Since 2012, ClearTurn has been leveraging our tangible expertise to help companies reach their strategic and executional goals. We pride ourselves in making sense from the chaos, having the tough conversations, and producing concrete outcomes.
CLIENTS
“We were up a creek without a paddle, and the house was on fire…ClearTurn made sure we didn’t drown or burn by filling in key management role gaps, ensuring vendors were performing to the high standards we agreed to, and developing a template to set newly recruited program leadership on the path to success."
- Janice Vorfeld, COO, Institute on Aging
Apria Healthcare
Apria Healthcare is one of the nation’s largest and leading respiratory therapy companies, providing home medical equipment to more than 1.8 million patients a year in the United States. Apria wanted to diversify its outsourced revenue cycle management operations, but wanted to do so in a way that also strengthened its relationship with its existing vendor, so leadership hired ClearTurn to provide strategic planning and execution for their preferred approach.
Leveraging their deep business process outsourcing experience, ClearTurn consultants assessed the current vendor relationship, aligned with leadership on their desired end state, and quickly developed and executed an action plan, which entailed the following:
Sourcing Strategy: ClearTurn consultants drove the entire RFP process, which included developing the prospective partner list, updating RFP templates, leading the review process, visiting prospect sites, negotiating contracts, and ultimately closing terms with new partners.
Implementation Planning and Execution: during the RFP process, ClearTurn consultants developed a thorough implementation plan. With the signed contract, ClearTurn then led a process for partner onboarding, stood up a governance structure (detailed below), and trained and transitioned partner management to Apria employees.
Governance Structure: to ensure partner performance measures were being met, ClearTurn consultants developed a comprehensive governance structure, entailing organizational structure, roles and responsibilities, job leveling, job descriptions, and the like.
Ongoing Governance Activities: Clear standards and procedures were codified covering company financial health criteria, partner country geo-political and environmental monitoring, crisis management scenario planning, and company quality and efficiency performance. Also, ClearTurn led Apria employees through a remote and onsite partner audit to unearth areas of non-compliance, develop remediation plans, and close key gaps in performance. This exercise not only improved partner performance, it also provided Apria with leverageable expertise to update contract terms with their other partners.
By using 3 partners across 8 outsourced locations, Apria shifted outsourced operations from 7% to 65%. The entire strategy reduced revenue cycle management operations costs by 35% (or $25M a year), while instilling critical institutional knowledge within Apria’s leadership.
Lark Health
Lark Health is the leading chronic disease prevention and management platform using proven, AI-augmented health coaching to deliver better health outcomes at scale. As a tech startup in 2015, Lark had solid, disruptive ideas with multiple potential healthcare applications, but wanted a healthcare insider to bring clarity and alignment around the most impactful business model.
ClearTurn consultants paired up potential Lark applications with their knowledge of how the healthcare industry works to zero in on what area of population health would be the best fit for a product like Lark, including market assessment, target audience identification, product assessment, and competitive positioning. Armed with this go-to-market information, ClearTurn negotiated contracts and augmented the initial sales pipeline, closing $3.2M worth of revenue within 2 years. Lark leadership was so impressed with the results that ClearTurn consultants continue to drive business development for the company, and has helped grow one Lark product line to be the 2nd largest product in the country in terms of enrollments. In addition, Lark continues to retain ClearTurn for various implementation and support initiatives when needed.
Proteus Digital Health
Proteus Digital Health is creating a new category of pharmaceuticals: Digital Medicine. Digital Medicine measures medication treatment effectiveness, helping physicians improve clinical outcomes and patients reach their health goals. Proteus leadership was interested in switching current outsourced customer service and technical support operations to a new partner, and hired ClearTurn to lead the effort.
During data and intelligence gathering, ClearTurn consultants discovered risks critical to the company’s growth trajectory if it kept customer service outsourced, and recommended bringing customer service operations in-house to better understand the complexity level needed to meet customer expectations. With this strategic pivot, ClearTurn then built an internal customer service and technical support infrastructure. By bringing these capabilities in-house, Proteus was able to not only provide high-touch customer service, but also gained insights which helped inform product improvements and commercialization approaches.
