Will Power
Being a physical therapy entrepreneur can be unbelievably challenging at times. From patient care, to running the businesses, to balancing a family, it’s no wonder many entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed and burned out. Each Tuesday, join Will Humphreys, a retired private practice owner and medical entrepreneur, as he introduces game-changing leadership concepts and interviews other successful leaders in healthcare. If you want to start, scale, or sell your outpatient physical therapy business, this is for you. Together not only can we increase our income, impact and freedom, we can build the largest network of healthcare leaders in the world at the Will Power Podcast.
Will Power
AI in Healthcare Billing with Greg Martinez
Navigating Rapid Growth: Insights from Greg Martinez at Athelas
What happens when a $6 billion medical billing company faces rapid growth? Join us as industry leader Greg Martinez from Athelas shares strategies for maintaining team morale and trust under pressure. Through personal stories, Greg highlights the importance of understanding the "why" behind daily operations and working alongside passionate individuals. He reveals how adaptability and the right mindset can turn chaos into opportunity, even in high-stakes situations.
Key Takeaways:
- Maintaining team morale and trust during rapid growth
- Turning chaos into opportunity through adaptability and mindset
- Overcoming friction points with trust and open communication
- Leveraging diverse perspectives to innovate in healthcare technology
- AI's role in streamlining tasks and enhancing decision-making
- Speed and transparency as drivers of product development and trust
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One of the challenges rock stars, when we grow our company that we face is the resistance that we get from our team. Have you ever tried that before, where you try to grow your company and it starts to burn out the current team? Maybe there's even people on the team who aren't the best fits, who use that opportunity to make their complaints vocal and bring the morale down. Well, today's episode is for you. Complaints vocal and bring the morale down. Well, today's episode is for you.
Speaker 1:This is Greg Martinez from Athelas, a $6 billion medical billing company wanting to go public in the next four years. That type of growth is so intense that it's nothing I've ever seen before and, as a result of that, greg's going to share the lessons learned from growing a company that aggressively and that strongly. It will shock you how they approach growth and will give you inspiration on how you can talk to your team in a way that's going to be collaborative but also not be slowed down by the resistance that we get from some of the people on our team. My hope is that you'll learn how to grow in a way that will make your life easy. Enjoy the show All right. Well, greg, we've had a great conversation about the secret to success. Why don't you share what you think success looks like for you professionally?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question. I think one is the passion on what it is that you actually do right, the why behind the day-to-day grind, but more so the combination of the why with the people that you do it with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's what we were talking about. This idea that, like, who we do it with really matters 100%. Describe that for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's interesting. I didn't know that I cared that much about it until we started scaling things right and expanding our team and you hire all these people and you recognize they have these attributes and characteristics that can help you succeed. But more so, what I found fulfillment is in is seeing them be successful, so their families are taken care of, and when you care about them as individuals and humans and you enjoy spending time with them, and then their success actually means more to you than just hitting a number or achieving a goal, then work doesn't feel like work anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, you have to do that because what you're doing right now is so intense and your team is so amazing. I was surprised, you know, with our billing company, katie and I, we were just amazed and we've said this to everybody as big as your company is, how personal it is. The most amazing individuals, daniel, kevin, like so many people that, and everyone you meet. They're so amazing. How did you guys find each other?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. It's a really good question. It's kind of like those lifelong things that you talked about, right? So Daniel is one of those people, for me for sure. He was my last student. His last clinical rotation was in my practice and we just talked about business and ideas and big picture stuff and what was wrong with the field and why we couldn't make an impact on it right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so the first time I got approval to actually create this clinical team inside of Athellas, he was the first person I called and I knew he'd come. He immediately gave his notice and you know, he's been my right-hand guy since that day and if anything were to change, we'd go everywhere together, like we are going to work together in the future, no matter what. And then others have been classmates, I mean our first three people we hired. Todd was my classmate in PT school, one of my closest friends now, and then Jordan was actually I grew up with his family's brother and he was one of my assistants, my aides, and I wrote his letter to PT school and those are the first three letters we made.
