Transforming the Healthcare Model – A TLM Podcast

This blog will walk you through everything that went down in the Thought Leader Magazine podcast with CareCloud’s CEO, A. Hadi Chaudhry. In the podcast, Hadi Chaudhry majorly discussed the role of CareCloud in reshaping the model for healthcare practice growth, the company’s vision for scalability, the global workforce, key achievements, and the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play in the future. 

After sharing the pleasantries with A. Hadi Chaudhry, Todd Smith, VP of Partners Growth, asked him how he developed an interest in IT and at what point he realized he had something to devote his life to.   

It is no secret that A. Hadi Chaudhry has a background in Finance and was doing CA when halfway through it, he switched to pursue his passion for technology. Reiterating the same, he said, 

“I realized that technology is going to be an integral part of almost every field, and the future seems to be more driven by the technology, so at that point, I transitioned and took the path of IT.”  

He recounted that coming from an IT and financial background has greatly helped him in the business. 

A Glimpse into CareCloud from A. Hadi’s Perspective 

CareCloud is a health tech company providing propriety comprehensive end-to-end tech-enabled Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) solutions in the healthcare space.  

The company has a full suite of software products, including certified Electronic Health Records (EHR), Practice Management (PM), Patient Experience Management (PXM), Healthcare Analytics and Business Intelligence (PrecisionBI), Digital Health solutions, and much more.  

Carecloud is a Nasdaq-listed company that went public in 2014. Today, it serves over 40,000 medical providers in all fifty states of the US across 80 different specialties.  

Basically, it serves all segments in the healthcare space, whether it be small practice, medium practice, enterprise, large medical groups. 

Why It Matters – What Healthcare Space Challenges CareCloud Solved? 

A.Hadi Chaudhry started from the beginning and said that, CareCloud was founded in 1999 with a vision of transforming the RCM industry into a more tech-enabled RCM and providing an end-to-end, fully integrated solution for medical practices at a very cost-competitive price. 

The gap identified was that there were solutions, but no solution covered all aspects of running a medical practice at that time. Small practices with limited funds struggle to set up high-end systems and meet ends. So, we offered them that, also at a very comparative price.  

Besides RCM, our vision was to provide advanced IT solutions like EHR, PM, PXM, etc., to help streamline the workflow and processes of running a practice.  

“Our idea was to have one central database. Around that database, whether it be PM, EHR, or PXM, everything should reside in one database properly integrated so you don’t have to go to different disintegrated products and then try to inter-operate which comes with its limitations and problems and redundancies, so yes the vision was to have a full solution and end to end in terms of workflow perspective.” 

What the Clients Get Out of CareCloud’s Solutions? 

For the client, CareCloud has become a one-stop shop for them. They don’t want to worry about how they are going to check in their patients, how to get a certified EHR system, the penalties and doing the right reporting, how they will be able to comply with the government regulations, will they be able to meet incentive requirements, and circling back to the patient showing them their reports and their lab results. He further added, 

“So I think the way our clients look at it is that they are going to get the end-to-end solutions and at the backend, expert team to handle their Revenue Cycle Management that will handle their charges, their claims, denial management to ensure higher reimbursements and a steady cash flow.” 

While answering Todd Smith about his query about whether the hardest part of healthcare is the back-and-forth practices required to do for submitting claims and collecting payments, he said,   

Our first-time pass rate is now hitting 99% with the help of our propriety tool-based scrubbing system, resulting from our last 20 years of experience. 

According to Hadi Chaudhry, whatever they have learned in the last 20 years, that information and knowledge have been converted into rules. Now those rules are scrubbing to clean claims, and if the claim needs any attention, systematically, it gets flagged so the team or the provider knows to work on it and then send it out.   

The company has put these pieces in place through its tech-enabled RCM to attain the best industry metrics. 

What Role Hadi Chaudhry Plays in the Business? 

He said that, as the CEO and the president of a public company most important responsibilities are: 

  • Bringing value for the shareholders 
  • Growing the business strategically 
  • Refining the business opportunities 
  • Revenue generation  
  • Ensuring company growth 
  • Defining the goals  

Besides, delivering results based on the set goals, sharing the results and future of the company to the shareholders through earnings calls, talking to the investors and analysts, and positioning the company in front of them whenever the next round of funding has to be done.  

