problems that people are having and as the more you can do that in ways that help everyone um and Healthcare is a beautiful place to do that in because there's you know you've staffed you have doctors you have patients you have the system itself that needs fixed so there's all sorts of different challenges and possibilities there so it really kind of that that's what kind of got me all the way up to healthcare but I've worked in finance I've worked in Insurance I've worked in Tech I've worked in um pharmaceutical I all over the place Life Sciences um all you know and it's it's been fun um you know it's always there's always a new challenge out there there's always a problem that needs solved when I always loved asking this question about entrepreneurs uh you said you're in the corporate world um I think we caught the company you work with but we can edit it later if you'd like all right but did you have like family members who were entrepreneurs did you have that crazy uncle doing multi-level marketing or no actually no I really didn't um my my parents my dad was a school teacher and my mom uh worked in the actually I worked in the healthcare Arena doing uh teaching residents how to alleviate their medical debt um so I mean I did have exposure to Health Care early on but not really entrepreneurship um and so I just again my heart's always kind of been there I own my own jewelry company I made jewelry for a couple years when I was younger and that kind of that really lit the bug um actually I guess it really Harkens all the way back to high school I had a company uh installing uh VCRs back when you had to do the dial-in on the VCRs um because you know parents were coming by this vcr and they'd have no idea how to program it and I I had a couple friends that I took care of and they'd go out and help me install and I'd sell the VCRs and then go install them and it was fun it was you know it was an opening kind of foray into business and then beyond that um we you know I kind of uh you know followed that niche in college I tried to go corporate for a little while and it just didn't work for me um so and I now the entrepreneur bugs bit me since I was about 22 which is a good 30 plus years ago now so now Andy you did just date ourselves because there's a whole audience that has no idea what VCR means so just for my audience because I think I'm about the same age as you or getting close to it or older but perhaps vcrcs for video cassette recorders so for your youngins who are listening uh before that they had uh TiVo or you know automatically recording programs we would have these cassettes that could be betamax or VHS and then if you wanted to record your show let's say three's company yeah now we're really dating ourselves Mike yeah there you have okay uh friends or whatever you would go in and you would set your clock to record and I think probably about 15 of the population actually knew how to record on time and I guess you were one of that 15 to figured out how to do it uh it was a necessity thing I actually worked in a video store running videos and the okay one day can you figure out how to do these and I said sure and I figured it out and he said can you teach other people and I said sure and he said well let's figure out how we make that you know make that into a profit Center he was a he was a former construction worker who was an entrepreneur so that was probably my entrepreneurial influence now that I think about it Mike I don't know I've ever really thought back that far to that whole Genesis but there you go and then if you would have been able to actually stop the 12 o'clock for because my dad always had that as VCR he never figured out how to stop the 12 o'clock oh Lord yes yes indeed there's I mean there were all sorts of challenges but we were usually able to overcome them um very few people knew how to do it so um oh anyway yes go ahead please okay so let's with that segue let's talk about health care what got you involved in healthcare this that's that's the big Behemoth right everybody says there's a lot of money to it but there's a lot of problems to it as well well and I think actually this the last part of what you just said Mike is what got us involved is there's a lot of things that need to be solved um we uh came across um an offering that we really liked um through a who's a there's gentleman who's now our third business partner uh my partner Buzz McComb and I had Healthcare Evolution group running for a while um we brought Jorge Gonzalez in with us um uh you know along the way um but uh what we were shown was a program that helped doctors with their uh compliance issues with their patient engagement side of things and with new Revenue um and it kept them away from dealing with the macro law um that's out there I mean nine percent penalties are never a good thing when you're running a 20 margin um and so the first thing I looked at is while this is a huge risk if you don't actually take care of it now the second part was oh wow we can engage the patients and help avoid emerging care situations and help the doctors see the people they need to see in the timely fashion that they need to see them while we maintain a baseline on all the people that are doing well enough but might have something emerging right and then the last part is we can create brand new Revenue we're not robbing Peter to pay Paul a lot of the programs that I've always seen in healthcare you know borrow from some other column in order to create quote unquote new profit ours is actually brand new profit and then I got further into it and I went I love this because it looks and feels like the practice there's no real integration um there's no Tech integration issues there's no HIPAA risk there's not even an