The Sneaky Metrics Sabotaging Your Revenue Cycle — and How to Fix Them, with Aaqil Khan
Download MP3Well, hi, everyone, and welcome to the MGMA Insights podcast. I'm Daniel Williams. I'm a senior editor here at MGMA, host of the MGMA Podcast Network. We're back with a repeat guest. We were blessed to have Aaqil Khan, RCM consultant with Collectly, own the podcast last year, and we're back with Aaqil.
Daniel Williams:I'll give you a little bit of information about what we're going to be discussing. We're going to explore what Aaqil and his team call those sneaky metrics in the revenue cycle management cycle there. And we're going to be looking for those KPIs that don't always get the attention they deserve. So we're going to be looking into that. And without further ado, Akhil, I want to welcome you back to the show.
Aaquil Khan:Thank you for having me, Daniel. I appreciate you.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. It's great having you on here. And just for my edification, give myself and our listeners, where are you calling in from? Where do you call home?
Aaquil Khan:Yeah. I'm calling in from a small town, Dixon, Illinois. It's about a 100 miles west of Chicago, hometown of Ronald Reagan, hometown of Charles Walgreens, hometown of John Deere, and also home of the largest domestic fiscal scandal in US history. So a little bit of the good, a little bit of the bad, but a small, mighty, mighty proud town here sits on the Rock River, and, again, a hop and a skip to Downtown Chicago.
Daniel Williams:That is remarkable. Wow. We've we've gotta get you back on the show and just talk about that town and all the influencers from there. That is remarkable. So good.
Aaquil Khan:There are some there are some good Netflix documentaries out there about the domestic fiscal scandal. A controller embezzled, I think, $53,000,000 over 20. So and had a, you know, 200 show horses, $2,000,000 RV home. It's a pretty interesting story to say the least.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. I love those. I watch American Greed and some of those other documentaries on those, so that I am adding that to my list, so thank you so much for that. Yeah. So we did have you on the show before, but just for our listeners who didn't get to see that show, share a little bit about your background and how you got into the revenue cycle space.
Aaquil Khan:I always joke. I don't think anyone ever wakes up saying that they want to become a revenue cycle leader when they when they, you know, grow up. Sometimes kind of finds you. My journey is a lot of twists and turns. I actually did my undergraduate degree in molecular and cellular biology.
Aaquil Khan:I minored in chem and and I minored in business. So my goal was always to go into medicine and become a doctor. My father was a physician. He has four sisters who are. I have multiple cousins.
Aaquil Khan:I know it's a podcast for some who are on audio, but for those who are on video, I'm Indian. And if you're Indian, you have to either become a doctor, an attorney, or a lawyer, or your parents didn't think you made it. Right? So so I was blinders on and I was dialed in to go to medical school. I was sitting for the MCAT and then met with tragedy.
Aaquil Khan:My father passed away in a boating accident unexpectedly when I was 20, last day of my sophomore year of college.
Aaquil Khan:I knew I wanted to be in healthcare because I saw how many lives he touched and a mentor of mine kind of opened my eyes to the administrative side of health care. So to buy some time while I was still working through, you know, life changes, I went and got my master of health administration down in St. Louis, and this is right about the time the Affordable Care Act was starting to roll out, starting to really study the literature, read the legislation, look at the trends. And I took an internship over in between the two year program and really started to enjoy the business side of healthcare. Applicable, I govern my life by an effort versus impact ratio.
Aaquil Khan:And as a doctor, you have a very high impact on a lot of patients. On the administrative side, I saw that with similar impact effort, I could have also a high impact on larger populations. So decided to stay on the business side, started with a consulting firm. We did accounts payable auditing and supply chain consulting. From there, moved into a remote patient monitoring startup.
Aaquil Khan:And then I went to the provider side formally. I did an EMR implementation. I have my Six Sigma black belt, so I helped them map the workflows between the couple of different systems we were on, done even paper and surgery, to then the unified single EMR system across the entire health system. Did pre and post and a lot of integration testing, Got involved in, you know, unique departments like corporate health. And then I it was a smaller health system that I started to work at at first.