Simply put, he works closely with other leadership members of the company to represent the company in front of the investors to ultimately run and grow the business. 

What is the Vision to Scale Up? 

Hadi Chaudhry took this opportunity to zoom out and talk about how they grew up as a business since its inception. He said that they grew the company with three fundamentals: 

  1. Our proprietary Technology 
  2. Global Workforce 
  3. Market Consolidator 

The first two fundamentals helped them to get into the third strength. That is, looking into distressed companies in the industry, buying those companies at a much better valuation, and then making them profitable by leveraging the same two strengths; global workforce and proprietary technology.  

“Since going public in 2014, using the three strengths, we grew our business at about 35% CAGR, and the acquisition growth strategy primarily drove this growth.” 

Their future vision is to develop consistent organic growth. Thus, they have established a strong marketing and sales team to help the company grow even without an acquisition.  

At the same time, they also want to tap into markets other than the US. So far, CareCloud served clients in the US only, but they are exploring opportunities in the Middle East, and it was also mentioned in their fourth quarter 2022 earnings call.  

They will look for new markets and plan to expand their operations horizon in the digital health space, especially toward Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) 

Are There Any Success Stories in the Past 4 Years? 

A few years back CareCloud partnered with a prominent therapy and rehab facility. They wanted an off-shelf solution that suited their needs but couldn’t find any. Thus, CareCloud offered its ability and expertise to customize a solution specifically for them at much more cost-effective pricing leveraging its global workforce. 

At the same time, the company planned out how to roll out this entire package or solution targeting the therapy and rehab facilities known as Remote – therapyEHR. 

The unveiling of CareCloud Remote, a therapy-specific solution designed to satisfy the demanding needs of the rehabilitation sector, took place during the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) annual convention.   

It comes with extensive, simple-to-use features for organizing patient data and monitoring progress.  

The market for software solutions for rehabilitation is fairly developed and dominated by a few suppliers in terms of market dynamics. However, innovation has been a while since innovation has been in the spotlight. CareCloud Remote was created after spotting the biggest opportunity.   

This is an illustration of CareCloud taking on the healthcare industry’s top sharks with a solution it considers to be technologically superior.  

What Are Some of the Biggest Challenges In the Healthcare Business? 

“The reimbursements are continuously decreasing, and the cost of providing healthcare is constantly increasing.” 

He explained that they must strive for continuous creativity to find a point where they could offer the solutions at a much lower price while enabling practices to minimize their overall administrative and operational costs by automating the processes.  

“On the practice side, the challenges we face are the technology’s adaptability and the resistance to change if the practice has been doing certain things a certain way for the past few years.”  

In such a situation, a thorough demo is provided to the client to help them understand that there are other ways to the things. The functionality or feature they believe needs to be added is not required in the first place to ensure an efficient and profitable practice. 

“The third thing is the importance of training; sometimes, they ignore the importance of training, yes, there is a system and a solution, but the staff must be trained on it to leverage it to its full capacity.” 

These are a few of the challenges Hadi Chaudhry discussed and added that over the last two decades, CareCloud had made a mark thanks to the expert team under its wing and overcame most of the roadblocks. 

How CareCloud Differentiates? 

He said that CareCloud had positioned itself as an organization redefining the tech-enabled RCM services to help medical practices step into the next generation of healthcare.  

The company has many products, and tech-enabled RCM sits on top of all of them, whether Precision BI, EHR, PM, Chronic Care Management (CCM), or any other.   

“The client can get one or a combination of products or all solutions and services against a percentage of their revenue. Thus, if they are making more money, we are making more money, and if they are losing money, we will not be making more money.” 

Looking back twenty years, EHR, PM, PXM, BI, and RCM were different individual products, but today, these are the four fundamental products for running any practice smoothly.  

For example, today, you can’t imagine a grocery store without a digitally advanced cash register, but two decades back, it would have been considered a luxury.   

So, it’s understood that if a client comes for RCM, they will get EHR, PM, PXM, and maybe healthcare analytics and business intelligence software. Additionally, the pricing is another differentiating factor. 

How CareCloud has Built a Culture with Global Workforce? 

