Boost Healthcare Revenue with Gamified Efficiency | Expert Interview with Matt Seefeld

Our society, especially in the workforce needs to feel love. They need a sense of belonging. They need to feel respected. All things are important, but they also need to be recognized. If you think about how many likes do I have on this post? How many views did I get on this video? The way we are, our kids are all into it now, but adults are all into it. So part of our gamification approach is giving some of that back. So it's a lot of yay, applause. You got this paid. You're doing great. We're really focusing on making sure that the staff are competing against themselves, right? I'm big on I compete against Matt. I don't compete against you. If I start competing against you, just like in athletics, I've already lost because my head is now thinking about what you're going to do, not what I need. So while we like to look at benchmarks and get a sense of how people are against people that are doing the similar jobs, our gamification engine is really driven on making sure that if you do better today than you did yesterday, if you're more productive and effective because you want to be, you're going to be recognized for the work that you're doing. So it plays into that, that desire to be loved, that desire to be recognized, the desire to be rewarded for the work we're doing. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us Matt Seafeld. Matt is the executive vice president of Met Evolve. A top provider of data driven solutions that help healthcare businesses optimize their revenue cycles and medical billing teams to lower money collection costs, increase efficiency and enhance revenues. Welcome to our show, Matt. Thank you. I appreciate you having me on. My pleasure. That's amazing what you're doing here because we owned a medical facility in the past and collections, invoicing and following up, you needed basically full-time people to manage that. So is this like a software driven or is it a service? How does it work? Yeah. So it's a combination. I came on board back in 2017 with Met Evolve, the CEO at the time. And I had previously worked together and it's really a company that was founded by a couple of orthopedic surgeons. They very quickly realized the limitation in billing software systems. So they went out and developed their own. They very shortly after launching the billing software systems to the market realized doctors don't necessarily want to follow up on insurance claims. So they started a revenue cycle company. And so it grew, it grew very well over the years. And then when 20, I'd say 2013, 2014, when the EMR craze started to slow down, that was their big resellers that they would basically, the electronic health record would get sold, the practice management company, PM system would get sold as a part of that, and then a lot of those clients would opt into the Met Evolve rent cycle services. So it was a good world. They never built an EMR. So we've never built one and we weren't in the cloud. So as you probably know, this industry is commoditized, heavily commoditized with revenue cycle companies and practice management systems. So we had to go beyond that if we were going to continue. And that's really why I came on board. You had to integrate. You had to integrate with those systems. We had to figure out a way that we were going to be relevant going against the big ones like Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, right? This is a small little rock, Arkansas, privately owned company, right? So this was, but here's what's interesting was the software that we, that we deliver today, which is really this effective intelligence framework was actually built to save our recycle business. Our margins had dried up because people were getting more expensive and reimbursements were going down. And there was lots of inefficiencies in the revenue cycle of our clients. So we built this software out of necessity to get our margins back up to where they need to be. And now it's been interesting is I'm sure you are aware of your listeners. Inflation has played a big, is a big pain point in healthcare. You think about these organizations are spending 15 to 20% more on staff, labor, both clinical administrative and supplies to deliver the same service they were delivering before. And guess what's also happening. Your reimbursements are going down. Medicare keeps cutting reimbursement. Insurance companies are now using AI bots to deny claims more efficiently. It's the game. And I love that you said people intensive when you're talking about what your experience with it. It's still people intensive. So how do we, how do we bridge the gap? And the only thing we control, which is less people, I need less people. I need more efficient people, more effective. So you have all of this stuff happening, economic challenges and the delivery of healthcare, but then we also have a social issue. People don't want to work anymore. They want to only give you enough. If you pay me 18 bucks an hour, my friend, I'm only going to give you $18 an hour worth of work. There's no more self-actualization. So that you've got the people who are like, eh, I'll leave you for two bucks more if I can get two bucks more in the street, our software, what it does now is it's actually gamifying the experience. So we're measuring people in an objective way and the ones that are innards, the ones that want to be better today than yesterday, they actually generate more income. And we do it through a gamification engine points so that they get recognized for the work they do. They get rewarded for the work they do. And then therefore they're retained. So it's, and here's, what's crazy is the companies that are