issue with uh the EHR we can you know we basically can log directly in and the doctors are pulling up their soap notes right in front of them boom boom boom it's you know it's really easy to um you know to put into a practice and it really helps the practice so once that kind of came in play we started talking with a lot of groups um we started recruiting a team of um former Healthcare Executives uh folks that have been retired and who wanted to get out of the house and go do something fun and visit their old friends and uh or the people that that took their place when they left and we started running this out and seeing what would happen and that was uh maybe a year-ish ago um and in the last nine months we've added three other services into the stack um so we you know we call it CPR compliance patient engagement Revenue we partner with a company that is a tremendous branding partner and uh execution partner on that part and um again like I said what they do is remarkable and what it helps anybody that takes Medicare whether it's the patient the staff or the doctor it's a huge help to them um so you know and again win-win-win um that's what we're looking for um the next parts I mean I can I can get into but I you know I'll pause so he's a doctor I wasn't used to asking for help especially when it came to subjects outside of medicine but then I found physiciancoaches.com in an instant I found hundreds of experts to help me in all aspects of life on areas I was afraid to ask dealing with burnout starting a side gig money management even help with my marriage and the best part nearly all experts are Physicians themselves after reading their profile in a quick chat I knew I found the right Mentor for me at physiciancoaches.com help from professional colleagues is just a click away [Music] so when so you talked about your four you know your four major services with Healthcare Evolution group I'm just curious working with doctors have you seen like a common uh theme you know with the doctor owner you're seeing like the same problems again and again is it is there something that you can kind of point to that maybe will help the practice owners who are listening to this program uh just be aware of or just be aware of that these problems can occur that's a really good question Mike um you know I think the biggest problem they're facing is um a bit of um It's a combination of apathy over laws that have been passed but not enacted and that's Macro for you that was passed in 2015 they only enacted it at the beginning of this year so they've been being warned and warned and warned and warned and it's a big you know it's the little boy that cried wolf and the government's the little boy right and so they keep saying oh we're going to do this we're going to do this and now they actually are um so I think there's a certain amount of skepticism is the other word I would say so you know what we do is we run a report for them so a lot of times I see skepticism I see a lot of folks saying are ACO or MSO or or whomever takes care of this for us and in real in realistic terms they usually don't um they don't do what they need to do to do all of it anyway and certainly not at the level at which we're able to perform for them so we run a free report for them um so there's no upfront cost to any of what we do either and we run this free report that shows them where they stand so I mean I'd say you know finding out where you stand with CMS and how CMS is seeing your practice is probably the biggest thing that most people need right out of the gate um they don't know they need it until we run the report for them um you know reports as simple as getting a MPI number from them and saying okay let's run and see what CMS is seeing um we have a ability to do that at a level that is is pretty impressive and um the uh the report that comes back shows them on those 46 touch points for Medicare um and the macro law you know where are they compliant where are they not what do they need to do to get compliant um you know and then we show them how we can help so I think a lot of times doctors um also uh let's just be honest I think most doctors are like most people they're human beings they don't like to ask for help um they don't want to say I need help I'm sorry even more so right yeah I was going to say possibly more so um but in this case what the help looks like is is very congruent to their practice and very much uh congruent to what they want to do and how they want to practice so we're kind of a helping hand that comes in in the background looks and feels like them and can perform a lot of these um touch points I mean the typical Medicare patient is seen somewhere between two and four times a year right there's no way you can do 28 services that are required in those two to four messages too especially even in four there's just no way and then you know if you're not compliant with 28 out of the 46 you're going to end up with your fines and your penalties so it breaks down that simply so a lot of times it's just asking them are you aware of what you're up against and they might think they are and then we can show them that you know hey here's what you know this is really what's happening behind the scenes this is what they're going to send you you know probably shortly is this letter that says hey you know you need to actually put together an action compliance plan once they do that then you're on the clock the good part is we can get to you before that before you get the letter and get you compliant and not ever have to get the letter right um you know and so I mean again I think there's a lot of people that have judged this as something that oh that's not going to happen to me that's only going to be the big systems um and they're