Speaker 1:So you've known these people forever. Is the relationship more important than the skill set? Because, I mean, these were really intense positions that you've hired them for at Othello, a $6 billion company. Your scaling goals are super huge. Your vision, of course, is to take the PT industry and use AI to totally transform their revenue cycle. So when you're bringing people over, my first thought is like, yeah, I'm sure Daniel is amazing, but how did you know he'd be amazing at this?
Speaker 2:And you don't always.
Speaker 2:Honestly, the true answer is you don't know, right, you can't know exactly, because when we scale this quickly in a business like this and the valuation continuously expands, right, right, you just adjust on the fly. You do what you have to do every single day and it's a little bit different. You just have to recognize like it's not going to be perfect and structured and that's okay, like living in chaos is how it's going to go, and I thrive in that, I love that environment. So you can't know, but I do know that, from a skillset standpoint, like he thinks operationally, he understands big picture, he's strategic, yeah, and you can't teach someone a thing like that, so I know he's going to figure it out. And also, he's super driven and very reliable and it's like that's more important than anything else to me, right? And the rest of them, from a relationship standpoint, it's the same thing. Yeah, I trust them. As humans, we can teach them the skill set They've translated their provider skill sets, very, very quickly into a sales management role in less than a year.
Speaker 1:That's amazing and it's such a cool concept because you have these two things at play that are really famous concepts. So, rockstars, as you're listening, one thing that we talk a lot about is that you hire on mindset and you train on skillset. So that's what you're talking about with Daniel's strategic, high-level thinking capabilities. You know him well enough to know that piece. But the second thing is trust.
Speaker 1:My favorite book of all time for business no kidding is a book by Stephen Covey Jr called the Speed of Trust. It's actually not that well-known Everyone knows his dad for Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But the speed of trust was told to me by one of my mentors as his favorite book and I thought he was exaggerating. And I read it and I was like dude. This is so crazy, because when we have trust with our team members, you can really lean on each other.
Speaker 1:For all the hard stuff and I know for me as an owner, greg like the hardest things was and I couldn't trust that someone would show up every day. I couldn't trust that they were like. The person I was hiring wasn't going to talk crap about me when I made a mistake, but it's so easy to pick on the leader in that group, and so the trust that you guys have with that team is evident, as as is proved by the fact that I see you guys talking to PTs and they're just totally feeling that connection, despite the fact that you are backed by a very large company in artificial intelligence. Yeah, yeah, so, man. So every quarter, obviously, you guys focus on growth. So what challenges do you guys face on those relationships, as you're, you know what I mean, because there's so much stress. How does that stress the relationships that you've built?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's honestly, it sounds cliche, yeah, but when you go through these really challenging situations together and you win right, you hit these goals that seem unattainable at the time and in the last second, seem impossible. And you know personally, it's not exactly what I'm talking about. Firstly, is that exactly what I'm talking about? Like it builds this increased level of trust and camaraderie and just buy-in right to each other and to this bigger picture of what we're building together that it's like, hey, I would go to battle with you wherever we're at right, and it's just become so much more binding long-term because you've done something so hard together that you can't experience any other way. Right, if it was easy, it wouldn't be the same at all.
Speaker 1:Right, you wouldn't have the strength of the relationship. That trust gets re-fortified is what you're saying, 100%. So do you ever have friction points? Do you guys ever have points where there's like you have to talk things out, or All the time.
Speaker 2:I mean, the challenge with scale, right, is you can't map things out perfectly and so there's never like a fair, just way to have everybody benefit equally as we grow, create new territories, create new teams. You know scale at a really, really fast pace, right? We're over 50 providers, yeah, and to do that and keep it fair for everybody is impossible. So you have to have those conversations of like hey, you have to recognize early on my intention is not to harm you. I would do anything possible to help you be successful long-term here. But you have to recognize, as much as we try to keep it fair, it can't ever be perfect. If you trust me enough to remember that and give a little bit here and there so we can all win together, it's going to work out in the end, you know in the wrong run.
