Testimonials

Peter I. Sallay, MD, President, Methodist Sports Medicine / The Orthopedic Specialists, Indianapolis, IN

“Over a period of several years, our practice seemed to be working harder, and yet we were earning less and less. We had engaged several consulting firms to help us stem the tide, but in each case, results eluded us. The most those firms ever offered us were fancy, multicolored documents with cookie-cutter, boilerplate recommendations that lacked specificity for our group.

I learned about EthosPartners after a friend in North Carolina’s Research Triangle recommended them. In a matter of about a week, they assessed our practice and found multiple operational problems. For example, our average income was in the 25th percentile relative to other groups in our area, despite having a decent ancillary stream of income.

Ethos not only provided reasonable answers to our questions, but also laid out an extensive plan for the renovation of our practice. Furthermore, they aligned the physician incentives with their own.

Within 18 months, EthosPartners both fulfilled their promises and exceeded our expectations. We are currently involved in several important strategic negotiations, which have been pivotal for our group in terms of its future position in the community. Before we partnered with EthosPartners, we would have made decisions based on “gut feelings,” whereas now decisions are made on firm data that comes from local sources as well as sources that are culled from EthosPartners’ extensive prior experience.

At this stage, our practice has a declining debt burden, an improvement in the bottom line for all of the physicians, and a pending deal for our ASC that will likely double income from that source.

I give EthosPartners my highest recommendation.”

Reimbursement Team, HealthEast Care System – Clinic Division, St. Paul, MN

“Working with EthosPartners helps us achieve our vision of providing high-quality, compassionate and cost-effective healthcare for our patients. The valuable information from VitalStats and customized reports assists us in improving our operations as well as helps us make sound business decisions. Rather than spending our time creating reports, we are able to focus more time identifying opportunities and improving our processes.

EthosPartners is fun to work with and they are very responsive as well as flexible to meeting our organizational needs.”

Jim Lyons, Administrator & Lois Mathews, Assistant Administrator, Hutchinson Medical Center

“Our relationship with EthosPartners has been an exciting step for our business. VitalStats and personal consulting services have helped our business to pinpoint issues before they become problems. The regular consultant reviews enhance the services and add a much appreciated ‘personal touch.’

Their involvement in our joint project in reporting data for the Minnesota Community Measurement Report has exceeded our expectations, allowing us to meet the needs of our organization, our payors and the community. In working with EthosPartners, we have begun to realize that the possibilities for data mining both relevant and applicable information are limitless.”

Dan Grosskopf, Assistant Administrator, Quello Clinics

“EthosPartners has assisted us in many aspects of our business and continues to meet the specific needs of our organization. Their assistance has been invaluable in such things as defining and delivering our monthly production report, which is designed to report statistics based on the group’s complex production formula. It is delivered timely and consistently [and] the monthly calculations come out clean the first time. It also eliminates time, which would be spent on the monthly manipulation of raw data as well as reducing the errors, which come from converting raw data.

EthosPartners routinely provides insight on how other practices are handling daily operations or dealing with special projects. More importantly, their consultants give us insight on what works and what doesn’t work and why. VitalStats provides useful and relevant data which is available [in] a useable format at a moment’s notice, which is typically how it is requested.”

 

Diane Murray, Director of Operations, Apple Valley Medical Center

“VitalStats has been a godsend for me. I now have my monthly numbers within hours of end-of-month. I don’t have to filter through pages and pages of month-end reports to find my pertinent numbers. If something doesn’t look right, I can drill down any number of ways to find out what caused the discrepancy, immediately and painlessly. Two years ago we hired a consultant to look at our coding practices. The reports produced were very helpful but it took a lot of our time to produce the data to support them, and it was also very expensive. With VitalStats, I can produce the same graphs whenever I want, for whatever timeframe I want, compared to whomever I want, and do it on my PC in about 10 minutes for each of my physicians.

I’ve had VitalStats for two months and have only begun to tap into its many uses, but I am very impressed. I’m anxious to set up access for the rest of the management staff so they can do their own solving and information gathering.”

 

Christie Woodson, Oklahoma Heart and Vascular Center

“In my career experience the greatest weakness I have witnessed relative to physicians is the lack of understanding of financial position, whether because of time constraints, or not knowing the proper questions to ask. From an earnings perspective, most are doing so "good" they don't bother to evaluate what it would take to become "great." And while they want to earn a good living from what they are doing, they are not driven by a financial motivation. Earnings are simply a nice byproduct of their work, not the reason they practice medicine.
 
Fine-tuning aspects of financial performance can add up to substantial amounts of money over time. Most of this fine-tuning is completely transparent from the physician's perspective (such as shorting A/R collection time) and doesn't impact their routine at all. But to fine-tune you have to have an easily accessible database of information. That is where GEMMS Dashboard comes in to play.
 
The GEMMS Dashboard program is the best analytical tool I have ever seen. Not only is it comprehensive but also simple to use. Even used in a minimal capacity, it can pay for itself by giving you A/R aging information, collection lag time ratios, etc. in two or three keystrokes. Used in its fullest capacity, it is a comprehensive analytical tool, which either you can employ for the doctors, or they can employ themselves.
 
HVC opened in Feb. 2006 and we added GEMMS Dashboard in October 2006. I wish we'd had it from day one. I hate to think of the hours I spent generating the kind of data it generates in seconds. I think it is the most cost-effective monthly expenditure we have at HVC.”