Aaquil Khan:So I I homegrew the decision support team. We looked at labor and productivity, different KPIs, service line analyses, market share growth, activity based costing systems. And as you really start to get into the analytics and dig into those data tables to really do effective service line and and forward projections and who should we recruit to the market, where should we open up a new center, have to start to understand your insurance contracts.
Daniel Williams:Mhmm.
Aaquil Khan:And your insurance and your reimbursement and what's your payer mix. And so as I started to get deeper into that world, a new CFO came into the organization. And when he and I connected and started to share data, he asked me to take over revenue cycle. Didn't know a lot about it at the time, but but he he argued that, hey, with the data, you know, a decent amount more than you think. And, yeah, just rolled up the sleeves and ran that shop for several years from everything from prior authorization down to bad debt in collection.
Aaquil Khan:So I was lucky enough to we actually ended up rebuilding the revenue cycle when we did the EMR implementation early on. I I helped lead the clinical side. A different group led the rev cycle side. When I took over, we went down from the health plan master to the charge master, contracts, tables, rules, edits, rebuilt the whole thing. File transfers, it was a very good learning experience.
Aaquil Khan:And then that hospital got bought out by a larger health system. I went to work for them and rebuilt the revenue cycle again to their standards and their kind of standard operating procedures. And then I was being pitched collectively at a conference over the summer, fell in love with the technology, fell in love with the tech stacks after about ten years on the provider side, most recently revenue cycle made the switch to technology.
Daniel Williams:That is so cool. What a great story. So just give us the elevator pitch on who Collectly is just so our listeners will know who they are, where they're located as well.
Aaquil Khan:Colectly is based out of San Francisco. It's a revenue cycle software company that started back in 2017 with the focus on improving the patient financial journey. So Colectly initially started off as a software system for you know, payments and and automation and outreach and and particularly a a human billing support team as well. Fast forward with AI and voice agents, Collectly is now a full pre service functionality with demographic capture, appointment verification, eligibility, pre service payment plans. At the time of service, pertinent information bubbles up right for the registration team terminals, and on the back end, digital first outreach, still omnichannel though with robocalls, paper statements for the populations who needed.
Aaquil Khan:And then the the real secret sauce is Billy, an AI agent that helps with billings inquiries and patient support. So at its core, it's looking at the patient financial journey and improving trust and building and improving financial health literacy for patients.
Daniel Williams:Okay. So we met back in December and had an early call talking about, Hey, what do we want to talk about on this podcast? And you and your team came up to me and said, We want to look at those sneaky metrics that live and breathe within the revenue cycle. So talk And to us about those. What are the ones that y'all have identified that practices overlook?
Aaquil Khan:Yeah. No. This is for me, this is a really fun topic. Grateful that you guys agreed to it because I started my career you know, my main bread and butter before revenue cycle was decision support. It's it was KPIs.
Aaquil Khan:I mean and you can you know, we are very data rich, oftentimes information poor, and you have to balance a very complicated dashboard with actual meaningful metrics that you could look at, ask questions around why, and determine meaningful change. So I'm I'm gonna throw a lens on it with with relation to patient pay and patient pay performance in within the revenue cycle. If you want me to fire them off, Daniel, or you talk a little bit more about them, how do you wanna tackle these?
Daniel Williams:Yeah. Just share a couple of them with us and let's let's go from there.
Aaquil Khan:Yeah. In no particular order, because I don't wanna say that one is more important than the other. But if I kind of look at the patient journey and we start, you know, at the front end of the revenue cycle, I think one of the ones is accuracy rate for estimates. Estimates are starting to become really important and patients are demanding that transparency. How often are you?
Aaquil Khan:Are you wildly off? Are you slightly off? Because that inaccuracy ultimately creates bill shock. So that's my first one. Other ones are eligibility verification rate.
