0:00:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Welcome to Practice Freedom. What if you could hang out with owners and founders from all sorts of healthcare private practices, having rich conversations about their successes and their failures, and then take an insight or two to inspire your own growth? Each week on Practice Freedom, we take an in-depth look at how to get the most out of both the clinical side and the business side of the practice, get the most out of your people and, most of all, how to live the healthy life that you deserve. I'm Mark Henderson Leary. I'm a business coach and an entrepreneurial operating system implementer. I have a passion that everyone should feel in control of their life, and so what I do is I help you get control of your business. Part of how I do that is by letting you listen in on these conversations in order to make the biggest impact in your practice and, ultimately, live your best life. 

Let's get started. Welcome back practice leaders. Welcome to a conversation with Matt Seafeld about revenue cycle. What could be more exciting than revenue cycle? I think you'll find it interesting, though I did. We really dig into really what does that mean in terms of revenue cycle efficiency, and I think what I was kind of surprised is how little we talked about things outside of our control, really talking about what is the cycle of revenue? 

I'm assuming you know what revenue cycle is, and I say that sometimes I run across people who use different terminology. So let's take a step back. Revenue cycle is really this idea of as a healthcare practice. We have to code properly, we have to do a bunch of things to get paid through insurance, right? So we have to. There's a lot of boxes that have to be checked, things have to be submitted, and so the complex chain of events that have to occur to end up with some type of reasonable reimbursement in a reasonable timeframe all accumulate to be a revenue cycle. 

So we really talk about well, you know, before I kind of get into that, matt's background is in automation 25 years of assessment, design and implementation of process improvement. You know work with big companies, been a part of PwC, founded an organization, interpoint Partners, which was later sold really focused on workflow automation and analytics. President or executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Medieval, where he's been there since 2017. And there's just a lot we talk about how to improve that cycle and what you'll find in the conversation is really digging into what you measure, who you measure, what do you tell them? How efficient is this Really driving this concept of efficiency? And really you know how do you do that, creating some clarity and focus? Not the 10 things, the one, just the one thing people need to do. 

So you know the evolving patient experience and you know understanding how that's unfolding and sort of responding to those things outside our control. So give a listen. We'll have to get some feedback from you along the way, share it with those people who can find value. And, of course, before I let you in, don't forget if I can help if you're stuck, if you're envisioning this amazing high value practice, if you're excited about what you could be in terms of an amazing culture, delivering amazing patient experience, giving you the life you deserve as a leader, founder, owner, whatever your leadership role is. But if you're stuck, you're unclear. Please don't stay stuck. Let's figure out together what a first step or a next step could look like, and so find some time with me at practicefreedomcom slash schedule and we can take a few minutes to talk about that With no further ado. Let's drop into a great conversation with Matt Seedalt. Well, so is it morning for you? It's 1120. What's your time zone? 

0:03:56 - Matt Seefeld

Where are you? I'm in San Diego. I'm in Del Mar, just north, probably 20 minutes north on the coast. 

0:04:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Okay. 

0:04:02 - Matt Seefeld

So west coast. But yeah, I'm up early, so it's midday for me. 

0:04:06 - Mark Henderson Leary

So yeah, the sun just came up. It's midday for you, yeah. 

0:04:11 - Matt Seefeld

Actually, yeah, yeah, 920. But you know, for me I guess I could say it's around live shot. 

0:04:16 - Mark Henderson Leary

So we just had our 80-degree Halloween, which is very typical for Houston, walking around in a skeleton costume, full body, sweating all evening long with the six-year-old running around the neighborhood. 

0:04:28 - Matt Seefeld

That's so funny. Yeah, I was a Viking and my wife was a Viking. 

0:04:34 - Mark Henderson Leary

I see you as a Viking. You can pull off. 

0:04:35 - Matt Seefeld

Viking. 

Yes, oh, it was great, I'll send you a picture. I was like pretty proud, I've got the fake tattoos. You know I had like the battle axes, the face paint, but got the fake tattoos. You know I had like the battle axes, the face paint. But it's funny. Uh, so many of the adult friends, or as your kids, as they, they just don't dress up and I'm like, dude, this be a kid again for a night. Yeah, but it's, it was fun. So wasn't 80 degrees, but it were. We've been pretty warm in the month of October, which is not normal for San Diego. 

0:05:03 - Mark Henderson Leary

So what's warm for you, and we'll see what high sixties. 

0:05:05 - Matt Seefeld

What do you know? It's all relative. You're like man. I was sweltering the other day. It was 68 and no humidity. It is. There's a lot of weak, weak people down there when it comes to rain and and they call it. They say inclement weather, like, oh my God, I can't play sports in August, it's so hot and humid. I'm like son it's 82 and there's a Pacific Ocean breeze coming at you. Go to Houston. 

0:05:28 - Mark Henderson Leary

That's exactly right. 

0:05:30 - Matt Seefeld

In August and see how your football pants feel. 

0:05:32 - Mark Henderson Leary

Oh my gosh. Yeah, there's some real coming of age. That happens in those sort of late. You know, the August two-a-days pads football for the freshmen, even for middle schoolers. They get them out there and like that's how you, that's how you make somebody tough, yeah. 

Well cool man. It's so good to connect. We, you know, we started this conversation trying to get our technology to work and we're complaining about how these miracles are failing us that it took us I mean, it took us at least five minutes to figure out how to communicate on a global capacity, as though we're in the same room with voice and video that's going to be recorded and published with basically no effort in the next couple of weeks for thousands of people to listen to, and it's a very tough world we live in. 

0:06:18 - Matt Seefeld

I mean we're never getting that five minutes back. I guess I joked with you before we started. You know, the 19 platforms that I've been using with the same technology worked fine, and then I plug onto a new one and it's like good, now I got a trouble. Hey, you know what I did the old fashioned restart. So if anyone's listening, remember what the IT guy always says have you tried restarting your PC? So just start that first before you call them. 

0:06:40 - Mark Henderson Leary

That's right, yeah. Have you rebooted? That's right, yeah, have you rebooted. 

That's just a reboot first. That's built in. I was an IT guy for a long time and so absolutely built in. In fact, what I learned as an IT guy was that if I failed to ask that of my person I'm supporting, I'm very likely going to chase my tail for a long time. So it wasn't just like send them off, it was like me hold discipline. Have you checked the basic? Is it plugged in? There's nothing on the screen. Oh my gosh, let's reinstall the operator system. No, is the monitor plugged in? 

0:07:15 - Matt Seefeld

Oh yeah, way better Way better now. 

0:07:17 - Mark Henderson Leary

Okay, thank you. 

0:07:19 - Matt Seefeld

That's great. 

0:07:21 - Mark Henderson Leary

Well, so the technology. What's the state of technology in healthcare and that kind of stuff? 

0:07:30 - Matt Seefeld

Yeah, it's funny because here we are in 2025 almost with driverless cars and all this amazing innovation that's going on, and you look at the administrative side of healthcare and they're still in extremely outdated tech. It's very two-dimensional. It's the systems were designed to simply get a claim out the door and then hope to get paid. They were never designed to measure the effectiveness of the people that are actually doing the work to get claims paid. So I always find it ironic when I look at the advancements that are being made on the clinical delivery side, which is amazing, right, all these new advancements, all these new procedures, all these new drugs, all these things to help the human, but who's left behind is, well, it's that thing called a revenue cycle that's going to get you paid for all those cool things you're doing, so you can stay in business. So it's 25 years in this industry, specifically building and consulting in healthcare, building software companies, as well as consulting in complex revenue cycle problems. 