right they're going to start with the big systems don't don't get me wrong but we've gotten plenty of people that have come back to us in the last six months that have said hey I got my letter I should have listened before so that's the stuff I really want to avoid Mike because it's a panic moment it's a really intense uh you know oh no oh my gosh you know this could you know be a really devastating peace moment sure sure I guess you know like it's just human nature just as we do with patients they want to get their lab tests because they're afraid of they're going to find out something sometimes you just need to bite the bullet just get it done before you find out that it's too late and and if I may Mike to that to that example and it's a good one except the one part is if I'm getting lab results back I don't know what I'm getting back and I don't know what we can do about it here no matter what you get back we actually know what we can do about it so there's I mean there's a lot less of a Fear Factor if you look at it um logically now again you know watch logic and fear don't always go together so right you know it's um but you know realistically I think you're right I mean I think a lot of people are a little scared to pull back the curtain and see what's back there you know they they're a little worried that it's not going to be pretty and in a lot of cases they're actually right but we again we have an ability to make that part pretty which is kind of nice um you know and then like I said we have other things we can bring in I mean and I should say we you know we concentrate on the primary the folks with the primary relationship with the Medicare patient so it's primary care it's internal medicine it's geriatrics and it's Family Medicine um largely that we work with and then we work with everybody from the small clinics all the way up to the larger systems in the country um Healthcare system-wise so it's it's a fun you know it's a really fun space to be playing in and there's about 88 percent of positions that are still not compliant um so it's a pretty wide open field too wow so let's talk about some of the other services wound care is one of the services that you can that you offer yeah it's um it's a field that has always kind of had a bad rap um because you know traditionally a doctor is going to refer that out um to some external uh Source because wet wraps and you know and Manuka honey and things like that are not something they usually want to play around with it's usually a very long healing time um it's got a higher recurrence rate it's got a fairly High infection rate it also leads to a lot of problems for the patients and the patients turn around and blame the doctor um and you know that's not a that's not a good situation for any of them um so what we have done is we've built a turnkey solution that is a really powerful deal um with a partner of ours again that is um the full software package that goes through all the ordering goes through um uh tracking goes through all the patient pieces all the picture taking all the the we can even do all the billing for them on the claims uh Mike are you still there yeah okay I thought I lost you um you know and we can go through all the all the pieces like that but the best part about it is there's no out-of-pocket cost because we can do it at 90 at 60-day net billing so um these patches are they're amniotic patches um they're dehydrated so they've got shelf life but you don't want to have to buy 10 of them at a time out of your own pocket in order to get a discount um you know and be committed to an ongoing program to get a discount we've made it so that it's really simple really easy very TurnKey um to bring in and you know average doctor with a thriving practice is going to refer out between two and four patients a month to somewhere else this allows them to bring back in probably 75 percent of that current patient load because there's certain things we we still need to refer out there's you know exposed bone and things like that um you know are going to probably be referred out to a surgeon or some somewhere else but when you look at the actual uh caseload I mean a lot of these doctors are picking up three or four new patients a month and it's a substantial increase to their practice bottom line and again at very little risk to them if if there really is any risk at all because the programs also there's no contracts um there you know we encourage people to give it a good six months and make sure that they've given it it's full best but we have yet to have anybody drop out um we have up to anybody even really be anything other than Throne um with what happens because we're able to do um a provide a service for their patients that they weren't able to provide before um Word of Mouth takes care of you know the cousin the neighbor the the co-worker coming in um and suddenly you're seeing instead of two or three patients a month you're seeing seven or eight um and your profit Center just keeps increasing and you become more and more popular in your hometown um or in your area um the only place it's all part b Medicare um we do not work with the part a side of things so we don't work with hospitals on the wound care that's a whole different animal and we don't we don't play in that field or in that space But I mean podiatrists dermatologists um Home Care nursing homes Assisted Living um we even can work directly with RNs um and uh and and well I should say um nurse practitioners um in large part depends on the state on whether they need a sponsor or whether they need other training um but like Florida they literally open their own practice and the woman who we partnered up with has had a career much like you have Mike of helping Physicians