out there in this space, the large PM EMR companies, right? The blue chips. They haven't even figured this out yet because they're spending all their time focusing on the clinical side, right? How efficient are the physicians? I need the physicians to love the electronic health record. Now they want to focus on the consumer. I need the consumer to be engaged, but who gets left behind in my 23 years in revenue cycle management. It's the people that are actually getting you paid for the services that you deliver. They always are. That's like the forgotten soldiers. They're always forgotten. And nowadays, if you don't have motivated individuals that want to prevent mistakes and do the right thing on the first pass to get the outcome you expect, you're even in more dire straits because you're spending 20% more for those people. It's a bad time in healthcare. I was interviewed yesterday by a research company and they were focused really in life sciences. And she was talking about all this cool innovation in life sciences and all these cool robotics and AI driven things to be more efficient in the OR. And I kind of made a joke with her. I said, who's paying for it? And she was like, well, what do you mean? And I said, that's great. All these awesome biopharma biotech companies. Everyone's got this new gadget. It's got to get paid for what if somebody needed some recertification on that and they didn't get it and it got denied and they didn't overturn it. You're out $5,000 now. And so I love innovation, but we have to understand too, you still in a North American healthcare have to get paid by somebody. It's either the patient or it's the insurance company. In most cases, it's a combination of both. A mix of it. Yeah. And it does create some sort of enthusiasm in what they do. Can you elaborate how the gamification looks like with your product? Yeah. So one of the things that we realized was I used to say it's a generational thing and I'm not trying to pick on Gen Z or young millennials or anything. I've actually changed my town and realized that our society now. And especially in the workforce needs to feel loved. They need a sense of belonging and they need to feel respected. All things are important, but they also need to be recognized. If you think about how many likes do I have on this post? How many views did I get on this video? How many, right? The way we are, our kids are all into it now, but adults are only doing. So part of our gamification approach is giving some of that back. So it's a lot of yay, applause. You got this paid. You're doing great. We're really focusing on making sure that the staff are competing against themselves. Right. I'm big on, I compete against Matt. I don't compete against you. If I start competing against you, just like in athletics, I've already lost because my head is now thinking about what you're going to do, not what I need. So while we like to look at benchmarks and get a sense of how people are against people that are doing the similar jobs, our gamification engine is really driven on making sure that if you do better today than you did yesterday, if you're more productive and effective because you want to be, you're going to be recognized for the work that you're doing. Okay. And so it plays into that, that desire to be loved, that desire to be recognized, the desire to be rewarded for the work we're doing. And a lot of the old school folks that I grew up with are like, I'm already paying you. I'm already paying you money. I'll give you, I'll give you a real example. I was talking to a buddy of mine that runs a call center and he was talking about his high turnover. So 30, 35% turnover. I'm like, seriously, it's got a hundred, hundreds of people. I said, so 30 to 35, 40% of your people, just what come on for a month. Supports tons of clients. Every client has protocols. You've got to learn. So the training just to get somebody proficient is like intense, lots of money. And I said, what do you pay these folks? 16 bucks a month. And I was like, that's pretty low. Is that's market. I'm like, that's an old school way of thinking. I said, here's what I, he goes, what would you do? I said, I would pay him $19 an hour. Then I'd give him another $2 an hour. If they show up to work, because that's another problem. People like just don't show up. And then I would pay another $2 if they hit the performance measures that you are already looking at. And he's a CF public CFO by training. So he's doing all these numbers. He's so you want me to pay $750,000 more per year for people to show up to work and perform above what I'm saying. I said, that's exactly what I'm saying. And I said, work with me for a second. How much does it cost you to pay the recruiter? They use a staffing agency. They have to pay 30 or 40% of the premium every time they get to take that. So that's $60 an hour times 30, 40% for at least the first 90 days. But you're losing people in the first 30 days to 60 days. So you're paying the premium and then you just lose these people. How much does it cost when you lose a client? How much does it cost when people don't show up to work and your abandonment rate goes from 5% to 50 big picture. So immediately he's okay. I see what you're saying. And here's the best part is I said, how many people do you have today? Well, it's 75. Do you think you'll need 75 people to handle the same amount of phone calls today, if people showed up to work and were motivated to actually resolve calls and that's really got it. He goes, no, I said, you probably need half those people. So immediately it was like, so I was a long story for you, but I really believe that incentive based revenue cycle is the future, whether we like it or not. I know this is an