Blueprint For Saving 11 Billion Dollars In Healthcare Costs: MD On-Line CEO Bill Bartzak (Part 7)

SM: If you are able to pull in 600 doctors’ offices a month, I imagine that a lot of that is happening on its own.

BB: We have to spend about 15 to 20 minutes on the phone with each new office to teach them how to use the system.

SM: Do you have to do any phone sales, or do you just do phone interactions after they join?

BB: We have telephone communication both before and after a sale. We have been dealing with insurance companies for such a long time now that we are constantly doing mailings with them. We also do a lot of seminars with insurance companies, which the doctors are invited to.

SM: You are using marketing as part of your sales, which is a much more efficient way of recruiting customers. Do you have to do telesales on top of marketing?

BB: We do some telemarketing to upsell and turn offices that are using only the free claims processing into paying customers of our other services. That is where the marketing stops and sales begin.

SM: What is the perspective of your board and investors on a potential exit? I imagine that you are in position to pay dividends and so forth.

BB: When the opportunity to exit comes in front of us, we will know it. We are constantly talking to people to know what the appropriate exit would be. There are options. We could sell it to someone else, take it public on our own, or continue to run it as a private company. We have to evaluate what would be best for the stakeholders in the company and best for the industry.

With everything that is going on in healthcare right now, we are hearing people talk about having a mandate for electronic claims. There really should be. There is $11 billion of waste through processing paper claims. The technology exits, not just with MD On-Line. It cuts out a lot of waste.

Only 10% of the healthcare providers in the country get their payments electronically. That number is staggering[ly low]. At one of our recent conferences, I asked how many people in the room received a paper paycheck and had to take it to the bank to deposit it. There was not one hand raised. Physicians’ offices and insurance companies are farther behind than we are as employers and employees. That needs to change.

SM: There are two issues. Filing for the claims and then getting paid electronically. Is the $11 billion in savings for both filing claims and getting paid, or just filing?

BB: That is just for filing. If the entire process were conducted electronically, it would save over $86 billion per year. That number comes from the American Medical Association.

SM: Is electronic filing being addressed in the most recent healthcare legislation?

BB: No. That is heartbreaking. If they want to see savings, this is a great opportunity for it. A lot of people brought it up, but it never made it. The government is going to pay doctors to move into electronic health records, but that does not mandate electronic filing.

SM: That sounds like more low-hanging fruit.

BB: It definitely is. We have the doctors’ attention because we are getting them paid. The neat thing about our business is that we really do help the insurance companies and doctors get claims processed faster and save money. In the middle of that we get to make some money.

SM: I have really enjoyed this story. Congratulations.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Blueprint For Saving 11 Billion Dollars In Healthcare Costs: MD On-Line CEO Bill Bartzak
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