0:08:49 - Mark Henderson Leary

And the biggest problem still of the people in the process to getting paid. And I started getting curious, like who are those people? Because I have kind of what I think are those people and it didn't occur to me that maybe I'm thinking of that in a narrow way. What are the people in that process that you were thinking of and what do they? What does that look like? 

0:09:08 - Matt Seefeld

Yeah, that's a great question, right? So if you think about like healthcare, so you have this whole population of clinicians that are amazing, out delivering the care, right, but then you have an entirely different population of individuals who are doing everything from the scheduling to the registration check-in, to the verification of benefits and eligibility, to the billing, to the coding, to the following up on outstanding account receivable, to the payment posting. Those are, I call, the administrative people responsible to get claims out the door, clean and paid. Billions and billions of dollars of waste in this industry is because of breakdowns in the revenue cycle, many of which are tied to the effectiveness of the people who are being paid to do a specific job. You know, I've looked at, you know, in Metaball. You know we have a software that sits on top of any of the billing platforms in the market and we actually will measure every human touch from start to finish. 

So from the time a patient enters the system to the time that claim is paid, and the amount of waste that touches averages anywhere from 40 to 75 percent when we measure it. What waste means is that you have somebody, for example, calling on an insurance plan and they find out something's wrong with that insurance plan. They can take action. 40% to 75% of the time, though, there's no action required. They're just passing the buck. Right, the payment wasn't posted correctly, so now somebody has to send in information over to the payment team to ask a question. Right, the coding wasn't done correctly. Now you have to send a question off to the coding department to do something, and so you have this whack-a-mole. One of our clients CEO used this analogy two weeks ago is you have a whack-a-mole of touches that are going on in a revenue cycle to try to figure out how to resolve a claim to get paid. Which is and that's the biggest missing leg and here's the neat thing about measuring every human touch it takes to get clients paid is now you start to diagnose the why. 

So when we work with clients, we are. We are working on process redesign, more accountability on their people, potentially technology gaps or misuse of current technology in order to reduce touches. When you reduce a touch, you improve your margin. You improve your margin, you improve capacity within your revenue cycle and these touches are expensive. I mean depending on where your revenue cycle folks are. A lot of clients will send things overseas. A lot of them have them here in the US, which are obviously more expensive. You can put $2 to $5 a touch. So if you have 50,000 touches in a month and 50% of those are just wasted right, somebody didn't do their job. Due to math and annualize it, it's millions of dollars, yeah. 

0:11:52 - Mark Henderson Leary

It's, a lot of things are kind of going on. For me. I to me, it's just what we're describing is a classic bureaucracy. It's just like a one piece of the puzzle done by one specific person with no contextual awareness of what's going on and so constantly at a state of helplessness, like someone outside the machine is like the ball is stuck in the pinball machine back there. If you could just move it to the, it will roll down and I can hit it with the flipper. You know it's in the bureau. It's like it's waiting on a response. Well, does the other person know? So, that being said, the cost, the cost of time, the transaction, cost of like you said $5 per touch, that sounds like cost of somebody's. I gotta pull it up, I gotta look at it and there's a transaction there. But there's also the cost of like just the overall delay. Like it sat in the inbox for 48 hours or seven days or something like that. How, how does that all? How do you think about those two Waste? Yeah, I love it. 

0:12:49 - Matt Seefeld

I mean, yeah, you're, you're ahead of me on this, like so. So you have the actual time spent to diagnose the why Could be. Let's say, a call insurance company. They say the claim is denied for coding, they want medical records, right, or something like that. So now you know there has to be an action taken. So that's, that's the time now somebody spent figuring out the why is this not paid, and now have to take action. But you just nailed the more important thing is it's not only the delay in reimbursement, right? So you kind of just got paid checks in the bank. Life is okay. Now how long is that going to take to appeal? Yeah, are they going to hit the filing statutes, right? I mean, a lot of these commercial payers will only give you a small window of time to appeal a denial Like did you make it Right? Right? 

0:13:31 - Mark Henderson Leary

right. 

0:13:31 - Matt Seefeld

There's another component to quality. So when I think of revenue cycle, I do bear balance right. There's the cost associated with collecting on money, and that could be my collecting patient liability or insurance monies right, it's usually a combination of both, especially with high deductible plans. There's the cost, then there's what we charge, which is meaningless in healthcare. I can charge you whatever you want, but the insurance company is only going to pay you what you're contracted to get, right, but the difference between what we should get and what we actually get is a huge chasm. Yeah, if I were to go to any health care provider and ask them are you collecting anywhere close to a hundred percent of what you expect? Their answer is I don't know. Most of these groups, if you believe, they don't even have reporting to tell them. 

0:14:19 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, why. 

0:14:20 - Matt Seefeld

So so what is what? Is 3% written off to say, non-contractuals annualized? So you have the time somebody's spending trying to fix the problem. You have the delay in reimbursement and, most likely, a reduction in what you're supposed to get. Those are crushing margins, crushing profit margins for every healthcare provider in this country. And what you're not going to get is you're not gonna get more money in the future from a payer. It's not happening. I don't believe Medicare or Medicaid. I don't think Blue Cross is gonna be like hey man, I'm feeling bad for you or something. Just jack it up 20%. Right, they're trying to find ways to not pay you. And, by the way, labor costs, supply chain costs, all the costs delivered with the clinical, that's not going down. So you are in an industry that's just going to. I mean, where's the end point? Where's the end point in industry? It's crazy. And here's what's funny. 

When I speak I speak a lot on conferences. I've been talking about Henry Ford a lot recently. As I said, how can a guy back in the early 1900s figure out that I can have one person make a car and be very expensive, little production and minimal quality, or I can get everybody in the right sequence where they have the right tools, I have the right supply chain, I have the right way to measure them. Measure how well are you at doing this? One piece of building a car and guess what? Higher quality, more production, more margin. So this guy figures this out 125 years ago and here's how healthcare the most complex industry in this country healthcare are still nowhere close to that. 

0:16:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Well, it's pretty ironic, it is super ironic. But the cause for that is not a surprise. You could not sell a car if it was two, if it was two to three times expensive, more expensive than it needed to be, they weren't going to move. And so the compulsion to like, if we're going to sell lots of cars, we got a price to the market. In healthcare, the value has always been so high, the margins have been high and the margin for error. You can make a lot of mistakes, and we have, and we've continually done that for a century. Right, and so what? The? What the real crisis is is like hey, there's a little bit of capitalism creeping into this. There's a lot of political pressure that maybe this is, this has gone way too far, and there's there. There's so much inertia on the way we've done it. The bureaucracy is built in. You don't just compress the bureaucracy with a little competition and suddenly it's more efficient. Like it has to crumble before we can rebuild it. 

So we're starting to actually have to be compliant with the laws of capitalism. But it's a tough, tough switch. 