entrepreneurial podcast and I literally left Deloitte and Touche in 2006 to start my first workflow automation analytics company, which is exactly what I rebuilt here at MetaVault because I couldn't stand the fact that we couldn't measure people. We couldn't measure people. I was working with a big health systems, billion dollar academic medical centers, big ones. And they're sitting there collecting less than they should be. Right. They've got denials up the wazoo right there. There's all these inefficiencies going on in the revenue cycle. And I'm like, you realize it's a breakdown in your people, right? What do you mean? That's the person scheduling the appointment or getting the pre-certification or verifying eligibility benefits was motivated to just do it right the first time. Your claims would go out clean and get paid. They couldn't grasp it. Back then was interesting. Is the systems couldn't measure it. They didn't, I didn't have a system and I hadn't developed it. Right. But they couldn't measure every unit of work being done to get claims paid. And that's what we've done. We can measure everything. So we look at metrics now, like zero touch rate, which in our industry would be how many claims get generated and out the door without a single human touch. No one had to get involved. No human make a 19, 20 or 25 bucks an hour guy, right? You need to know that the other piece is the work effort. How much work is it taking when humans do get involved to get the outcome and is the outcome even what you expect it to be? So I know we're getting deep here, but think about this all goes back to people. It's people doing the right thing at the right time that are motivated. They're recognized. They're rewarded. They're going to stay with you. They're not going to leave you. They're customers for life. Or they are, if you think about Ritz Carlton and Disney, they got it right. They realized early on that it's not about focusing on the customer experience. It's focusing on the employee experience because when their employees are empowered to move heaven and earth, to do the best thing possible for the customer, guess what happens, your customer satisfaction goes up and your revenue and profitability. Is maximized. So we're trying to bring that back into revenue cycle where let's focus on the employees, but let's give you the software that measures them objectively and allows you to then gamify, recognize reward, and ultimately retain those bucks. And that's not, it works. We've seen major financial improvement in our clients that are adopting in a year ago when I would speak about this stuff on stage, I got this, it seems cool. Whatever. Now they're like, Oh my God, I'm losing people. Everyone wants to work from home. I can't measure them in the home. They're not in cubicles anymore. It's all changed. That's awesome. It's good to have this in place because it makes things more efficient. It runs businesses more smoother. Can you share a specific example of how MedEvolved has helped the healthcare business optimize the revenues and increase their efficiency? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I actually like to call myself out first is that when we deployed this software, we had developed it and then we deployed it and it was actually in its infancy. It's, it was not even, I'm not even comparing to where we are today. Is it the first thing that we saw was a huge drop in labor expense. Now, some of those individuals chose to not be a part of the team. They didn't want to be measured, right? They wanted to just go make the same amount of money or a little bit more somewhere else that wasn't going to hold them accountable. So we lost about 25%, which at the current state of affairs was actually not a bad thing that we need to free up cashflow for the business. But then what was so interesting is that we started to see the people that stayed really rise up into performance. And the one thing that I did initially was I actually allowed us to re-recruit people. What we found was a lot of the employee satisfaction issues was not because they didn't want to do a good job, but they didn't have the training to do the best job, and in some cases they didn't want to do that specific job. We had people posting payments that are social. They wanted to talk to patients. They wanted to be on the phones. We had people following up with insurance companies who hated that. They wanted to be payment posters or coders or charging. So part of understanding the employee experience is actually making sure people are in the right. Once you're in the right roles, then you have to decide you're in the right roles, you're capable of doing a good job, but are you willing? And that's where the gamification is, right? If you're willing, you're going to get rewarded for it. So we saw our overtime almost dried up completely, which for us was a ton of overtime, hundreds and hundreds of hours a month went on, went on. I think we dropped it by about 90%. So that was a big measure there. Our clients' revenue cycle performance improved, right? And so you think about these are folks that are following up on claims, coding claims for a lot of, we're in the surgical specialty space, independently on physician groups, and all of a sudden our client satisfaction came up. They're like, wow, my AR is getting better. My denial rates are improving, my overture rates. So we're starting to get chatter from clients that, Hey, something's different here at MedEvil. What actually became, I would say that when I looked at like margin per FTE hour or what I call FTE work hour, it was absolutely unbelievable to see how that went up, right? That went up like 60%. And I'll tell you why actually went up more than that. Why