Speaker 1:Okay, I love that. How it came back to trust too, because you know you have that trust with people saying you can trust. I'm not intentionally trying to hurt you, yep, because we're organizing chaos, which is all. Growth is Right. We're taking this unorganized matter and we're organizing it to grow or scale. We're in this position where there's going to be lots of mistakes. That's one of my favorite things that I've heard is we're either learning or winning, right, and so the learning is more like what others would call failure, maybe friction within the team. Have you guys ever brought someone on? That's not a fit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and again, the intention. I will literally tell every single person I interviewed this right, Our intention is to make this a win-win. You need to be interviewing us as much as we're interviewing you. Yeah, this has to be a long-term fit for both sides and unfortunately sometimes it doesn't work out and what we try to do is paint that path and picture for them to say, hey, our intentions were good, we did everything we could to make the best fit possible, but I think we both recognize this probably isn't the best path or fit together long-term. How do we help you find a better opportunity moving forward so it does happen? It's, again, not been very common, luckily, thus far, but I think the odds show that it's going to happen sooner or later on occasion.
Speaker 1:Well, what's cool about that, too, is, I think, that a lot of times, when we think that we have a dream team going, that we don't have friction points, and that's quite opposite.
Speaker 1:A team, for it to grow and scale, well, clearly has to be growing is one of the things that you're saying, yep, and so you're in this environment with Athelas, where you guys are growing super fast. You've got lots of energy behind it and I will say this all the way up to your leadership. You know, hirsch and these amazing people that like kind of make you feel stupid, to be honest, like I'm twice their age and they're like super humans and you just, but they're so kind you can't dislike them. Like they're just, but it's the idea that, like you have this trust, but you also have these clear focuses on outcomes that allow you to have these safe arguments about, like, what's going to be productive and what we should do or shouldn't do, because everyone knows and trusts that, at the end of the day, they're all wanting the same for all. They all want everybody to win, and so I think that is something that people get confused with when they have teams that, or they've never experienced a dream team they think that that's just not possible at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I agree a hundred percent, and I think it's fascinating. It makes me think of two things. Number one is, again, you have to be aligned to the big picture because, it will never be perfect, like we talked about.
Speaker 2:Right, you cannot expect things to just run smoothly. You have to be willing to adapt all the time and recognize that, not if, but when things don't go the way you hoped they would. That is not personal. It's going to happen and you can control how you respond, but not all the circumstances that you're put under. The other thing is fun for me is PT was so amazing. You know how passionate I am about our profession Totally, 100%, believe in what we're doing. Some of the dynamic relationships that I've been able to, like experience at a company like this.
Speaker 2:I don't know how to really put a value. How do you measure the value long-term to working with someone like you just mentioned? Yeah, right, and it's not even just like their resume, because resumes are crazy. Right, there are people from all over every Ivy league school you can imagine, from from Harvard and Stanford. You know they're amazing.
Speaker 2:But to sit in the same room as people that think and see things a different way than you and to absorb the way that they analyze and process things and then bring our own personal experience to the table and see those things kind of mesh together is a pretty exciting experience, right, and in PT it becomes so common because we're always with the same people all the time. It's not necessarily bad, it's just not the same experience, right. And so they needed a bridge builder, right. They are so smart, so good at technology, so good at automation. They think of things in ways that providers don't, yeah, but they're also building tools for providers, right. So they had to have a connector, a bridge, between end user and most brilliant minds in the world, yeah, and we created that bridge of value that couldn't have come in another way, and so our value is great. It's just very different than what they bring, and when you put those together, it becomes something great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that story because we sometimes get trapped by being too similar with each other, but the thing we don't want to be afraid to be, the thing that matters most in being similar in thinking, is vision Like values and vision, because even if one person's a tech background and I'm a healthcare background, if we both want to disrupt physical therapy and make it the leader in musculoskeletal industries, I think there's a huge opportunity in my world. When I started getting coaching back in 2008 for physical therapy ownership, I almost walked away right Like it was just too hard. I got to this point where my wife said why don't you get a coach? And there was no coaches in physical therapy that I could find. There may have been, but like I never found them. So I joined Entrepreneur's Organization EO. It's the largest in the world for just business networking and they train you. They'll give you a mentor 5,000 a year, so kind of like this low expense but high impact experience.