open successful practices so she just applies that over to the nurse practitioner side then from there so it's been fun um yeah that's been a great piece um that's one of the other pieces that we work on So speaking of wounds one big womb that we have in practice is when we have we provide a service and then we don't get paid and we have to use a collections agency and with that really awkward segue talk about how you can help uh practices get some of their money back oh thanks Mike um you know it's it's a sentence I never thought would come out of my mouth um in my lifetime if you had asked me a few years ago to say that I work in I work with and and in debt collection um but what we found is a company that we partnered up with that is a compassionate and empathetic debt collection company and that's uh I know that's kind of hard to even fathom for a lot of people but they don't use lawyers they don't report to credit bureaus they don't threaten um you know uh and uh manipulate they don't push um they literally meet you where you're at and then they use AI to kind of check in so they might send you a text that says hey Mike can you make that payment this Friday and you say yes or no and if they say no then you get a nice phone call that says hey you know how can we get you back on track what happened are you okay you know that kind of thing but they've collected about 1.5 to 3 times as much as a typical agency and the other thing that's really important to understand there Mike is whether you're in a specific state or nationally there are a lot of new laws about collections especially around medical debt and medical debt 500 and under which is about 80 percent of medical debt that are going into play that are Consumer Protection Bureau act that eliminate the ability to go to a credit bureau which is page one of most people's Playbook right the folks we're working with they don't do it at all so that's not doesn't affect them and so a lot of people that are with traditional companies are going to see that level drop even more because they aren't able to use their first page of their playbook anymore um with these guys we again I think that's why they're getting up to you know around the three percent are the three times return but 1.3 to 1.9 is pretty typical um you know higher return and you know again this is all money that you weren't sure you were ever going to get back so it's bonus money um so why not get more of it why not why not get more of it back and and on top of that Mike and you kind of already alluded this a little bit but you don't end up upsetting the patients the patients don't come in and spend the first part of their appointment complaining about the collection Bureau you sent them to and how nasty they were um you know and I I talked to enough nurses and enough doctors to know that happens yeah yeah we they're just like we realize that we're not going to get it back so just having that option you know it does sound like uh you know not having that you know uh negative you know Sledgehammer approach just doesn't work all the time finally um I know you know our time is coming to close you also help doctors protect their assets and help them with privacy tell us about that so we are um fortunate enough to work with a trust that is a contract law trust it is uh kind of unlike most trusts that are out there most of them are uh changeable by either state or national legislation and with ours it's contract also it's actually uh pretty much Rock Solid and it's a trust that will help increase privacy it um do tax deferral and um Shield um from malpractice suits and things like that um it'll help protect the nest egg they've been building and help them build generational wealth over time so it's something they can you know use as a legacy tool as well to leave things behind to the kids in a way that they might not have otherwise been able to do doctors are always burdened with higher tax brackets and stranger requirements and you know all sorts of stuff they have to carry Insurance wise and protection wise this is probably one of the smartest things the other thing that's great about it is it's a one-time charge it's not a yearly it's not an ongoing it's a one-time setup and done um and you know again with legislative and and uh statutory law those can change literally a couple times a year sometimes you know they'll change pieces of it and you'll have to go pay the lawyer or that you had set it up um you know another fee and another fee and another fee and then well you know you have to refile it this is uh the other thing about this trust is it files once every 21 years and you don't pay the fee again in 21 years you just refile um so it's not you know there's not a extra whammy at the end of it but again you know when you're talking about people that are making uh you know upper up middle middle upper class income and up it's usually especially if they're K1 or um it's a it's really a strong tool um there's other things we do within that to help the doctors there's wealth acceleration Vehicles there's policies that we can put in we can protect their IP we can protect their practice we can protect all the equipment they have um there's a lot of things we can do with this trust that are pretty beneficial and pretty amazing so um you know again it's something that's really easy to learn about um and we can make all the information available um as as people want to know great great about any of these could you just share I know you work with a lot of doctors and I know you're rolling out you know some big things that are coming out maybe you share like a you know a couple of success stories one or two success stories of uh groups one doctor that we started with pre-coded um so it's going