it went up was we onboarded a lot of new contracts and I didn't have to hire like I used to. So I was bringing on new revenue, cleaner revenue cycles because people were motivated to do a good job and I had less people to do it. So all of a sudden our margin just popped up. And so I was where you normally would have taken me. I think we had 82 people when we started this journey and we got it down as low as 38. Managing almost two times the client count. And, and this was before we had gamification. This was back in, in 2019 to 2020. So that was a big thing. We also noticed that what we didn't know COVID was coming, but what was nice was when COVID came in April of 2020, I already had the software in place to measure people in the home. So we sent all of our team home and we've never brought them. So think of the office space, we've said, the lease, we're going to have to move out of a building. We're going to have to rent more of these space somewhere else. And a lot of our clients, by the way, they buy our software because of that. They want to shut down the office or convert an office into more weight, more exam rooms, increased throughput and put an MRI. So we saw that where I'm seeing the big return on investment now, and I'll use, I'm actually speaking with, with Will here next week in a big ortho conference. And he's a CEO of a large orthopedic group up in the Northwest is he really started to get bought in on zero touch rate. And he was the first client that really started to understand that if his people are doing a good job and my people are doing a good job, then the work effort rate should be fairly low and the zero team is not having to get involved. Should be pretty high. So we're actually now looking at how that improvement is driving margins for both organizations. It's improved our margin for me because I have less people trying to follow up on bad claims because he did something wrong and there's more margin for him because he's got less people now required to do the same job because they're motivated. So it's just more efficient when, when, but it's the, when, when, so you have two measures now. I love that analogy. So which one is right? I mean, I tell everybody it's healthcare. The only thing that we control with the right software in place is, is literally the, is the people and the human effort and you mentioned integration. And that was the other thing that we've done in the last two years is that we don't, we still have a great practice management system, but most of our large contracts now we're just putting our effective intelligence software on top of anybody. I don't care if you're on Cerner or Allscripts, Epic, Modvent, doesn't matter. I'm literally an upgrade to that PM system. It gives you the actual data necessary to measure people, measure zero touch rate, measure work effort rates. And so instead of clients hoping that those companies come around, which they won't, you just upgrade, you just, it's easy data into a data warehouse, warehouse to my software, people work on my software back to warehouse and then out into the analytics platform. So that's allowed us to see it big time as a company, which is why we're growing as fast as we are compared to where we were five years ago. And Matt, for the zero touch point, do you involve any artificial intelligence or machine learning? For that part? Yeah. So what we're starting to do now, we're actually our data science organization is our fastest growing organization, which is probably pretty common for a lot of software companies out there is that we are capturing so much rich structured data that we can start to apply learning principles around that data. So every time we see this type of profile and say an insurance claim and you do these things, you have a much higher likelihood of a good outcome. But if you keep doing those other things, you've got a much lower likelihood of a good financial outcome. So let's now drive. So take that learning and drive that back into our workflow solution. So what we're doing, if you think about Sally's calling blue cross to follow up on an authorization denial, right? What pops up in front of her is exactly what she should do. It's almost removing thinking a little bit and de-risking touches because remember everything is measured in touch. How many touches by how many different humans did it take to get your pay? We're trying to remove touches. When you remove touches, you reduce labor costs, right? Ideally we get to zero touch, but we know that human errors never get to a hundred percent zero, but I've seen some of our clients now are larger ones. I've seen them as high as 75%. Now you think about that 75% never. You sure? Never because technology is continuously increasing. You don't think we'll be pretty, pretty close to a hundred, right? Let's put it this way. As long as the insurance companies are here, I have a, I may be six feet underground or spread out into the ocean before it may happen, but it's going to be hard in North America. I've seen it. There's too many games. There's no alignment. And this was another discussion we had yesterday with this research group is that she asked, how do you solve this problem is that you have to, we have to get better alignment between the insurance companies, right? Including Medicare and Medicaid, the cost of delivering care to the patient. Right. And then you have to start looking at the reimbursement side. So if we don't have alignment between the consumer, the provider and the payer, it's almost impossible to be streamlined. The irony is if we had perfect alignment there, we really understood the cost of delivering care and reimbursement was reasonable margin for these organizations so they could grow and