CareCloud has 4000 employees globally. In 1999 the company was founded, and in 2001 opened its first offshore office. Over the last 20+ years, they have learned much about building and maintaining a culture.  

On building culture, A. Hadi Chaudhry added that it starts with regular communication and interactions between the different employees globally. He said,  

“At any given time, there will be employees traveling to offshore offices, and traveling from offshore offices to the US office, sitting in front of the clients, sitting together, conducting meetings, and understanding each other.”   

He also mentioned that CareCloud was one of the few companies that adopted video conferencing technology very early. Sometime around 2002. webcams were installed on the computers. At that time, it was on a small scale to some key players; over time, they upgraded other employee systems as well. 

“We started conducting a daily check-in management meeting through video across all the different divisions in our offices sometime around 2005-2006, and since then, we have never even missed a single day; we all dial in, we stay on the call for 10-15 minutes for a quick check-in.” 

All these small things help build the culture and fill the gap, bringing different cultural groups to work towards a shared goal.   

Besides, local cultural events are celebrated according to the local customs of each location. Moreover, CareCloud also takes the CSR aspect very seriously.   

When Covid Came, What Was the Situation at CareCloud Like? 

After the COVID-19 outbreak, people started talking about telehealth, but CareCloud launched its first product of telehealth back in 2018.  

However, 1% of appointments were virtual before the pandemic in CareCloud’s entire database. During it, the number went up to 26-28%, so the adaptability increased significantly, but the company identified the need for it even before the pandemic hit.   

Now that the tension has eased up somewhat, the numbers have dropped, but they are still maintained at 6-7% and gradually gaining traction.   

How chatGPT and AI Will Revolutionize the Healthcare Space? 

It is going to revolutionize almost everything, and at the same time, the healthcare sector will change too. AI is not new; even if you think about healthcare space as well, some of the fundamentals are already there, such as AI-based attendance, which takes care of the rescheduling of appointments, resubmission of claims, automatically scanning through the medical records, but that was very limited AI being used.  

In terms of what CareCloud has done so far, it is nothing new. The company has products leveraging AI, ML, and BI technology.  

“We already have used AI technology, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots. It’s a whole catalog of bots that can be deployed. You can call them your virtual employees, which can scan through different information and perform certain maintenance tasks automatically without human intervention.”   

RPA can not only scan the claim and submit it, but it can also fax it out or queue it to perform the next steps.  

  1. Hadi Chaudhry further shared the analogy he has been using since chatGPT’s introduction in November 2022. He said, 

“The pandemic has put everything on the fast track of virtualization, so the pandemic was the driving force. It was bad for the world, but at the same time, it helped us learn something new or new ways of doing things. ChatGPT will be some sort of pandemic for AI adoption, which has triggered it already.”   

Talking about chatGPT and AI, Hadi Chaudhry also referred to Elon Musk’s concerns about AI’s safety and pointed out that he sees it happening with the numerous APIs chatGPT has started and made available. 

Besides, he added that the team at CareCloud has already started working on how the different APIs can be leveraged under the chatGPT. For example, it can help scan through an enormous amount of medical documents and data images and then help diagnose the patient with rare diseases.  

In medical practice, there is always a question hanging: How safe will this decision-making be? 

With time, the results will become more accurate, but initially, the responsibility lies on the shoulders of the medical providers. But the recommendations coming from AI will definitely help the provider make the right decision.   

It can also help in drug discovery, identify the impact of drugs in certain diagnoses and situations and help suggest new drugs or the right drugs to prescribe. He added, 

“It’s absolutely going to change, and it’s just a matter of time. 

And it’s better to change ourselves instead of resisting it because this will happen. The world is going to change.”  

What’s Next for A. Hadi Chaudhry Professionally? 

“After CareCloud, I may retire. Still, I plan on joining different advisory boards of different public companies and contributing to their success with all the experience and knowledge I have gained over the past two decades.” 

Conclusion 

The questions Todd Smith asked Hadi Chaudhry allowed him to share his views on how digital transformation is happening in the healthcare space. The podcast touched upon many key areas, including the role of AI and chatGPT in the healthcare industry, what challenges in the space CareCloud is equipped to solve, how healthcare providers are benefiting, and so much more. If you want to listen to the entire podcast, check it out here. 

 

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