Aaquil Khan:Then there's a couple different ways to look at collection rate. You can look at collection rate as a whole, collection rate specific to self pay, and then even diving deeper into pre service collections and point of service collections. We can look at payment plan effectiveness. There's contactability issues, patient AR days, cost to collect on patient dollars, though, would be the one that I'd kind of summarize as that capstone. Mhmm.
Aaquil Khan:We know cost to collect really well. We measure it primarily with insurance dollars, and we look at that global cost to collect. But do you ever look at it with respect to collecting patient dollars? Looking at the vendor fees, the print and postage, the call center time, the software and tools involved. This to me is one of the sneakiest that, you know, I guess, you know, we can dive into these more.
Aaquil Khan:Yeah.
Daniel Williams:I want to look at it from this angle. Why are they falling through the cracks? What is going on within a practice that these particular metrics that you're mentioning are falling through the cracks? They're not being observed. They're not being capitalized on by the practice.
Aaquil Khan:Yeah. I think there is a you know, I've never I've never, for the most part, met someone in health care that, you know, they just you know, that they don't care. Right? It's very rare that leaders don't care. I think it really boils down to competing priorities.
Aaquil Khan:I I used to come into the office with this beautiful plan to sit down and tackle these two, three, four, five objectives for the day. You get going on it, know, you got meetings here and there, oftentimes it can be a lot of them, but then it's the knock knock on the door. And it's a, hey, a personnel issue, system break issue, and everything that you thought you were gonna get done for the day is out the window. So that to me, think is the most important thing is we just don't have a lot of time. We're putting out fires.
Aaquil Khan:You can't sit there and kind of get ahead of that always. There's also a systems connectivity issue. I mentioned to you earlier, right, we're part of an EMR implementation. Big part of that was so systems talk. But when you've got data hygiene issues or information living in different areas, that makes it hard to pull out that.
Aaquil Khan:And even if you do, even if the systems talk, and even if the data is clean, then the next layer and the next issue is definitions. Right? Aligning on what is the KPI? What is the denominator for some of these metrics? What is the appropriate numerator?
Aaquil Khan:What are they gonna be the exceptions? What are, you know, what what are the timeframes? And then I think the last reason which I was fortunate in one role to have, you know, end to end purview, but in another role I had more of the middle and back end, but it's fragmented ownership. You have different people who lead the front desk and they've got their, they've got the estimates and the accuracy and the copay collections. Then you have clinical teams who might be scheduling in the throughput.
Aaquil Khan:You have the billing and the follow-up teams who are responsible for statements and reaching out to the patient. You have finance who's responsible for all the things. So sometimes those metrics live between people.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. Right?
Aaquil Khan:And so I think that that is sometimes a hidden issue in organizations, particularly some larger ones.
Daniel Williams:Okay. We talked about why they fall through the cracks. Are there triggers or any processes to put in place to capture them to make sure they're not falling through? What do y'all do? What do you recommend?
Aaquil Khan:It's a good question.
Daniel Williams:Because, as you mentioned, people are always going to knock on the door and say, There's a personnel issue or there's a tech issue. Those things are always going to we can't have those go away, but as much as we might want them to. But what we can do is, I guess, plan for any of these data points that might just not get captured accurately or on time.
Aaquil Khan:Yeah. No. It's a it's a good question. I I think we talk a lot about it at our organization right now, how AI spending is just outpacing any industry. Right?
Aaquil Khan:So automation, I think, is is one of the first things that you can look at to make sure that these don't fall through the cracks. Okay. Assigning owners, have you talked about, right? Metrics sometimes between owners. Those I think are the first two things that you could begin to do is get ownership, look at technology, you know, back before decision supported, my first hospital was pretty robust.
Aaquil Khan:It was pretty manual. Yeah. We're data. We have analysts looking at them. We're cleaning them.