Speaker 1:None of the people who coached me were in physical therapy and I'm so grateful for that. Having a CPA talk to me about numbers, having a roofing construction worker tell me about team building Like you just never know what value everyone has. But the big thing was, we're wanting to help people and make a difference. And when you're at Athelas, I mean it's really interesting because what you're doing there is. It's always been interesting to me that you guys are hyper-focused on physical therapy, right, like you have AI, you're focused on revenue cycle as well as a handful of other things. Now, sure, why did you guys like double down on PT? Because a lot of critics would say why would anyone double down on PT.
Speaker 2:It's a totally fair question and again, the obvious answer at the service level is that I was the first provider they hired. That was my background, that was my network, it was what I knew, what I was familiar with. And at the time you have to just say, hey, we're building this new tool, this suite of tools. We need someone to use it. Yeah Right, it yeah Right. And early on it's like how can we get in front of people as fast as possible? And that's my network. So it started just like great, this is convenient, right. Then what we learned down the line and again that's the honest answer is that's my network. That's why we started.
Speaker 2:I am biased. I'm going to continue to push for PT. Yeah, I want us to have the greatest tools and skills you know and opportunities possible. But down the line they saw that PTs have a lot of opportunity in private practice. Most other medical specialties don't have as many private practice opportunities. They're part of a larger umbrella system, like working at a hospital. But PT is so common to just break off and say I'm going to create my own thing and I'm going to figure out how to run this thing on my own and I'm going to scale it and very few other medical professions or specialties have that many entrepreneurs that are just building something great with a really, really diverse skillset like PT, and so I think it aligns really well with how we're building. They think the same way. There's a lot of synergy and it's made sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that you have that. It's so cool because we did an episode last week with someone by the name of Tim Spooner. He's got the largest private practice owner here in Arizona and he was talking about how this is the single best time to become a PT and start a practice. And the reason being is because what we don't realize as PTs is that this is a $600 billion industry called musculoskeletal stuff. Versus musculoskeletal recovery, versus just the physical therapy rehab portion, that's like 30 to 40 billion, sure, so there's this massive industry to come in.
Speaker 1:So I think that's another reason why Athelas and other larger companies are starting to really, you know, jump in here, because you guys jumped in because you grew where you were planted. They planted a guy named Greg and he grew from PT. So that's where you continue growing. But now, as you guys are growing and scaling, there's just tremendous opportunity for disruption, scaling and man, what you guys do in the AI space is so fun. So I know a lot of people are gonna be tuning into this episode because they want to hear about how AI functions with revenue cycles. So talk to me about that. What does AI? What does that even mean? Artificial intelligence helping people get their money as physical therapy practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. It's so broad. There's just so many places you can start. Yeah, I think the easiest way to explain it is to think about the repetitive or monotonous tasks that are generally required to successfully create and submit a claim and then actually get paid on it in a timely manner. Yeah, right, there's so much repetitive patterns that have to go into place in order to actually get paid fairly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the question becomes why do we have to do that every single claim, every single time, and then adjust that for each payer individually? Can there be a way to automate that, right? So the simple way of looking at it is do monotonous tasks at scale immediately. Let's take that piece out right now, right, yeah, and then, when you start automating portions of it, what you start to get is data, and when you have data, you can make more informed decisions about efficiency. And then you drive your decision-making process based on actual results and objective numbers that are coming from some of the automations you've started and that drives more automation. And so it's gone from.