0:17:05 - Matt Seefeld

And I don't even have. Like it's crazy. I love that. You're talking about capitalism, is it? I don't even know. I don't know where that even falls in, because I think the bureaucracies and the politics around, I mean the lobbyist amount of profit margin that these payers are making, the fact that, you know, maybe we raise taxes, maybe we reduce taxes, depending on the next administration. Nobody's paying more for Medicaid, nobody's paying more for Medicare. I mean, the irony of the to me and this is sad is that every single one of us you and me included, and our kids and our neighbors and the physicians and the people in the revenue cycle are all impacted by this because we all consume healthcare in one form or fashion. So it's an industry that's impacting every human in the US. 

But there's no solution to make sure that these groups stay in business. I mean, go read any healthcare newsletter. Somebody's going out of business. I was talking to a group the other day and they said we just gave up and we're selling to the hospital and their comment was we should have sold three years ago to private equity that was giving out stupid multiples, and we didn't. I've had groups tell me that. You know, I'm in my mid fifties and I'm done retiring early like go off and do something else. Med school applications I heard I don't know, I don't have a stat on this, but somebody told me that med school applications are now down. It's just, it's sad right, I mean Hippocratic Oath right. 

Taking care of people, taking care of society, is now being governed on whether they can keep their doors open. And here's the other big piece that we all have to be honest with Providers don't understand business right. There's very few that I've met that truly understand the revenue cycle and are truly willing to have the insights and the aptitude to make investments in technology to hold those people that are out doing all the work to get paid for that physician's claims in action. And the administrators too. A lot of the administrators they're afraid of change. I always hear well, we've always done it this way. I said that might've worked five years ago, but it doesn't work now. You can't do it the way you used to do it. 

I'm seeing a switch. I will say I'm seeing in the last six months. I'm seeing a switch in a lot of thinking for healthcare organizations that they have to now invest in technology that's going to start to really measure where the where the errors are occurring, not clinical, where the administrative errors are occurring. To try to a to your point speed up revenue right, make sure you're getting what you expect to get, and do it with as few touches as possible. Yeah, so I'm seeing it. Definitely it was two years ago. I'm still in like cyberspace, like what. I've been talking about this since 2003. And now people are finally like, oh yeah, he might be onto something. 

0:19:53 - Mark Henderson Leary

No, I get it. Yeah, I talked about that a lot and it's. You know my focus into healthcare was so inspired and has been, and I love it, but it is still. It's amazing to see the recognition of wow, we got so much more to do and so so much value we can create and and still so much resistance into the mindset of institutional mindset is part of it, and that's easily the easy people to blame for this. You know the blue suits mixing with the white coats. You know the MBAs. You don't get it. That's only part of the story, though. 

The whole community you talk about those sort of frustrated burnout. Older we'll call them older generation, older mentality Physicians are like it's not worth it anymore. I would never send my kid to medical school. That's my assessment, being pretty comfortable, this assessment is right, having talked to enough people. It's just that the paradigm hasn't shifted for them. They're thinking of like I just don't know how to make it as a single doctor or a couple of doctors living as an academic institution where our craft was high value and we were just treated well, or we needed a little bit of assistance and it just worked as a niche cottage industry. 

It's like well, yeah, it's a business. It really was always a business and you enjoyed a century of no pressure. But this is a capitalist economy. There's lots of, there's lots of costs that have been bloated here. You've not been forced to be competitive and efficient and so you've got a century of of bureaucracy and inefficiency that does feel unbelievably difficult to shed. But there is a second generation. Maybe it's really technically a third generation. Actually it actually is. It's a third generation. It's sort of the healthcare 3.0 mindset. It was like oh well, if we use the principles that work, to be efficient, to build a brand, to get specialized, to simplify the practice and by the business it actually works. And when we go to market with cash pay offerings and we figure out what it costs, it turns out people buy it and so right, there's really this entrepreneurial appetite, but it hasn't turned the whole tide yet. I mean, the movement is strong, it's real, you can kind of see it everywhere, but there is an awful lot of the vestigial still around. 

0:22:02 - Matt Seefeld

Yeah, yeah, it is. And it's a shame that there's still such a differential between the desire to produce the best political outcome and the desire to make sure you stay in business. And it's sad, right. I mean you look at all these paper performance. Everyone asks me about value-based care and they're like are you worried about value-based care? I'm like that thing's never going to go. I mean, the amount of money that gets spent trying to prove you did something right, it's just further crushing the profit margins of these groups. So if the I mean honestly, I think if value-based care becomes the thing, I don't then know how some of these groups would even be able to support that. I mean the idea is right Like, hey, better outcomes, right, healthier people, I'll pay you more money, but nobody thinks about the revenue cycle and how you're going to truly manage a program like that, because there's too many of their factors that are hurting their, their margins. I guess why is we see so many of these companies bought out of business, right? People that are trying to jump into behavioral health and telehealth and all these different things and they get fixated on? You know well, I'm going to be a COVID testing person or I'm going to be a blah, blah, blah and it's like two years later, after the good run, it's like I don't have a business now. Right, you know so it is hard. 

And consumers let's not forget about the consumer. Right, we have high deductible health plans. We're choosy on where we go. We can't pay our deductibles right out, pay over time, so your ability to get your money up front it's gone. Why would you pay a $3,000 bill in January when you can pay $100 a month and still honor your obligation and providers are going to take it? Because it's either that or bad debt. Nobody wants bad debt, right, especially for hospitals that are listening, right, I mean, if you're out there, I mean you've got an emergency room. Right, You've got Impala, you got to take whoever comes in and that's. That's a different. But even elective, believe it or not, when we looked at some studies on elective surgeons, for example, orthopedics with commercially insured patients, the amount of bad debt write-offs that still occur on that population is astronomical. Really, it's astronomical. Like think of yes. 

0:24:12 - Mark Henderson Leary

In network. 

0:24:14 - Matt Seefeld

Absolutely. I have a Blue Cross plan in network with my healthcare provider and I'm just not paying my portion of the bill. And here's the problem. Did you get asked to pay anything upfront? No Revenue cycle breakdown. Did you have a good self-pay strategy to engage with me with, say, mobile tax, e-statements, right, all that stuff? 

0:24:37 - Mark Henderson Leary

This is a fundamental problem on the front end of RevCycle, yeah, and so I don't want to totally derail it because I want to get into that. I want to walk through your view on RevCycle. But that sort of hits even one step before what probably would be traditional rev cycle, where you're saying like, hey, let's get cash in advance or a credit card number at least, let's think very tactically in that sense and I'm saying, well, is this the right patient for you? Like, you have a specialty practice and I'm constantly on. This sort of soap box of healthcare is traditionally of a mindset of your best patient is the one right in front of you. And I get it. From a care perspective. That makes sense If somebody can help, sure, but in terms of marketing and things like encouraging people to come to your shop as opposed to go somewhere else, please don't mislead somebody that your shop is primed to help them and give them the best outcome. 

If it's not because you are focused on high performance, fitness people in this type of thing, and wow, you've got somebody in a geriatric situation, how do they show up? Well, we can help them. Well, can you. And vice versa, like, hey, we really focus on people over a certain age. Well, let's get these young high school athletes in here. They'll be great Like. No, that's not going to work for them at all. 