invest back to back into their community. Life would be great. But do you also have situations where you have billion dollar, multi-billion dollar profit margins coming out from the insurance companies, and then you keep reading on the other part of the newspaper is all the hospitals run out of business or the physician groups that are having to sell to the hospitals because they can't stay afloat or they have to retire early. There's too much misalignment between those three, in my opinion, to get us to a high zero touch rate in the short term. That's not to say. Yes. Can't change. Big thing that I lead with is part of the inverse of the zero touch philosophy is it's where you are expending resources. A lot of clients are investing in RPA, the robotics process. They're investing in AI software, a lot of bull times, right? They're investing in these things. But what scares me the most is that they're investing in areas that may not be their biggest problem. They may, it may be a problem, but what I like to do is I like to first look at where people are getting involved. Then I like to diagnose how involved in each of those areas are, then start to look, is it a people issue? Is it a process issue? Is it a existing technology issue? Where do I need to acquire new technology? And so I put that out there and that's the consultant in me. That's my Deloitte KBC days. All those were had to go in and do people process technology and alignment. It's a mistake. It's a mistake to go through lots of money and invest a lot of IT resources when you still don't really know the extent of which your people are having to get involved and will this solution even solve it every trade show. I got you. There's a thousand booths with a thousand cool entrepreneurial ideas, but not everything's going to work and not everything's focusing in the right areas, in my opinion. And so you can end up with a lot of software you buy and then it's on the shelf. Well, it's for trying, right? Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. We need that innovation. We need people to go out and try, but you're absolutely right. Not every single one of them is going to be used the way it was intended. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And I think when you think of entrepreneur, like being an entrepreneur myself and a lot of your listeners is it's not always the great idea, right? It's looking or the new idea, like, Oh, this is something new, not being done. Like in my case, I started a business because I wasn't going to accept how it was being done. And I knew I could fill a gap with technology. And when I went into 2008, nine into the recession, it was terrible. All my funding was drying up. Couldn't raise capital. Couldn't do anything. The way I stood afloat was by talking to my clients and understanding additional pains that they have and then where my software could evolve to meet those needs. So it's the same thing we did here at MetaVol, right? We always say we're an entrepreneurial startup that's cast low positive and been around for 25 years, right? Because what we did was we build technology to save the services side of our business and it works. And therefore we can sell it now out to the mainstream market and it works. Yeah. So I always encourage entrepreneurs when I talk to folks that, Hey, you want to start a company is you got to, got to think through what you're trying to solve for. You also have to find your buyer and how you're going to, a lot of people have great ideas to sell into healthcare, but they don't understand how complex healthcare is. It's very hard to sell at all. I always say, if you can sell in healthcare, probably could go to a lot of other industries and do very well. It's a complex sales cycle. Matt, as you mentioned, that is helping a lot of businesses. If there's somebody that could benefit from something like this, they should definitely get in touch with you. But I wanted to ask you another question, Matt, what do you feel your innermost superpower is that got you to this point in your life? Obsession. When I, basically, if I put my mind to something, I become obsessed with that idea and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that, knowing that I don't contrive, yeah, I always tell you, the kids I coach, like you control actions in life, you don't control outcomes. And it's hard for people to grasp that. I want to be the best. I want to be the champion. I want to win the game. I want to have a successful company. It's not about that outcome. It's about what are you willing to do to give yourself a push? And so I think for anybody, especially as an entrepreneur, like if you don't have that, it's going to be very hard to succeed, you have to be relentless. And I think that's probably the one thing that I continue to stay focused on and everything I do, even as I'm getting older. Always have goals, always have goals, not too many. That's awesome. Learn quickly what you don't want to be. Try to be things that you don't want to be. Thank you for sharing that, Matt. I appreciate you. You just want to be better than you were yesterday. The gamification is making them be better than they were before. They're just competing with themselves and that kind of drives that energy to move forward. So that's excellent. Appreciate you for coming on our show today, Matt. And the audience, thanks again for joining us. Once again, Matt's information will be in the show notes, his website, contact details. Definitely. If you're in this business and would like to save some money and make things more efficient, definitely want to get in touch with Matt and thank you once again, and thank you, Matt. All right. Thanks again for having me on. I appreciate the time.