As it grew into a leading provider of medical equipment, VIP Medical outgrew the Google Sheet that supported some of its most mission-critical processes. To solve the problem, VIP Medical adopted Quickbase as a platform for building a suite of tightly-integrated applications to manage everything from new patients to insurance validation to billing. The results are a 4X increase in sales, the elimination of fulfillment errors, and faster billing cycles.
Challenge
- Web forms and spreadsheet impact ability to efficiently place and process orders
- Significant manual effort due to inability to access information from other systems
Solution
- Quickbase online platform for integrated CRM and other core business operations
- API enabled integrations optimize data exchange
- Agile, rapid application development platform solves inefficiencies everywhere
Benefits
- API integrations and process automation dramatically improve efficiency
- Ability to take on more patients increases sales four-fold
- Faster delivery and lower error rates for an improved customer experience
- Streamlined billing for accelerated reimbursement
- Simplified HIPAA and PHI compliance, easier audits, and greater visibility with custom reporting
A subsidiary of The CLADD Group, VIP Medical is a durable medical equipment conglomerate operating in the global healthcare market. In addition to working with a wide network of partners who refer patients, the company also provides service to many insurance companies and several multi-national organizations.
VIP Medical’s original CRM was a Google Sheet that extracted web form orders for 200 to 300 patients a day from the company’s marketing efforts all over the world. Because the spreadsheet was used by the entire staff to support different aspects of the business, even minor alterations to it had the potential to cause major headaches for other users. In addition, manual processes, such as benefit verifications, involved hundreds of hours a month on the phone with insurance companies in different countries and time zones.
We wanted a way to centralize intakes and seamlessly connect to different services so that all the information we needed to do business was instantly accessible in one place.
The Solution
After researching potential options, Kochen met with Harrison Hersch, a Quickbase consultant who now works directly for Quickbase as a senior product manager. Convinced Quickbase was the most effective and versatile solution for the job, Kochen hired Hersch to build out an online Quickbase ecosystem where the business now lives. The platform also supports a range of integration capabilities. Over the course of a two-year period the following solutions have been created:
- A new patient intake process with a custom interface for phone representatives
- Twilio integration for call transfers, logging, recordings & transcriptions that are instantly uploaded to Quickbase
- Direct links to insurance validation services with custom business logic that sets approval parameters
- Seamless imports of Rx information from prescription services
- Document scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) of several types, including Explanation of Benefits, that automatically link to Quickbase
- Simplified and automated full lifecycle billing
The beauty of Quickbase is that it is a multi-use platform that can benefit any industry. For us, the billing, CRM, and EMR solutions out there just don’t compare to the custom solutions you can quickly produce with Quickbase.
The Benefits
Calling insurance companies about a patient’s benefits, among other manual tasks, was so time consuming that it required a full-time staff of sixty. Now that much of the work is automated and insurance and other service information can be pulled directly into Quickbase via API calls, the same work can be easily handled by fifteen people.
Operational efficiency has also had a significant impact on sales. The company can accommodate the needs of many more patients—requiring everything from diabetic glucose monitors and test strips to back braces. Sales have quadrupled, and with a new Quickbase barcode scanning app, ordered items are confirmed before a shipping label can be printed. Fulfillment errors have gone down to zero, which means the right products get into patient hands faster.
With the ability to automatically collect and compile everything needed for billing via Quickbase, Intuit QuickBooks, and an API call out to Brightree (one of the largest health care billing providers in the U.S.), billing to insurance is now seamless and fast. It replaces a manual process that used to take 30 to 40 minutes per patient.
Quickbase also helps the company easily comply with HIPAA and PHI regulations and streamlines auditing by keeping information, call recordings, and documents secure yet readily accessible to the right people with roles and permissions. In addition, custom reporting capabilities now provide instant visibility on any aspect of the business for quick and informed decision making.