back away so we got a nice track record there uh was running the CPR program and it has been for uh you know still still is um they weren't sure what was going to work for them they were actually ready to go to private uh private pay um they wanted to cut out Medicare entirely they were in Florida so they probably had the population to do it um and the area of Florida they were in they probably almost definitely had the population to do it but um they decided to take a chance because the the person who talked to them was a good friend and um you know they rolled the dice and went with it um and the first year they did really well they started seeing new income they started seeing patients they you know hadn't seen before they started increasing their patient base and seeing people come in more often because that's the other thing we can do is book appointments for the people that need them we don't take any of that income at all um and then the um the back side of it is um three years later they had enough Revenue coming in between the two partners uh practicing practicing Physicians that they are now able to open a spa um you know their wives wanted to open when they were going to retire and now they're able to open it early and everybody's able to work and it'll be their retirement vehicle um so but they were able to do it out of brand new income which is never a bad thing um I I would say one other quick one is um the the Wound Care Program because of how fast actually both programs CPR and wound care produce Revenue very very quickly 30 to 60 days we've got revenue coming in for the doctors which is pretty much unheard of too you don't usually get programs that are brand new that you know they usually take six to 12 months to move um anyway the long story short we've saved a bunch of practices and I don't mean to sound Melancholy or or I'm not melancholy I mean overly overly dramatic about it um you know it's I I but I don't want to sound Melancholy either is what I started my tongue got ahead of my brain um you know where it's not a big deal it is a really big deal um you know a lot of these doctors were struggling after covid they were trying to figure out how to regain their footing they had taken some serious hits and some you know some disappointing losses um and we've been able to put profit centers in place for them that have been very easy for them to bring in for their staffs to run for their patients to grok to and work with um you know again it's it's all and they really The Soup To Nuts part of what we do I mean the fact that it's a turnkey solution they don't have to really do a whole lot other than participate awesome awesome again Andy you you do so many different things I know we're just kind of scratching the surface on on some of the programs really can't you know wish we could go had time to go more in depth but we're going to leave a link for those who are interested in learning more whether it be the wound care the CPR the collections the helping uh helping doctors with their assets we'll leave a link in the show notes uh today this has been tremendous I can tell by your heart you just love helping others helping other Physicians I'm sure you you've already talked about it and you've seen it firsthand our doctors are struggling out there but guys there's always options there's always Solutions out there if people have figured it out uh you don't have to completely abandon things there is still hope for us but for Andy uh again thank you again for for joining us on the program any last minute thoughts before we end the call today um you know I want to kind of echo some of what you said Mike um you know we see a lot of folks that are um tired they're worn out they're beat down um and they're maybe not enjoying medicine the way they used to they're not enjoying what they signed up for um because a lot of times it's gotten to where you know they're filling out charts and punching screens more than they're doing anything else um one of the nice things about all of our programs is it it helps eliminate some of that as well um and I love seeing that reaction from doctors they're like wow I got some of my time back I got some of my life back I got you know I got an ability now to I've got new Revenue I can actually hire the person I really needed to hire but I couldn't afford um all sorts of things like that that are again you know either large or mini success stories but they're all positive gain um and you know to your point there is hope out there um it's not all gone to complete crap at this point it's you know it's frustrating it's aggravating but there's a lot of changes that are happening in the move to value-based care um in this move to quintuple aim that are actually positive um and uh that you know I think we can certainly uh talk with folks and help address so again thanks Mike for having me it's just an absolute thrill to be able to help a lot of people and through your program I hope we get the alcohol a lot more well thank you Andy again his company is apropos Healthcare Evolution group because that's what you need to do you can't stand still in it you need to evolve think about considering some of these programs that Andy's presented to us and whether or not you decide to go with his program or other programs out there just realize there may be somebody out there who's maybe have figured it out found a shortcut maybe an easier way of doing things you know the definition of insanity right is keep banging your hands against the wall and keeping things will change uh thanks again Andy for for joining us and thank you for listening and as always guys don't just stand still find out different options find out different paths to success and keep moving forward [Music]