And so let's make sure we understand target market, including things like the psychographic and their economic means. Are we trying to provide low-cost services to them, and therefore they will be happier in a low-cost setting, or do we want absolute plush setting and therefore need people to show up and drop their Mercedes keys on the table and go? 

yeah, absolutely, these people are going to pay this, no problem, they're going to love it and so I'm curious if that fits into your thinking and if it does, great If not, I want to talk into where your thinking starts. 

0:26:28 - Matt Seefeld

No, I love it. I think there's two pieces. So one is and you already hit on one topic, which is am I trying to find the best patients economically for my group? So this is, this is a dangerous game. So I always say those that have means can see who they want, but those who don't have means are going to be can have more narrow and narrow opportunities. 

I've seen it here in Southern california. I live in san diego, and there are health systems already who have stopped seeing certain types of patients based on the payer they have. Yeah, you know, and that that's a scary game, because what's happening right is well, I don't treat medical, which is california medicaid. I don't treat medicare managed care anymore. I don't treat blah, so where do they go now? You know, and I I have an identical twin who's an emergency room doctor and we talk all the time about how much level one and level twos. He sees People who can't get access to a specialist, so they come into the ER. These aren't emergency situations. These are basic questions that could have been answered by a primary care doc, a specialist. They can't see him, so now he's tied up and, by the way, the ER bill is way more expensive. Do you think these patients are going to pay that? No, which becomes bad debt. It's the fundamental thing is is it? 

Our access to good healthcare is great if you have the money and the best insurance possible, but these providers think that that is a tactic, and I don't blame them. Like would you just keep seeing all of these? You know, I get 10 cents on the dollar for Medicaid. So let's just open up the floodgates to Medicaid patients. You'll never make money on it, because we just talked for the first 15 minutes about the waste going on in our cycle. So you have to say well, I'm not gonna see Medicaid anymore. You know, medicare pays me 15 cents on a dollar. I'm not gonna see Medicare anymore. Blue cross still pays me 40 cents on the dollar. 

So let's go do geo-fencing, psychographic segmentation. Let's go see if we can find the fluent zip codes and really market to those and make sure that they come to us for hips and knees and all that. Look, if you're running a business, that's great. Like I mean, go for it. However, if you're running a business, that's great. Like I mean, go for it. However, we just narrowed all the people who, who? I mean God forbid. We have an economic turnaround. I mean. Imagine if unemployment jacks up and all of a sudden people are like oh my gosh, inflation hasn't settled, I'm still paying 30% more for goods and services. I lost my job. Where do those people go? I mean, if the next administration decides to get crazy and rip out you know the whole Obamacare and people having access to good insurance. Where do they go? I mean, where do they go to an emergency room? That's where they go. 

0:29:04 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, there is two sides of that. I tend to lean on the side of this may have to get really bad before the solutions to solve that become worthy, incentivized, heavily enough to go there, and so I tend to kind of trust capitalistic forces and so I kind of want to see things swing out of balance to the point where, like, it wakes people up and it causes significant shifts. Now I don't like the idea of the short-term suffering that goes with that, but sometimes there's long cycle stuff that we have to go through. 

0:29:36 - Matt Seefeld

Which I love. I know you talk a lot about entrepreneurship, so I'm going to use this as an opportunity to plug anyone out there that thinks they have a cool idea and they can turn it into something people want to buy. You just nailed a topic that I speak about all the time on entrepreneurship it's called scarcity. Companies that have had to fight to stay alive most of the time are the most innovative, forward-thinking companies out there. In my opinion, right, companies that just keep getting infused with capital are complacent. So I 100% agree with you that this has to get worse before somebody steps in and puts a real plan out there. And we're not there. We're just. We're literally at the start. 

Like I said, I've been in healthcare revenue cycle since 2000. I've built four workflow automation systems to sit on top of these crappy billing platforms. Up until the last year, nobody has panicked. There's something that has happened this year and I know this from sales We've closed more deals in the last six months than we closed in probably two years on this software that we had developed and that's not a coincidence. And we sell a lot to revenue cycle companies too, right. 

These are groups that are trying to bill for providers all over the US and some have to offshore and offshore. I'm telling you, the panic now is there and it's going to get worse. You're going to see this happen next year and it's scary. It's scary for me, it's scary for you, it's scary for everybody, because how bad does it have to get before somebody steps in and says is there an actual model that would align a payer for services, a provider who delivers a service and the consumer? There's no alignment right now between the three of those. Literally, I can't think of a single way where there is alignment between the provider, the payer and the consumer and that business. You can't run it. That business is never going to work right. If the payers keep trying to get more and keep trying to pay you less and the providers are having to spend more to deliver care and the consumer is now footed with a half to two thirds of a bill the first half of the year, how is that going to work Right, right? 

0:31:49 - Mark Henderson Leary

It doesn't. 

0:31:49 - Matt Seefeld

And I love that you're saying capitalism, because nobody's looking at this from a capitalist perspective. They'll look at the administration as well. I've got the solution for healthcare. 

0:31:58 - Mark Henderson Leary

Well see the capitalist sort of manifestation here is that now the costs are finally becoming transparent, the businesses can't support it. And even the stuff the back end, the hidden costs they're like look, we can't support it. And even the stuff that the backend, the hidden costs they're like look, we can't pay you more, we can't hire people. We like, we have to. Like it's starting to be these sort of very transparent conversations Like it used to be, like we just want to be competitive in the benefits. Now it's like look, staff, our costs went up by a thousand bucks a month a person and that matters. And we're going to tell you exactly where we're at and exactly what's going on. And the terrible coverage you're about to get is going to be the best covers that anyone gets in our area. And you're still going to have these massive out-of-pocket costs. 

And so now there's what that creates is dollars in play. Now it's not a given that that money goes to a specific plan. Now there the whole business is like well, we're open to other alternatives to the funds, insurance in different ways, we'll give you the money. And the employees are like well, I've got this huge out-of-pocket. How do I spend it? Would I buy direct primary care, can we do something different? And so now the dollars are kind of freed up because the pain and the pain is so high. Maybe I think that's probably the entry point to like. Now the entrepreneurial organizations start showing up and start saying hey, we're going to offer you direct care, we're going to offer specialty cares in this way, we're going to offer you fitness services, we're going to offer you lifestyle things that now you start to see a place in your budget because it's getting paid in a visible way. I think that's a real catalytic development that no one wanted, but I think it's important. 

0:33:37 - Matt Seefeld

Yeah, no, I agree, I mean somebody's going to have to shake it up, right. It's like we're going to go from, you know, blockbuster to Netflix to you know, streaming video, right, I mean, we have to innovate the way care is delivered and we have to be able to do it in an affordable way, right, and you think about treating a patient now, especially in the last 10 years, there's been so much work on the whole behavioral health side of healthcare, right, and what I mean by that is most patients that are having issues have other things going on right. There's other lifestyle complications. There's other things going on emotionally that's driving on right. There's other lifestyle complications. There's other things going on emotionally that's driving sickness right. 

So people are becoming more complex to treat. It's not just a. You know I'm not sleeping well, okay. Well, let's explore that. Right, you know it's I have chronic pain. Let's explore that. You know, it's one of those things where you have all of these cool companies that are popping up to deliver really innovative solutions, right, whether it's more mindfulness, or it's more health and fitness, or it's better eating, or it's tracking workouts, trying to get people healthier so they don't have to consume as much healthcare, but those are all expensive, yeah, and and. And. 