Speaker 2:Hey, you know, we could probably streamline querying portals for remittances and the numbers we throw out, right, like, we're going to get these 1,800 remittances in about six seconds. So we scrape these portals, get the data we need, post them directly back into our platform and it's called Insights, and that would take a human about two weeks working full-time, nonstop doing right. And so I was like, wow, that's really amazing Now that we can do that, how do we drive that data we're getting from remittances or eligibility checks right Into more purposeful or meaningful automations, right? And then it just starts to add on to that and the next layer comes, and then we get users like physical therapists and practices starting to use it and they say, hey, this is amazing, what if you used it in this way? And then our engineers like, that's a great idea, let's, let's try it right, because you have so many engineers that can adapt, so fast, so many.
Speaker 2:We ship new code every two weeks, jeez. So we have well over 200 engineers full-time engineers now based in the Bay Area and, again, top talent in the world. Right, it's like we're recruiting from. We can now handpick these engineers from Facebook and Uber and SpaceX and you know all these Bay Area companies and plug them into something that's traditionally so boring, like nobody likes to do billing, right, no one. But if we plug in automation, llms, large language models right, these automations, like, they get to move faster than they did at Google. Yeah, right, they're iterating that quickly. Yeah, faster than they did at Google.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, they're iterating that quickly. Yeah, because those are such large companies, yes, you guys have they get to really implement change and see it impact immediately, exactly.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And again they get to be on the front lines of like wait a minute, here's a use case for something I can build that could be immediately implemented into a practice. We see results from that same day. Same day, that's fun, yeah Right. And so now billing isn't like ugh, this old drawn out, monotonous, boring task. It's like I could build something great that could be used at scale immediately, like I want to work for a company like that. And then we grow that quickly and it's like great. Now there's opportunity for equity and progression and everything else. And then you have these teams that just get bigger and bigger with higher and higher levels of talent, and it becomes this momentum that's just hard to slow down.
Speaker 1:Dude, I love hearing the enthusiasm on the back end from your perspective, Because here's where I get excited about it. It's from my misery of being a business owner, as a PT owner, I don't know, no one ever taught me how to do those things and I felt super shameful not understanding revenue cycle. So it was like, okay, I don't understand how to do my billing, but I'm too embarrassed to ask for help. So I usually would invest in a company or an individual and that's why I started in the black right, Because I had Katie Archibald, who used to be that one in a billion who was this amazing person who could grow and scale it. So I found myself really passionate about medical billing, as boring as that might sound. Because what really got me excited was fighting the insurance companies and in our heyday, when we had this team just of amazing rock stars, it was like these team meetings were almost like rallies, like political rallies. We're like you know what I just got this payment from?
Speaker 2:Aetna.
Speaker 1:I stuck it to the man and everyone's applauding. And because what you realize. I mean, look, in today's political climate you can't say anything without offending half the population. Right, correct. But you can literally say insurance, the insurance system is evil, and everyone goes yeah, that's right, like there's no offense to that.
Speaker 2:We're united, we're united.
Speaker 1:And so what's fun is fighting the suppression? Because, again, until I owned a billing company, I didn't realize that, like there were these automated systems that were absolutely just meant to make it hard for me to get paid for my partners, and with this automation coming in, I mean 600 remittances in eight seconds, or something like that. 1,806, yeah, I mean. There's no human being on the planet that can play the game at that level. It's almost like we're going to the insurance companies with this new playbook and we can just play at a much different level. Do you worry at all, do you worry at all at Athelas, that they're going to come back with their own AI sabotage systems to make it harder? Have you seen anything like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's a fair point. With all the technology that comes out, you have to recognize everyone's going to try to utilize it in their favor, right, yeah, it's who can adapt to the technology the fastest and then again, who has urgency. I think that the thing is with payers. They don't have to be urgent because they have all the control, that's true. They've been in the driver's seat for so long. They can change the rules whenever they want. Right, where's the urgency? And so, for us, we can hold them more accountable because we have a lot of urgency for the practices that we represent and we can iterate so quickly.