Aaquil Khan:We're we're we're doing everything manually. But then once you find something that sticks, then you build the Excel macro. When that really gets well, then you go build a dashboard on Tableau and you build automation through SQL. So would be, I think, picking those core metrics, aligning on the definitions, finding owners, and then looking at automation.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. You brought up a topic that it just made a light bulb go off in my head, I think. That's what it felt like at least. It might have been too much coffee. But the idea of ownership, because what we've done at different organizations where I've been, when something is blowing up, you go back, you do a postmortem, you study it, what's happening here.
Daniel Williams:And a lot of times things are kind of thrown out into an amorphous area and to three or four or five different people. And then you have three or four people all going, Well, one of these other people is going to pick this up. So there's no ownership. There's five sort of owners, but not that one central owner who's going to live with it. They are going to make sure this particular situation gets across the finish line.
Daniel Williams:And so I'm so glad you brought that up because it really is so important, no matter what technology we have, to have that human element of ownership involved as well.
Aaquil Khan:I love what you said. I think that keyword is accountability. So you've got in these projects, you have executive sponsors and champions and different layers of the organization, but you have to identify who's going be accountable to the metrics.
Daniel Williams:That's it.
Aaquil Khan:So yeah, you nailed it.
Daniel Williams:All right. Well, let's dig into a couple of these. So let's begin with patient collection rate. What should leaders, our listeners, be looking for when it gets a little bit off track? When things are starting to go off track, what are some of the indicators?
Daniel Williams:What should they be looking for in that dashboard?
Aaquil Khan:Yeah. So, you know, let's if we could, because again, as you mentioned, definitions are super important, right? So if we could take a moment on some of those sneaky metrics, right? So on those collection rates, right? I'm looking at patient collection rate, right?
Aaquil Khan:And you can look at that as a percentage of the net revenue, or you can even look at it more specifically as a percentage of what is truly patient responsibility. So when it's net revenue, it's a macro lens. And when you're looking at patient responsibility, it's true patient pay lens. And this can look sneaky because it can look good from a dollar standpoint, but it may be failing as a conversion rate. For example, when we at one of my hospitals, we did a we weren't collecting copays when I took over the revenue cycle role of my first revenue cycle job.
Aaquil Khan:And so we got them getting into the, okay, guys, this is what we're gonna do. This is the reason why you're gonna ask open ended questions like, how would you like to pay? Not would you like to pay? And then to kind of gamify it, we did do, okay, like I said, let's kind of, we're gonna collect metrics and we're gonna do a competition. And we started with the dollar competition.
Aaquil Khan:And guess who was winning that competition every time? ER, surgery, because their co pays were a lot larger. But when you looked at a conversion rate, you look at the clinics and they had an opportunity to collect say in a day, 120 co pays and they collected 70 of them. So we're only at, you know, dollars 1,400, whereas someone in the ED might've had 10 opportunities only collecting one co pay, but it was, almost all of that dollar amount. Or at least two or three of them then ended up becoming the full amount.
Aaquil Khan:So that's something to look at is that definition again. If it's falling off track, is it falling off by dollars? Is it falling off by conversion rate? And then drilling deeper into how much of that is then point of service collections. How much of that is pre service collections, right?
Aaquil Khan:What was collected before the data service because pre service, think is really important. That outreach is for scheduled visits. It's things that could be shoppable. It can help reduce no show rates, reduce financial anxiety. So then you want to really start to, again, further segment those definitions to figure out where's the actual problem.
Aaquil Khan:Because to say, where is it falling off and what should I address? That can sometimes be a very gray area. So I think you have to kind of drill deeper to find out where that is truly falling off when you look at patient collection rate.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. One of the other things you shared with me is the patient experience metrics, patient satisfaction, and how those NPS scores and others can really connect to payment behavior. So I wanted you to talk about that, because at the end of the day, you do want to get paid. You want to provide that service and then get paid for that service. So talk about those patient satisfaction scores and then the actual payment behavior that you see after that.
Aaquil Khan:This is a very soft metric, which I think is probably one of the most important. And I've done a few talks on this in the past about removing friction from the patient financial journey. Anytime you introduce an app to download or a username and password to remember, a statement code, an account number to pull from another document or log in somewhere else to pull it, All these are not only introducing friction, but they're ruining the patient experience. It's making it difficult to pay. And we the last thing we can do right now is give patients a reason to not complete that payment journey.