That also gets us to the point of, you know, motivation I talk a lot about, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I feel like society for the most part, has lost the self-actualization, and what I mean by that is goal-setting achievement, being proud of seeing results. You know, putting a stake in the ground, saying this is what I want to do, this is what I want to be A lot of people that are coming through the healthcare systems. It's because they don't have that mentality anymore. You know, look at just like obesity, right? Well, if I could just take a drug, all those ways. It's like, well, how about we look at the whole lifestyle? You know the reason. I mean I literally was talking to my brother Andrew the other day at the ER doc. I mean he said do you know how many people came into my ER today complaining about certain things that all tied back to either emotional health or lifestyle. 

Wow, yeah, oh, I think I'm dying. It's like you're not dying, right, You're not dying. These are the things that are going on. So I know we kind of jumped the topic there, but I think it's important because it also ties back to the motivation of people in revenue cycle. Yeah, so you know, when you look at the revenue cycle, these are lower paid folks. They're very complex life, life in the home. 

I mean, I've been in this industry long enough that I can say that with confidence that there's lots of things going on outside of the workplace that are causing stressors and a lot of them are working from home now. So you have the whole aspect of of just working from home. It's tough. It's not for everybody, right? You know the socialization's lost, Sitting on on video conference meetings all day long, trying to hold yourself accountable when you have home situations going on. 

I mean, you think about, for me, I'm like I've got a nice house here, I've got rooms to move around, an office, A lot of people. It's an apartment. You might have kids running around, so there's distractions. So how do you get people who are responsible for getting you paid for the services that are expensive to deliver if you don't have self-actualization motivators. So one of the things that we've had to do in our software is really gamify the experience right so people can start to show a reward system and start to get things Like wow, if I achieve, Mark will see that, and that makes me feel good inside, because I work really hard and I haven't been. I feel like nobody knows how hard I work, Nobody knows my results. 

0:36:58 - Mark Henderson Leary

So you're talking about the people in the rev cycle knowing their role. Okay, so that's really cool, because that ties back to one of my sort of drivers is that in a healthcare business, the least valuable, least contributing practice that I work with and know of on a daily basis is healing people for a living. That's a pretty big value, right? 

So if you're an employee in a healthcare organization and you feel like you're in a grind doing something that's not useful. You're bored, lifeless, meaningless. That is a tragedy, because if you're at the front desk, you're helping somebody get better, faster, on a time frame that is convenient, you're answering their questions, you're getting them connected with information or people or doctors or medications or any number of things, and getting people paid faster and efficiently. Every link in the chain in health care really helps put someone on the moon in terms of metaphorically, the whole NASA janitor story, like you know, sweeping the floor, what are you doing? What works? Putting somebody on the moon? Oh, wow, look at that. This guy sees purpose and that's really cool in the NASA story, because sweeping the floor and putting somebody on the moon is a very distant feeling thing, but in the healthcare situation it's not. 

You are very possibly talking to the patient. Everybody in the whole practice at some point has a chance to talk to the patient and help them very directly. And so walk me through your view of I mean, we're 34 minutes in and we're just kind of getting into the rev cycle stuff in terms of tangibility. So I got to have it. So talk me through how you see it. 

0:38:33 - Matt Seefeld

Yeah, so I mean and you've already touched on it it's the human capital piece, right? Most of the errors that require a lot of touches to correct are because humans made a mistake, and a lot of it is due to lack of motivation and lack of context to where they fit, of context to where they fit. I think one of the biggest failures in healthcare is the board and the CEO down have not provided good context as to where people fit and why they fit there. 

0:38:58 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah. 

0:38:59 - Matt Seefeld

I think in business in general, like you have a $19 an hour employee who may be a front desk user example, is that where you see the start of the red cycle is there, or is it before that? 

The start of the red cycle is point of. Is it before that? The start of the rev cycle is a point of intake. It's me calling my doctor to schedule an appointment. It's me walking into an emergency room. It's the start of your entry into the experience that you're about to go through, where there's going to now be a medical claim associated with it. Right, and every one of those people if the scheduler is having a bad day and they're angry and they're frustrated and they take it on you, what you as a consumer, is your first impression, right. What do they tell you? I think, if you have a great experience, you tell one or two people. If you have a bad experience, you tell 10, right, so it starts there. Right. Then you come into the front desk. You're nervous because you might have cancer. You're nervous you might have, you know, coming in for a colonoscopy. You, you're nervous because you don't know what's wrong with your kid's knee who was a great football player. Whatever that experience is, you get in there. Now you have someone standing in front of you who's also having a bad day. Stuff going on at home. Right, takes it out on you. Right, it's short. 

I had this happen to me the other day when I spent 20 minutes on the Epic MyChart filling out every checkbox possible for the shoulder surgeon I was going to go see. I walk into this clinic and the lady hands me a clipboard says fill this out. I look at it, mark, and I go. These are the same questions. First of all, I filled out way more questions online, which is now in your EMR because I know it's integrated. And you're asking me and she goes well, just tell your literally like abusive. She's like well, you can just give it to the medical assistant then and I'm like okay, that experience to me it's so, it's so descriptive. 

0:40:42 - Mark Henderson Leary

You go to the best hospital system in the world, the best doctor in the world for the specialty, and you get somebody at that front desk who is mad. You're there, she is mad's, like how does this. 

0:40:50 - Matt Seefeld

I even tried to smile like I did all the right things but by here. So now I have a brand. I'm telling you now about it, like that's the thing, like that that now triggered me. So then what happens when I go see the doctor? Doctor does what he's gonna do, maybe there's a surgery. Does what you can do. 

Now let's talk about the motorcycle. So we didn't do it right on the front end. So now you let's just say they bill it incorrectly, right, wrong insurance. Now you're on the phone, they're calling you or, worse off, a lot of these providers. They bill an insurance. It comes back with an eligibility to not. What do they do? They send a statement to the patient that you owe all the money. Now the pension gets on the phone, calls the billing office. This is wrong. They're upset. Billing office lady had a bad day, upset with you. That's the only. We don't have your insurance. Well, how did you not get the right insurance? The lady that was off of me at the front desk and handed me a bunch of paperwork I filled out online Didn't re-verify my insurance, which, by the way, it just didn't work. Right. You see what wrong with? 

0:41:44 - Mark Henderson Leary

us. 

0:41:44 - Matt Seefeld

So now? But you have the lowest paid people that are now responsible for the customer experience, and the customer experience is being tainted because of mistakes made by humans who lack the motivation or the context to how important their job is. So this is not of I'm not dinging the administrative revenue cycle people. I'm saying it's from top down One. You have to make sure people know their role, make sure they're in the right role. Many times these revenue cycle individuals, they're just in the wrong role. You're in a call center and you're like you're having trouble with patients, so you're frustrated. Do you like talking to patients? No, I don't, but that was the only job available. Would you like to do a behind the scenes transactional job like posting payments? Oh my God, that'd be amazing. Just like doing the same thing, repetitive, over and over. I don't want to talk to you, oh great. So we're going to move you, sir. We're going to move you into the payment team. Nobody even asked that question when I was consulting. 