Speaker 2:You get an update of technology. You'll hear it in the news. It's implemented into our tech stack the next day for real, a hundred percent, because we can move so quickly, right, yeah, and so that's exciting. So, so, yes, to go back to your question, payers are using technology right now against us, right? They are using AI to deny claims, and there's just an article I can reference. But yeah, you know, cigna is denying 1.2 seconds per claim, is taking them 1.2 seconds denial, right, we know that's not ethical. It has to be a physician that actually reviews the claim itself.
Speaker 2:Like it's impossible you can't even open the claim in one, to start reviewing one for two seconds, right? So they did. 300,000 claims in less than two months, 300,000 denials Come on, crazy, yeah, crazy. And unfortunately, even the scarier part is we're so all overwhelmed with the day-to-day and the grind and trying to keep up and everything else. Yeah, less than 5% of those 300,000 denials were ever even resubmitted by practices.
Speaker 1:Less than 5% Just because they are so busy and they get overwhelmed and frankly, they're so busy the owners have no idea that it's even happening behind the scenes. Their billing companies are too busy trying to fight all the bigger fights, not going after the higher hanging fruit, so it puts them in that position where they just disappear and people just learn to accept their lower reimbursement for what it is they just basically go with the status quo because they don't know there's a better way?
Speaker 2:Yeah, right. And again they're trying to just survive. Like can I get my current claims out? Yeah, if I can't do that, I'm not going to stay afloat. I'm going to focus on that first. Maybe I'll get resubmit them and hope it goes well, but not make any adjustments, and maybe the insurance company won't catch it, or that's not a sustainable way to run a business or to scale. And so it's like how do we plug technology in and make it do that for them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and let them focus on what they want to do, which is treat and focus on the claims. There's a book that we're teaching a seminar tonight called AI and Physical Therapy here physically in Arizona, and there's a book that I'm handing out to everyone who attends that I'll put in the show notes for all the rock stars who want it, because I can't remember the name of it right now, but the whole book is exploding on the New York Times bestseller list because it's all about AI how it's offloading providers so they can focus on better care. I mean, there's all these trends virtual assistants for replacing non-clinical staff. You have AI filling in systems so that the provider can just hyper-focus on their care and get super impactful with the community, like they were intending to do from the beginning.
Speaker 1:One of the things that you guys have developed is a scribe technology to help offload the biggest headache of all time, which is notes and documentation. There's a lot of great softwares coming out there and I think many of them are fantastic. Yours has had some tremendous results. Why do you think that you guys like what I've seen people? I'll just say it this one friend of mine in Arizona told me the first day they implemented it. That night, two of his PTs cried on their way out because they realized they would never have to do a note again because your AI just sits there on the phone and actually plugs everything in. Tell me about how you were able to get to that point as quickly as you guys did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, one of our main main values at Athos is speed above all else, speed above all else, speed above all else, speed above all else. We move fast because we again, waiting, analyzing, trying to be perfect at something just slows down iteration. The faster we get it in front of users, the faster we get feedback, the quicker we can iterate and refine and actually improve the product in day-to-day use. So what we did is we had a lot of practices that are PT-specific, right, like we talked about. They were already using other product lines, they were using RCM, right, and they were happy and we basically said, hey, here's the new technology and documentation. We know it's a pain point, would you mind using it and giving us feedback? So we had them just pilot it and pilot it, and pilot it.
Speaker 2:And we got so much feedback that we could iterate over and over again in a safe place. And even our most basic version was like game changing. They were like oh my gosh, there's no templates, there's nothing but the fact that I can just turn something on to record an encounter, have it tell what my voice is compared to the patient's and have it spit out a transcription that then is formatted to what I wanted to say at all to look like a soap note was game-changing, yeah, and then you just iterate. And now we're I don't know how many versions in now. Right, but now it can basically completely free you from doing any documentation outside of the clinic.
