Episode 35: Grady Gibbs, Head of Strategy for ExpandMD

Announcer: MediGroup Physician Services presents MediGroup’s Frank’s Fast Five with Healthcare Executives. Produced by Bridget Wilson and Carrie Peters. Today’s guest is Grady Gibbs, Head of Strategy for ExpandMD. Now here’s your host, MediGroup’s Frank Gillespie.

Frank: Well hello and welcome to another edition of MediGroup’s Frank’s Fast Five. Today I have the privilege of talking with Grady Gibbs, Head of Strategy with ExpandMD. Grady, can you tell us a bit about your background in the healthcare industry?

Grady: Sure, 20 plus years ago. The last job I had before I got into healthcare, I was a strategist in the advertising world. I was hired to work on one of these campaigns that I now loathe. I absolutely hate them. But it was one of these campaigns that if you have this condition ask your doctor about this drug. It was my real entry into how healthcare really works and I learned how poorly this system treats doctors. There was a lot of unreimbursed work being forced on the doctor by this campaign and of course I felt horrible about having participated in that, but shortly after that campaign I realized I wanted to be the guy who worked for doctors. I wanted to be the guy who helped doctors, not created problems for them so I’ve spent the last 20 years working for doctors.

Frank: That’s very exciting, Grady. That’s a much-needed thing in the industry for sure and you are the man with the personality to do that. I’ve just known you a little bit but I love talking with you and you’re always so happy and optimistic. How has your background and experience contributed to your leadership of ExpandMD?

Grady: I’ve been really fortunate to find a company where the principles and other leadership of the company have the same mindset that I do, that the doctor is the issue. That’s who we serve. It led us to define the triple aim a little bit differently than other people do. We define the triple aim as good for the patient, good for the system, good for the doctor. So everything that we do has to hit the triple aim so we’re looking for things that obviously provide better outcomes for the patient, maybe reduce patient spending. Things that also help the system spend less money because of those better outcomes all while improving the doctor’s in the form of better reimbursement, less stress, fewer headaches Etc. So we avoid the things that I know everybody watching this knows what I’m talking about, there’s a ton of these reimbursement for reimbursement sake. There are things that you can bill because you can bill them. That doesn’t mean they’re good medicine Etc. You can bill them until they’ll pay or you get called out on them. We’ve avoided all of those. Our focus is only on things that have a proven track record of improving outcomes, reducing spending, and of course improving the situation for these doctors.

Frank: Grady, you touched on this a little bit, but expand on it, how does ExpandMD benefit patients and providers? What or who is ExpandMD best for?

Grady: We can help almost any doctor, but the types of practices that do surgeries and procedures less so than the practices that use medical decision-making in a clinical office visit to drive their revenue. So the PCPs, the cardiologists, endocrinologists, pulmonologists Etc that are using office visits as their method of taking care of their patients. What we do is provide either assistance or a turnkey solution around about 50 plus codes. We like to say, done for you, as our approach to a lot of these codes, some of them we can only do a piece of it because there still has to be a doctor involved, but some of it the practice can simply outsource it completely to us and let us handle it. We’re doing, of course, care coordination around things like transitional, principal, and chronic care management. We’re doing the annual wellness visits, advanced care planning, remote patient monitoring, of course, but we have things like hearing screening for hearing loss and one of my favorites which is the cognitive assessment tool that we use. These are all things practices can do for themselves. We say that upfront, you can do this yourself, we think you shouldn’t because of the amount of risk that you have to take on. You have to make an upfront investment. You’ve got to commit to hiring, training, and managing people. Then replacing them inevitably at some point. You’ve got to provide phone systems. You might have to buy extra computers, you’ve got to provide space. There’s just a lot to making a commitment to provide these services and it’s tough to unwind them. We operate with no upfront fees. We only bill on success. You can fire us anytime you don’t like us. So it makes it an easy way for a practice to work with us and the most important piece of it is because we’re taking on the burden of workflow, it doesn’t disrupt that all-important workflow in the clinic. You’ve got to keep that flowing and anytime you add something new you risk that workflow. We see a lot of solutions like, here just let your MA do this. The MA’s are busy, they need to focus on doing what the doctor needs to do, rooming and unrooming those patients, not something else.

Frank: I love it, it’s a full-scale service. Looking towards the future, what do you see next?

Grady: We see increasing payer support for a lot of what we do, and because they’re on the other side of these plan payments they recognize that what we’re doing actually reduces overall spending. Especially, CMS is encouraging adoption of some of the things that we do. We’re going to do more for more doctors in the future. The other part of the future is a little harder for us because we can’t always predict what problems clients will bring to us. However, that’s our favorite thing to do. When someone comes to us with a problem and says how can you help and then we get to be creative about working out a solution. A quick example, there are some really great cognitive assessments that a practice can give a patient. little computerized tests and so forth. We had practices using some of those that came to us and said listen I’m differentiating the drug seeker from the legitimate pain patient or the adult ADHD patient, that sort of thing and it’s really a helpful tool. At the same time, I’m testing these older patients for memory loss dementia. This is potentially Alzheimer’s type of thing and catching it early is fantastic. The problem is my MA has to drop everything and spend 25 to 30 minutes proctoring this online computerized. We just don’t have the time so we’re not assessing and getting the full benefit of this platform. We didn’t develop the platform, it’s not our tool, but we support it by letting our people proctor those tests on behalf of the practice, so that the practice can just push ahead. In addition to that, we’ve developed a free screener. We don’t bill insurance, the patient, or the practice. It’s just a free screener on a tablet that flags the patients who have problems that need that deeper dive. The deeper dive is then done by my people, but nicely reimbursed to the practice. It produces better outcomes, reducing overall spending, because of this early detection. It also benefits the practice because there’s no disruption to the workflow done for your system that generates some nice revenue.

Frank: That is really impressive. You’ve got the full continuum of care there. You get the last few words: what message do you want to leave with our viewers?

Grady: I rarely get the last word on anything Frank, so I really appreciate the opportunity to do that today. We would love to just have conversations with MediGroup members and their practice administrators, those are our two favorite kinds of people. Let us find out how we can help you. Most importantly don’t prejudge some of what we do. There are other ways of doing it that do burden workflow and disrupt the practice and so there’s a lot of: hey I’ve heard about that or a friend of mine tried that and it didn’t work right. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It just means the way that other practice tried it didn’t work. So often times that’s a real opportunity to serve. But we also want to hear about the problems. We want to hear that, hey we’ve got an issue with this and that type of conversation includes the consultants and other vendors in the MediGroup family because if you share our mission of serving doctors, we want to help you. Now I can’t guarantee that we can help you, but we want to hear about it. We want to talk about this to see if we can’t get creative and find a solution that benefits you as long as you’re serving them. As long as you’re serving the MediGroup members we’re here to help you too.

Frank: That’s fantastic and what a great message to leave, Grady. I can’t thank you enough. It’s always a pleasure and we look forward to working with you here at MediGroup and can’t wait to do more. Ladies and gentlemen give Grady a call at ExpandMD.

Grady: You’re welcome. Take care, have a great rest of the week.

Announcer: This has been MediGroup’s Frank Fast Five with Healthcare Executives. Produced by Bridget Wilson and Carrie Peters and hosted by Frank Gillespie. Special thanks to Grady Gibbs, Head of Strategy for ExpandMD. This has been a presentation of MediGroup Physician Services.