The first thing I would do is a capability and willingness. I'm like I'm going to. I don't know if you saw money ball. You remember back back when Brad Pitt's whiteboard? And they're moving people around. It's what we do. I go and I take the entire rev cycle and I say, okay, capability, one through three. Three great capable of their job, one not capable. Willingness If you're not willing to do a good job, whatever, I don't need you, right? What I found year over year doing this was a lot of people were not capable in the jobs because they were in the wrong job. 

They were great people just in the wrong jobs. So I always start with that. The other thing about Recycle is centralization, specialization, specialization. I am amazed that in today that you can put 15 responsibilities on a single person. 

0:43:28 - Mark Henderson Leary

Right. 

0:43:29 - Matt Seefeld

What do you do? Well, I call insurance. What else do you? Well, I take patient phone calls. What else? Well, sometimes I close charges, sometimes I have to recode, sometimes they post a payment. How is that like revenue Again, henry Ford, everybody. 

0:43:40 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah. 

0:43:41 - Matt Seefeld

You are an insurance representative, you only call an insurance unpaid claims. You are a payment poster, so so get claims. You are a payment poster, so get people organized in the roles that they want to do. Now the last part, which is so important for you and the listener, measure to improve, and this is the gap in the systems. There's not good ways. We had to build a full, automated, integrated workflow automation system that measures every touch by every one of these people so that the administrators and the revenue cycle teams they know how they're performing. If I can go to you and say, hey, mark, you called on 50 claims yesterday or a month ago, you're like great, that was my daily average, but you only resolved 20% of those Really and you touched each one of those 2.5 times on average. So the cost of the organization right now is there's still 80% of that money is still outstanding and you're about $3 over. So who's bringing that information back? A, they don't have it, which is where we came in, and B, once you have it, now you have to actually act on it. It's actually so simple. 

I know it's amazing to me that the solution with motivation of people, comes down to measuring, measure, to a measurement. That's what it comes down to like. If you say you want to lose weight, right, we have fitness trackers, you've got your apple watch on, I'm wearing a garment, I've got strava. I'm like am I getting my workouts in? Am I kept doing? 

Where's the measurement of people that are spending eight to nine hours a day trying to do a function in the revenue cycle that, if they screw up, hospital loses money. Practice loses money to the point where they have to stop seeing certain types of patients, to the point where they have to sell to a hospital, to the point where they have to close their doors. Nobody's having those conversations at the top down. Right and that's shameful, in my opinion is that every one of these people are important. Every one of these folks have the opportunity to show that they're motivated. But you've got to get people back to a meaningful way to measure so you can see the ones that truly want to rise up and be great versus the ones that want to go find another job Because that's okay too right. Maybe the healthcare is not your thing another job Because that's okay too right. 

0:45:51 - Mark Henderson Leary

Maybe the health care is not your thing. So the model for my mind is seeing the whole breadth of the life cycle make sure your inputs are solid, make sure we're measuring to improve in those steps in ways that are probably not very appetizing to people who don't have a passion for it, and making sure we got, I think, a really strong combination between the desire of those people and the clarity of the importance. Like this is not just wasting time. This is not just data entry. You're not just moving paper from one file folder to another. You are making a financial impact, an efficiency impact, a healthcare impact. It's important, and if you think that's important, we want you in the seat, and if you think that's boring and terrible, there's a, there's a job somewhere else for you where you're capping Coke bottles or something. 

0:46:39 - Matt Seefeld

Absolutely, absolutely Like. It's not for like. Look, unemployment is still so low. I mean, there's plenty of opportunities for people to move, but what I'm seeing like in our client base is most of the people, once they see they're being measured and once they know they can measure themselves, start to be successful and I think, I want to reiterate that every one of your listeners who's a part of a larger organization has to think about how many things am I asking an individual to do? 

These are people that can be very good at that one thing. Let them be very good at the one thing. You actually will increase their capacity. You will reduce your labor costs by centralizing these functions. You also now have a way to measure people against people. You can't measure someone who's doing 10 things for this group and nine things for others, like, well, you know, mark, mark, mark does a little bit better than Matt, oh, but Matt's got nine other different things he has to do. Okay, yeah, so how do you even benchmark that? Right? So it's it that to me, that's just red cycle consulting 101. I mean, that's the first part of my career I learned. You come in, you centralize, make sure people are capable and they're willing to be the best they can in the role. Now we measure everything and by measuring everything, we understand where humans are making mistakes. We also understand where processes are making mistakes. 

0:48:00 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, of all the teams I work with, the number one most common, consistent need, expectation and pain point is role clarity, especially at the leadership team level. 

Everybody wants to help and the willingness is there and we give people more and more stuff because we need more and more help and we end up with this confused mess and the idea of but I need to know what's most important and that is so powerful at all levels of the organization. 

And sometimes I worry that when you describe well, we're going to measure them or we're going to sort of drive towards efficiency, that can sound sort of like institutionally micromanaging, and it certainly can be. You can certainly crush people by like squeezing them heavily, but most of the time what you're describing, I see, is the form of like, hey, I don't really know what's important and it seems like you're acting like everything's important and so I don't really know where to spend my time and energy. So if you sit down with me and say these one, two or three numbers are really how we're measuring success, and if you get them in the sweet spot, that's a win and that now is like well, great, Now I at least know if I'm winning or not and I can try to do something with this. 

I mean, when I was a grocery checker in Boston in college, there was one number and I love this story because I forgot about it and I brought it back. The one number they gave you was items checked per minute, Because this particular grocery store at one point was the highest volume store per square foot in the Guinness Book of World Records at one point, Wow. And so working at this small grocery store in Boston that had unbelievably high, it was like 24 hours there were six people deep in line 24 hours a day. It was crazy busy. And so the one number and I don't even think they said much about it Like, oh yeah, by the way, you're measured in items per minute and it checked, and so at the end I'm impressed that they've had that by the way and so, but it was automated because the the check stand would figure it out for you. 

And so, like you get at the end of the day, it was like you were trying to reconcile the till. Like did you lose money in the tech? And anytime you lost money, $5 was a disaster. Like you cannot, like you just pull it out of your wallet, then we'll just move along. 

But the other thing was the items per minute, and I remember being so obsessed with that because that was the one way I could get recognition or measurement, or maybe it was better. Said, I didn't get a lot of other recognition. That was the one way I could find a proof that I was performing at a high level, and so me being me, I was just learning double overhand and he'd check, like on the ding ding, ding, ding ding on the scanner. I love it. 

0:50:27 - Matt Seefeld

Well, yeah, that's your personality right Is you want to achieve her. That's the thing I mean. You're, you're, I'm telling you self-actualization, right, it's the David Goggins mentality, but it is well. The thing I do want to say about it is is don't measure 50 things, right, you? They understand how to get better. Against that one thing, right, I mean. I always go back to, like weight loss. If you want to lose weight, well, that's your marker. Are you losing weight? But what are components to that? Well, you could measure your body fat percentage, you could measure bmi, you could measure other things. 

For me in the revenue cycle it comes down to the you're resolving the task the first time. So if it is is presented. If an error occurred, whether it was a person, a tech gap or a process breakdown I had, the upstream review could have been at scheduling, registration, coding. When it comes to you, can you resolve it and never see it again. So we call that a resolution, right, you know? And the benchmark is about 75%. So within 45 days of the last time you saw, whatever it is, a claim that's unpaid, you should have that balance. At least 75% result. I don't see that Right, and a lot of these clients that we go live with you're in the thirties and forties, now again. From then, what we do is you start giving that insight back to the individuals and you say this is your measurement. 