“Even with the complexity and challenge it took to bring customer service in-house, this strategy provided us an immeasurable amount of enterprise-wide, strategic insights, and critical learnings. As we grow and scale our business, we are well-positioned to evaluate and select the right outsourced customer service partners when it is time to do so, and we have ClearTurn to thank for that.”
– Joan Hain, Director, Customer Operations & Support, Proteus Digital Health
Pacific Pulmonary Services
Pacific Pulmonary Services (PPS) is a large provider of home oxygen, sleep therapy, and nebulized medications in the US. A sizable portion of its business rests on maintaining its sole source Medicare contracts within the geographic regions it serves, which go out to bid every 3 years. During one such bid cycle, PPS lost its bid in over 50% of its service areas. ClearTurn was brought in to develop a strategy to replace lost revenue.
In collaboration with PPS, ClearTurn consultants developed an M&A strategy to identify, acquire, and integrate winning bidders within lost regions. Through a single acquisition, ClearTurn was able to replenish 95% of lost regions, strengthen geographic reach within those regions, and expand into new regions with the acquisition. ClearTurn also managed the transition and integration of PPS business into the newly-acquired company.
Versant Health
Versant Health is a leading managed eye health and vision plan company serving 33 million members nationwide. Initially, when Superior Vision and Davis Vision merged to form Versant Health, leadership took the opportunity to consolidate and upgrade certain revenue cycle operational systems during transition. The accounts receivable function in particular was transitioned onto a new platform designed to increase throughput and decrease accounts aging, but early reporting indicated sub-optimal performance, generating concern among operational leadership. ClearTurn was brought in to audit the accounts receivable system, identify root causes of underperformance, and remediate issues to restore process efficiency.
Using their seasoned expertise and best practices in revenue cycle management, ClearTurn consultants quickly identified key process and data integrity bottlenecks, corrected key inputs to alleviate sub-optimal performance, and put process and reporting in place to ensure efficiency goals. Through these improvements, Versant was able to improve its P&L by over $2MM in less than 3 months. This impressive outcome led Versant to engage ClearTurn in driving multiple additional operational initiatives, valued at over $5MM in anticipated annualized cost savings:
Phone System Consolidation: improve call retention and call routing through consolidating duplicative IVR systems onto a single platform.
Digitize Provider Payments: lower payment costs by extending Superior’s EFT capabilities to Davis and driving greater provider EFT adoption.
Mailroom/Fulfillment Outsourcing: lower fulfillment costs through outsourcing certain in-house fulfillment activities to a leading industry vendor.
Book of Business Migration: transitioned acquired book of business onto Versant’s membership systems (e.g., eligibility, payment, network, claims, etc.)
Call Center Procurement Process: lead partner selection, contract negotiation, implementation, and governance design for new outsourced call center operation.
Institute on Aging
Institute on Aging (IOA) is a San Francisco, CA-based non-profit dedicated to preserving the dignity, independence, and well-being of aging adults and people living with disabilities. One of the services offered by the company is a program to help people meet their health care needs within their own community instead of going to a nursing home or care facility, more commonly called PACE. An outflux of institutional knowledge from recent management turnover left the company’s PACE program in jeopardy. Company executives needed interim program leadership to identify and prioritize root performance issues, develop and execute remedial measures, and create a program playbook for permanent leadership as positions were backfilled.
ClearTurn consultants were able to quickly zero in and develop action plans to address the most critical issues. Through contract review, ClearTurn consultants identified, developed, and implemented a corrective action plan with a key underperforming transportation vendor driving much of the program’s non-compliance, virtually eliminating participant complaints in that area and renewing customer faith in IOA just as contract renewal discussions began.
Credo
Credo, the leader in automated patient medical record retrieval, is working to radically simplify and update the current medical record and retrieval process to support patients receiving better overall care. Credo’s innovative digital solution offers healthcare providers and payers an alternative to traditional fax-based processes that can result in incomplete patient health records with costly mistakes. Credo's mission is to end "chart chasing" which is a massive burden on providers, payers and patients and costs the US healthcare system $126 billion dollars annually. Credo’s platform digitally engages with patients and uses the newly regulated interoperability standards to digitalize the entire process of medical record retrieval.aa
ClearTurn consultants have helped support this quickly growing start up. Our team has worked directly with Credo’s founder Carm with executive support, document management, event scheduling, and market research.