Daniel Williams:Right.
Aaquil Khan:So identifying all the applicable friction points is gonna be huge because when you do that and you make it easy to pay, you make it one or two click payments, you have a card saved on file. It's a very clean user interface. I'm able to initiate questions in a same place, get responses back. It's very clear how to escalate. I have text to pay options.
Aaquil Khan:All that is gonna not only increase my likelihood of paying sooner, but it's gonna actually improve my experience with that organization in general, make me a potential return patient. I've always joked with this with patient access when I led a registration team. Look, people can get the wrong medicine. They can get the worst medical advice. But if you smile at the front desk and everything was rosy and the room smell nice, that's gonna be what they remember versus getting the right advice, the right medicine, but a dimly lit room, a rude patient access representative.
Aaquil Khan:And so that experience is everything to returning, to paying, to building trust with the system. And so, it gives you competitive edge in your market when you're in an urban environment or competing with another area that has a very solid experience versus a paper only or a high friction situation, you're gonna win. But there's also financial repercussions, right? There's a Medicare incentive payment systems, right? You could lose part B dollars from bad patient experience.
Aaquil Khan:You could have increased patient acquisition costs, higher marketing costs. There was an advisory board study, might even been MGMA back in the day when I was building a telehealth system on trying to prove the ROI on the cost of acquiring a new patient, the downstream revenue. You have high satisfaction when you have a good patient experience, they tell their friends, you reduce that cost to acquire a new patient and they bring down some revenue. It's everything. Patient experience is everything today right now, especially loyalty.
Aaquil Khan:Right? Loyalty is out the window for the most part. I used to wait months for my my dad used to have a line on his door and they would wait weeks to see him. But today's age is hyper consumerism.
Daniel Williams:I want
Aaquil Khan:to be seen now. And so you can't afford to have a experience. They won't come back ever again.
Daniel Williams:No. You made me think a lot about the conferences that I've attended and that I've put on. You were so right. You can be so good in so many different areas. Let's use a conference for an example.
Daniel Williams:We can have great speakers, a keynote speaker who's so inspirational and all these other things going on, but don't run out of coffee. Because that's what all the evaluations, I was having a good time here and then you ran out of the coffee and I'm not happy now.
Aaquil Khan:Or the coffee was cold. Or it
Daniel Williams:was cold. It had gone cold or the room's too cold. We spend so much time at MGMA trying to get the speakers right, the sessions right, the content right, and then it comes down to coffee or room temperature. It's like, oh my gosh, you've got to think about everything, right? I mean, you've got to have everything covered.
Daniel Williams:So before we sign off, do you have a real world example where you've experienced a practice, really understand the dashboard and the data points, and make a real difference by really studyingI love the term sneaky metrics, you know, those things that are just getting past them, anything like that.
Aaquil Khan:This one's fun. We didn't get to dive into the I know I gave you a list Daniel, but I'll try to incorporate some of them into So story a little bit we were working with the large multi state specialty practice, They have dozens of locations, multiple care settings there, pretty complex billing environment. And on the surface, when you looked at collection rates and looked at patient pay performance, it looked fine, right? The overall collections weren't alarming, but as I mentioned, digging a little bit deeper, asking why as a Six Sigma guy, it's always five whys. You always wanna keep diving deeper.
Aaquil Khan:A different story began to emerge as we looked at some different metrics. And so patient AR days is a key metric. Patient AR days can be a couple of different slices. There's two clocks. Is it patient AR days from an insurance adjudicated to when I finally paid or is it actually when I finally became or from data service to when patient paid or when it was from when payer adjudicated to when the patient paid, right?