Guess what happens, like I see it every time. Within a month, somebody just decides to start hitting their productivity standard and the resolution rate goes up. So what happens then? Cleaner revenue cycle, faster payment in collecting what you're supposed to collect, right, and it's feedback now to the other individuals in the revenue cycle as to where the error occurred. It's the feedback loop, that's. That's. That's the missing link is in. 

I see this everywhere and I still see. I look, I still see in healthcare organizations like front end of the rev cycle, which is everything pre-service or point of service, and then the back end of the rev cycle has to handle all the problems. Most of the time these two don't like each other. Most of the time the front and back don't even report up to the same senior executive. Time and time again, it's like I get this hostile feedback of well, all those denials are coming from issues made in preregistration. What are you doing about it? I mean, I have a large ophthalmology group I can't say their name, although I kind of want to Literally on a call we're showing all these first fast denials where all these touches, all this waste going on, and half of these are coming from mistakes. 

And at the point, of care or prior to service right. No, authorization, verification of benefits isn't correct, Not collecting co-insurance. And the comment was, yeah, we've known about this for a long time. I said, well, now you have data right, you can change behavior. Oh, no, the person over that's not going to want to do this. They're not, they're just not going to do it. This was like two months ago. I said has the top-down shown you, guys, you're operating a margin? Has the top-down told the whole front and back that? Oh, by the way, this margin is getting worse to the point where you won't have a job. Like again, it goes back to what you said. Where's the context to why we do what we do every day and the impact when things go well and the impact where things don't go well. Yeah, I just feel like in my company that I run I mean, I am 100% focused. Does everybody here know whether you're a frontline person, a developer, an implementation, a client success? Do you know the role that you play in having a successful business? 

0:53:47 - Mark Henderson Leary

And if you don't, let's talk about it and are you in the right role? Well, sure, and I think that's the sort of the whole call to action here. That's entrepreneurship, that's business leadership. There is so much inertia, there is so much like. I wouldn't necessarily call it apathy, because I don't think it's exact apathy, I think it's ossification. I think it's like stuck in the way, like what will we even do with that change? Like you know, I couldn't even ask that question, like you can't use that kind of language in here. 

0:54:18 - Matt Seefeld

It's like, well, it's a different world. You know, yeah, people swear in business. 

0:54:21 - Mark Henderson Leary

People swear a lot more than they used to. People swear a lot more than they used to, and we can actually go cross-functionally, give some feedback about it and improve this. And I think that's the call to action for entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial leadership at all levels, and I think, for me, staking the ground in this mid-level between the smaller practices and the large institutional. I think that's where there's the most appetite and the most to lose, but I do think it works its way into the large institutions, and some very large organizations I work with have pockets who are really entrepreneurially led. If, for only the reason that they do see, like you said, extinction events coming, if they don't figure it out, the motivation goes way up. We're fighting for our lives over here. We're going to have to do it a different way, and so I think that's the exciting thing to see and watch it unfold. 

0:55:05 - Matt Seefeld

I think that's, that's the exciting thing to see and watch it, watch it unfold. It's, it's a it's a scare. 

0:55:09 - Mark Henderson Leary

I love scarcity man, yeah, yeah. 

0:55:10 - Matt Seefeld

You find out it's national selection. You're gonna find out who's a survivor and who's not, and and I think that it's, there's gonna have to be some macro economic changes to how people are reimbursed and I I just I don't know I'm I'm nervous that that some of those I take to your point it has to get a lot worse. It's kind of like you know, I do a lot of work in addiction and it's like you have the person who's had an alcohol problem or behavioral addiction and you have to tell family members or friends is that they won't find the opportunity to get better until they hit the lowest point spiritually. 

It's not just physically, it's spiritually Right. And, and I know like when I got sober seven, more than seven years ago, it wasn't a physical bottom, it was the spiritual bottom where I could see two futures one staying continuing to drink and the other not. And the the one I didn't. I literally couldn't see past the drinking on the on the one and then the other one. I saw all these amazing memories with my sons and rebuilding a relationship with my wife and being able to coach teams Right. So it's it, people have to get to that point. 

And healthcare, I think I love what you, I love it, you're just honest about it. Healthcare has to get to that point of desperation where they're willing to make it's willing to make a change and and it's going to be multiple factors that go into that is that if we can't figure out the, the consumer, alignment to the provider, alignment to the patient, right, I'm sorry, consumer, provider and payer, if we, if we can't get that aligned, I don't know where, I don't know where, this Well, that's a great sort of metaphorical parallel. 

0:56:46 - Mark Henderson Leary

I mean, maybe slow, exaggerated, but the, the, the scarcity. I was actually kind of a libel for me. The scarcity is what awakens the entrepreneurs. Right, there is, we got to do something here, and so the entrepreneurs come out at night. We're going to fix this and we're going to really create a fertile ground for some innovation and some risk some risk taking when the stakes get to be so high. But industrially, I mean in the industry, the real change does come from that sense of rock bottom. We have to get off of the drink. We cannot be, you know, alcoholics in the rev cycle or anywhere in the practice. And it really, I mean, it seems a little exaggerated, but like, to some extent it's how many just really bad habits? Could you walk around any practice and say like, yep, they're doing that, yep, we know that's dead and we're going to stop doing that? No, not today, maybe tomorrow. 

0:57:37 - Matt Seefeld

It's actually. It's crazy. We look at touches now on so many different of our clients and the themes are always the same. Can actually in a sales process now tell somebody within a month of go live where their biggest problems are? And half the time they're like, yeah, you're probably right, half time like well, I don't really know yeah then we go live and I'm like, doesn't change. 

yeah, the revenue cycle problems have been the same for the 25 years I've been at this. The difference now is that we can measure exactly specifically where it is right and and here's the funny thing is, the solutions aren't hard. It's not hard to fix these things, it's the willingness to fix them, and that's what I'm starting to see more open-mindedness. 

It's the willingness right it's honest and willing and honest. Right it's open-minded willingness and honesty with yourself. And some of these groups are gonna rise up and challenge themselves and some are going to give up. 

0:58:28 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, yeah. The solutions on the entrepreneurial side and when I teach business operating system and other things in terms of the business to run a great business, to manage, to scale, to measure, to create right people, right seed, the clarity of vision it's we got a million reps on this, millions of reps on this. It's, we got a million reps on this, millions of reps on this. We've been doing this for decades, if not a century, that we have what we need to know here to prove this out, and they're still sort of like well, I'm nervous about doing it Like why, why Just do Just, we have this is no miracle. I mean, it feels like a miracle when we do it, it's not that hard yeah. 

0:59:02 - Matt Seefeld

I'll leave it with this. My dad always talked about you know, he was a big sailor and grew up sailing inland lakes and then ocean and all that and he was. I was talking about the pessimist and the optimist and the realist and healthcare is living in the. I think they're living in the pessimist or optimist joint and what that means is, you know, the optimist is hoping the wind changes, right. The pessimist is just complaining about the wind not being where it needs to be and the realist adjusts their sails. And you have to see more realists in this industry that are willing to try different things and listen to people who have a solution in order for them to make it across the lake right. And I think that complaining about it or hoping for change is the absolute disaster for this industry. 