Speaker 1:Dude, I would have killed for that it's so crazy, because there's this whole thing in the book of speed of trust. I feel like this is our theme, because speed above all else, right, yep? So the biggest thing that creates trust in a quick way is results. So you talk about speed above all else. It begs the question, especially when you're piloting things, knowing that you're not producing ideal results, how do you not break trust when you're in this mode of going so fast that you're like openly knowing that you're not going to get it right the first hundred times, but you're trying to get through those hundred times as quickly as possible to get it to where it's productive? How do you not break trust?
Speaker 2:with those individuals. It's the name of the game. I mean you hit it on the head, will. Yeah, that is hard to do and that's where I think honestly our background as providers right, having empathy, being able to communicate clearly, like wanting sincerely to serve, right, like the team that I have we don't tell them to sell it Like, how can you serve these people?
Speaker 2:And when you come with a servant mindset and you are very clear on communication, expectation setting, yeah, and we are here to help you. We recognize it is not ready and it's not perfect in its current state, but together working on this and communicating about it through this process will get us to a point, uh, that will help us both long term. And then we obviously incentivize them like, hey, what can we do to help you, to reward you for taking a risk and piloting with us, so that it is this joint risk that we share and this joint venture long-term that benefits us both. And I really do think that, again, a clinician or provider PT-specific background has been essential to set those early expectations so that we build trust and they recognize and come straight to us with honest and open feedback that we'll listen to and apply and not feel like they just have to suffer in silence and hope that it one day gets better down the line.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's something that's very new to a lot of our listeners and rock stars. This is a masterclass on implementing change in general, because what Greg's talking about here and I love this is this concept around transparency. The way we get around. It is number one serving the people in our teams.
Speaker 1:If we're changing something within our company, as an example, we want to be transparent around the risks and the rewards. We want to always say we're piloting it. I always tell people, never say you're changing anything, but you're piloting every idea, first to see if there's traction and then from there making adjustments based on their feedback quickly, because what builds trust more than anything is results and being transparent. That there's going to be some out points almost sets you up for building trust when we are in a position where we can gain their feedback and make adjustments quickly, so transparently. Greg doesn't know I'm going to say this, but we had a chance to meet with dozens of people who've been on Athelas and I got to meet with them kind of after hours when you know no one was around except for us and they've had a few drinks and it's amazing what people tell me when they've had a few drinks.
Speaker 1:Honesty comes out. Honesty comes out. And I was like so what's it like really? And they all said the ones who were the earliest adapters were like the first reiteration of these things was rough, but they were always transparent about it and there was incentives to stick through it. Like you said, there's got to be an incentive, Like there's an exchange always present. We can't just expect people to make changes without that happening. And then the and so, because those pieces were there that couldn't go on indefinitely.
Speaker 1:But the way that going back to speed above all else, going back to the book, Speed of Trust, going back to fighting the insurance companies, even the fact that technology gets released on a Tuesday and you guys are implementing it on a Wednesday, because it's the most important value that you guys have is vital to building that trust and keeping results. So it's fun to see how you guys are pivoting in that space. As you look to the future, Greg, what is it that you see? I mean, look, man, like you and I both are big fans of Athelas. What do you think is going to happen with Athelas in the future? What would you like to see happen? You know, for the industry as a real, not just Athelas, but like AI, Like what the industry as a real, not just a fellow, but like AI, like what would you like to see down the road?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's some personal bias here, for sure. So, like surface level, what I'd say is can we create enough integrated technology on a day-to-day user experience to where a provider can choose if they wanted to see more patients without feeling any additional burden, if that's their choice, great. If they don't want to, great. It's up to them. They can actually make decisions based on what they think is best for their personal professional life yeah. And then the balance of home and spending time and quality time with family they get to choose.