Aaquil Khan:When did the patient actually see the bill? So that's one key metric that we look at. And I like to slice those two different ways to paint the macro picture versus actually what is actionable to identify collection process issues, but then tying that to the patient inquiry volume, right? How many calls and chats did I have per account? So patient error days were holding steady, creeping up a little bit, statements were going out on time, but call volume and support was a little bit high after the statements were sent.
Aaquil Khan:Patients were paying, but balances were hanging out there on the AR report a little bit longer because an AR report is one, it shows you the, where the balances are, but it doesn't necessarily show you that patient side of it, right? What they are seeing. And so there was a red flag here, rising patient AR, rising support demand. And the moment was because of this group, the multi specialty group, right? They had clinics, they had surgery centers, they had hospital settings, they were generating different bills.
Aaquil Khan:The bills, the multiple bills looked like they came from one organization though, right? And so when patients paid one, they thought they were paying everything, but the payments were only being applied to certain areas. And so people are calling in. I don't understand. I paid this bill, which where did the payment go to?
Aaquil Khan:Why do I still owe? There was clearly a willingness to pay, but the clarity wasn't there. And, we were looking at affordability issues, we were looking at paramedics issues, but we really weren't looking at the touches it took to resolve a simple balance question. So the sneaky metric wasn't just patient AR days, it was the effort per dollar collected. So when we identify these main issues that patients were having, they simplified and unified how the balances were presented, improved the digital explanation, right?
Aaquil Khan:The self-service tool, what am I looking at? Is it clear, the CPT codes? What is the balance for? Any prior payments? Where would they apply?
Aaquil Khan:If there were any options to resolve payment plans, are they all there? So then those questions that were coming in became a little bit more straightforward, shifted those away from live agents to automation, and the clinic in that practice saw collections increased by approximately 30% of the clinic settings, AR days dropped, support escalations declined, staff was spending less time on trivial questions, more time resolving exceptions, And patients, when they understood what they paid, they understood why they owed it, they paid faster with fewer questions. And so that's why it's a sneaky metrics. If you look at total collections or you look at the AR days, you miss the friction and our first pass rate was really poor. Patients were having to call on almost every balance and they were sitting out there for a while because they weren't getting applied properly.
Aaquil Khan:Once we uncovered that, then we found the real opportunity and we were able to push that forward.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. I have a final question for you then, because when I'm hearing you talk, I just keep hearing recurring theme, in this patient financial experience, and it really has to do with friction. Friction or frictionless You gave that great example of your dad's practice, and there'd be people we lived a different life then. People were willing to wait in a line outside, and now it is a now. It's a now thing.
Daniel Williams:I want my thing now. I was thinking when you make the opportunity to pay or to purchase easy, I was thinking about Amazon. Because in Amazon now, you can go add to the cart or below that it says just one click. It just says one click and you've bought You don't even have to go to the cart, you just buy the thing. So when we look at healthcare and we look at all the things you've been talking about, we've been talking about what's going on now, what happened.
Daniel Williams:But as you mentioned earlier, we've never seen technological advancements moving at the rapid pace they're doing now. So as AI evolves, as technology outside of AI evolves, what are some of these sneaky metrics? If we look around the corner, look a little bit into the future, what are we seeing? What should the practices be thinking about as we move rapidly into the future?
Aaquil Khan:I'll talk about a global thing first. We talked about friction. Being available for the patients when they need you. So right now I got a call center open from nine to five. Well, what time everyone works from nine to five.
Aaquil Khan:And so finding frictions in their inquiry, finding the two click payments, as you mentioned with Amazon. So I think it's finding every opportunity. And one of the beautiful things that I love about the data that I have access to now with Collectly is patient behavior. We can see when they clicked, what time they went in, how far they went into the screen, if they dropped off over here, and then we can adjust the way we do outreach. And so those analytics I think are important.
Aaquil Khan:And that concept of removing that friction. As we look around the corner, automation is king. Right? So how effective is automation being? You're seeing a lot of stuff around AI safety, the dangers of AI.