0:59:49 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, totally agree. We've covered a lot, man. We're getting on time I need to get going. 

0:59:53 - Matt Seefeld

I love it. 

0:59:54 - Mark Henderson Leary

Anything you feel like we didn't cover, at least for today. 

0:59:58 - Matt Seefeld

I feel like you and I could have a whole. I mean we can get into Gen AI, get into all kinds of fun stuff later on. 

But yeah, no, this is great. I mean I always love. First of all, you know you've got such a great podcast, so many great listeners. We just got to keep getting the word out on this is that this is an industry that's impacting every single human right, you and I included, and there's not a future that's bright here and we all have to. You know, the consumers, the providers and, at some point, these payers. They have to figure out that this is not sustainable and just closing off care right, and limiting who you see is not the answer, right. It's not the answer to put communities in stress and it's not the answer to say, well, if you have the economic means, then you're going to be treated, but if you don't, you know, go ahead and use emergency rooms and places where they have to see you. Everybody's in this and I hope that, specifically the payers, I hope that they start to understand that they have a major role in the ability for providers to continue to give great clinical services to their patients. 

Right that pay a lot more for health insurance. You said it, I mean, our health premiums went up again this year. We just had our benefits call. They're like going up again this year and deductibles going up too and I mean I can cover it. But a lot of people like our are. We have a residual company and I can tell you, like they're probably sitting there going, how am I going to cover five thousand dollar family deductible the first half of the year? Yeah, exactly right, when you're making, you know, 18 bucks an hour. Totally agree, man, but it's great talking with you Anything, you know. I think if people wanted to get in touch with me, I mean yeah, that was my next question. 

1:01:40 - Mark Henderson Leary

How does somebody find you? And this is a great time to kind of mention your addiction app and that kind of stuff as well. 

1:01:45 - Matt Seefeld

Yeah, yeah, great time to kind of mention your addiction app and that kind of stuff as well, yeah, yeah. So LinkedIn, I think, is probably the best. Matt Seafeld, you know, I know that'll be in the show notes, but check, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn. I use that quite a bit for networking, I think that. You know I did, I did create a when I got out of treatment years ago. The biggest gap I saw in people getting sober and that's, you know, really physical, behavioral addiction, and now we do a lot of work with emotional addiction, which everybody qualifies for that in some fashion is. 

I created a community that's free app store, apple or Google and it allows people to have a softer entry into this world of recovery where we're able to match people based on attributes, right, so could. Can I relate to somebody who went to war, who's been to prison, who's an alcoholic, who's never had a solid job? No, but there are people who have that profile, who figured out a great way to build an extraordinary life that could help you, right? The only thing I have in common with that individual is we had alcohol problems, now entrepreneur, a father right, an alcohol a surfer. So what we're trying to do is is we bring people together on more common ground and remove the intimidation of having to try to walk into a meeting or stand up and say I have a problem and it's, it's great, it's amazing. 

Community 24, seven. There's somebody, whether they're in New Zealand or they're in San Diego, willing to talk and chat. So my lifelink. They can search for it on the app stores and download it. If they know any of your listeners are having a problem, or family members or friends, get the word out. It's, it's the. It's the most important thing I've done in my professional career. It's not a commercialization. It's free to the world to use, I'll never charge for it, and it's keeping me healthy and mindful that, in order to have conversations with executives and gentlemen like you, I have to stay on the right track. 

Right and and it's, and I I talked a little bit about it during our show here, but the emotional addictions that everybody has and specifically, you know, revenue cycle is drives a lot of the perception of people not being motivated to do the right job. So be conscious of the people who work for you. There's a lot of thing going on between the ears that could be causing the perception of not wanting to do a good job, and I think that that's something that helps everyone right. Even when you start talking to the young kids, you know, hey, the only person that can make you feel bad as you. So don't, don't, don't labor yourself around it. So I think I think it is, you know I won't go off topic there, but I just hope that every one of your listeners understands that a lot of the problems that we, as human, create are actually in our own heads, and it's the I'm not good enough, you know, or you you've, you're, I'm playing a victim or these emotional addictions that drive in a lot of cases, maladaptive, behavioral and physical. 

So it's, we're complex humans. We're more complex now than ever with the connection to social media and the connection to immediate gratification, and this all trickles down to our ability to perform in our job. Yeah, and and and I I see it hand in hand. I'm the. I'm telling you I can see the most unmotivated revenue cycle person turn into an amazing individual, and not just with their work but their home life, building an extraordinary, extraordinary lives because somebody took the time to listen and guide. Yeah, going back to school, right, getting getting their kids back, you know half custody, whatever it is, buying in a party or buying a condo, right, moving out of a certain location, these little things, you see, are so special and we see the humans really rise up, not just in their work but be proud of their life. 

1:05:23 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah. 

1:05:24 - Matt Seefeld

And it also then is everyone around them benefits. So that's probably a whole different show, but I really appreciate you going a little bit over. I know your listeners are probably like, oh man, it's an hour, it's a lot of time, but I love this dialogue. I love it's conversational. It's hopefully they took something from us. Yeah, for sure. 

1:05:43 - Mark Henderson Leary

And I think there is a lot that ties it back into purpose and impact, and I think that's sort of the essence of this, and these practices are here to help heal people and everybody can grow and everybody can grow in their own way in the practice and that's a big part of it, and what you're doing is helpful. It does sound, you know, kind of the start of the conversation always kind of sounds like oh, we're just trying to make more money, but actually at the root of it it has a lot to do with purpose and efficiency. Impact that ends up helping the practice, but helping everybody along the way, including the people who are contributing to it. 

1:06:12 - Matt Seefeld

So it's awesome stuff, man. 

1:06:14 - Mark Henderson Leary

So people will check you out in MedEvolve and also my Life Link right. 

1:06:19 - Matt Seefeld

That's the yeah, yeah, my Life Link. It's my passion project and MedEvolve, obviously, is our company. If any of your listeners are looking for software that measures all these human touches and everything, we're here and hit me up on LinkedIn. Just search for Matt Seafeld and love to connect with any of your folks. 

1:06:34 - Mark Henderson Leary

Awesome, well thanks so much for the time. Matt. We'll have a conversation in the future. I'm sure it's been great. So thankful and grateful for all the stuff you shared. For all the stuff you shared, and that is our time for today. And so, for those listeners who thought this was valuable, love to get that feedback. Please get it in the hands of anybody who might not have it, because you know, as you know, the internet is full of information and a whole majority of it not useful. So if this is useful to somebody, please get it in their hands, because it's not going to get there on its own. And if you have feedback for us, we love to get that. 

As I always remind you, the last thing I want you to feel is stuck, and so if you're in your practice, envisioning this high value, high profit, thriving culture, that's really making an impact, that gives you the life you deserve, but for some reason, you're just not sure what the next step is. Or you're struggling or you're stuck. Please don't stay stuck. Please reach out and get some time with us struggling, or you're stuck. Please don't stay stuck. Please reach out and get some time with us. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule and we'll get some time to talk about what a first step or a next step could look like for you to create that practice that makes that huge impact. With that, we will see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson Leary. Thank you.

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