Speaker 2:Right now, it's like you either do it or you're not going to survive. Yeah, man, and you feel like you're a victim every day. You just have to do things a certain way because they're dictating all the rules at you and no one understood that when they went into medicine, right? So that's where I'd say it started. Can we get enough automation in place? Right, continuously on the documentation, the revenue cycle side, the EHR side, combining these things to have such an amazing day-to-day experience that the essence of going into the field is returned? Yeah, they're doing what they love because they get paid fairly. Again, right, that's number one.
Speaker 2:Bigger picture is man. Can we actually fundamentally change the way healthcare is rendered. That's where I get really excited, right? I mean, it is so important to recognize how broken a system is that says we go to school right, we pay all this money for an advanced degree, we have this amazing skillset, we offer amazing care, we have all this overhead and cost, we render this excellent experience for a patient, and then we have no guarantee we're going to get paid. Yeah, man. And then we go pay someone to try to get us help us get paid, and we still have no guarantee that we're going to get paid.
Speaker 2:Right, just broken, broken, broken. And so could we actually hold payers accountable Because we're doing such a good job at collecting that they have to fundamentally pause and say can we continue to operate in this manner or not? Right, that's what I would love to see happen. There's some personal bias in there, I recognize. If you ask our CEO, he may say something different. Yeah, but I want to hold payers accountable. I want providers to practice how they feel like they should practice, because it's the right thing to do and not because they're playing by rules that they had no control over making.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that vision and I think what's so when I hear you say that, it makes me think about what AI really is. You know, it's like money. It's not good or bad. Inherently it's a tool and as PTs, as leaders in PT, guys rock stars. The more we can harness this for our benefit to push forward the thing that we love the most, which is this industry. You know, my favorite people in the world are PT owners and leaders and people who want to be leaders in our industry, because they're the ones who are clearly choosing it not to be rich right now. These are people who lead with their heart in such a big way that I just want to challenge everyone to look for technology, look at profitability as the tool that it is for us to make the change that is coming. Because it is coming.
Speaker 1:People are starting to fight and they're starting to win their battles against insurance companies. With tools like AI, we are able to hold people accountable in a way that they've never been held accountable before, and when you were describing things earlier, Greg, like this thought occurred to me how we're like the least of their worries, Like they would never see it coming. This movement in physical therapy their smallest industry of healthcare, the weakest professional in terms of how we've been structured, but yet we're still around for a reason, and the reason is because the demand of what we do is so high and because we're so passionate about what we do. I defy other healthcare providers to be as passionate as PTs. I'm sure they're out there, but for us to come together, we're going to have to use technology like AI and other technologies to help us grow and scale.
Speaker 1:So I hope we get to hear more from you, Greg, in future podcasts. Man, this was a phenomenal time. I really appreciate you being here. If people want to get a hold of you and learn more about Athelas or anything about what you see as an AI expert in the physical therapy space, how can they get a hold of you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the easiest way is email my email is greg at getathelascom. And then again, if you go to our website, you can look at more opportunities of what's there and you can certainly learn more. But if you do fill out like an anonymous form of learning more information, you're going to get a random person calling you. That's probably not a PT, so sorry, Audience being PT I would say the best thing would be to come directly to myself or one of my team members that can speak more specifically to the PT experience through AI technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can tell you firsthand I've talked to at this point probably 50 plus companies that have been working in this space. I've never heard a problem. I haven't heard that. There hasn't been a problem that hasn't been overcome. Better said, and I am a big believer.
Speaker 1:So, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Greg, thank you for being on the show. No problem, all right. See you guys next time. Guys, thank you for taking time to listen to today's episode. If you found today's information to be useful, could you take a minute and help me? I would love it if you could leave a podcast review in your app so that other people who are looking for this information can find it. Plus, my dream is to have the largest network of medical entrepreneurs and leaders in the world so that together, we can change healthcare to make it better for all. So, in addition, if you can think of anyone that you can send this to, not only would that mean a lot to me personally, but it would build this network so that we can make healthcare the way that we want it.