Aaquil Khan:I don't necessarily know how to measure that right now, but just the trust with AI. I mean, how do we look at our populations? Are they ready for that? Are they ready to talk to a robot versus a human? Specific to the patient pay world, think it's we're gonna really start to look at digital pay adoption.
Aaquil Khan:Paper statements, they're out the window, man. We still need them. You still have to do them at certain times or certain balance types or certain demographics, but we have to look at digital payment. Are people reachable? What is our you know, what what what's the deliverability rate?
Aaquil Khan:Right? Like, how am I getting bad addresses? Am I getting cell phone numbers captured? Right? Am I getting home phones or cell phones?
Aaquil Khan:And then looking at those by balance types, by channels, am I email successful? Am I text successful? Are they good for lower balances, smaller balances? And you know, these are all ultimately going to be reducing the cost to collect. So these are some of the ones that I would look at as balances start to increase, right?
Aaquil Khan:ACA subsidies are expiring, deductibles are going up, people are gonna have a larger payment patient responsibility. I wanna start to look at payment plan effectiveness. If I'm gonna offer that, think we need to start considering that, right? Or financing, how many people are we offering it to? How many people are accepting it?
Aaquil Khan:Then how many are completing versus defaulting? Right? It's easy to celebrate how many dollars you have on a plan, but default rates quietly drive bad debt. What else? I mean, yeah.
Aaquil Khan:And then estimates, as I mentioned earlier, estimate accuracy is gonna be huge for downstream issues, eligibility verification rates, right? Now that we have a lot of tools, automation, AI to help with that, what's our first pass touches rate on eligibility verification, right? These create downstream errors, they create manual work. Those are just some of the ones that jump up to me right now.
Daniel Williams:Yeah. Before we sign off, I will share with you an experience over the holidays. We were trying to buy new iPhones. I won't say the carrier, but it was one of the most difficult processes I've ever experienced. We were on a call with a human, I think it was a human, for an hour and forty five minutes.
Daniel Williams:We were going to purchase three phones, but it kept going. It was friction. There was friction. I felt like we were reentering the atmosphere of the earth. We were getting heat, you know, and the ship was rocking and everything.
Daniel Williams:But we just finally said after we completed the first, we couldn't go another three hours or four hours, so we just stopped payment or stopped the process on the other two. We're going to go into I almost said the carrier's name. We're going to go into the carrier's location physically and just purchase it there, I think, in the next few days. But you know what I'm talking about, though. That's where you're going, Well, it happens to be a smartphone.
Daniel Williams:For whatever reason we feel like we need those, it's part of our identity and everything. So you're going to go over and above and beyond, but it might have me the next time looking to switch carriers, just like what you're talking about in healthcare. If a patient's not getting what they need from their provider, they may be looking around. They may call their friends and go, Hey, do you have a GP? Can you give me a referral, recommendation, anything?
Daniel Williams:Just wanted to leave you with that thought about how damaging the relationship can be when there is friction in the process.
Aaquil Khan:Potentially even worse than them switching, to your point, is not paying at all.
Daniel Williams:Not paying.
Aaquil Khan:Or what is really going to be the quiet killer and really going to hurt health care down the road, and it already is today, delaying and putting off care. Yeah. Until it gets really bad. Right? So we're trying to go to value based care.
Aaquil Khan:We're trying to go to preventive medicine, but if people don't understand what they're gonna owe, they're very intimidated by their bills, they're scared of what it's gonna cost because there's no transparency, they put off care, then it gets really bad, God forbid they're in the ED, surgeries, inpatient stays, and now you're collecting a bill 10x that with someone who's trying to heal and recover. And we're not helping them heal and recover through a very difficult billing process. A great story to end on there. I appreciate.
Daniel Williams:Thank you, Akhil Khan, RCM consultant at Collectly. It has been such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Aaquil Khan:As well. Thank you so much.
Daniel Williams:All right. Well, we are going to include quite a bit of information and resources in our episode show notes. So just click into those. We'll take you straight to more information from Akhil and Kolektli. And until then, I want to thank all of you for being MGMA podcast listeners.
