How Healthcare Providers Can Expand Coverage and Grow Their Business

Healthcare companies provide their services in the occupational setting to treat employees when they're injured and prevent injuries before they happen. They help keep workers productive, reduce lost work time, and reduce costs. We interviewed Dan Fronczak, President & Co-Founder of Healthy Roster, about how they help providers expand coverage and grow their businesses. 

Here is an abbreviated version of the conversation. You can see the entire recording here. 

Michael Pendley: Okay, Dan. VIP. What is it?

Dan Fronczak: VIP. Pretty simple. It's a Virtual Injury Prevention. It's proactive care for employees to help reduce those recordables and lost work time.  So, Virtual Injury Prevention allows healthcare companies to have their providers use HIPAA-compliant communication tools to support those proactive care measures, for anybody, from anywhere. At any time. We offer tools like a kiosk, a hotline, and an app. I think this works best with provider groups already embedded in the industrial sector.

These are people for who, number one, are looking to strengthen their current relationships with their customers, i.e. those big employer groups that they're supporting. And then number two, provider groups who are looking to work with more industrial organizations, i.e., new business. So typically groups that already have providers  working in the industrial sector. They want to grow.

They want to strengthen their relationships. They want to do good business. Basically, we have found, in our line of work over the past six years, that Athletic Trainers are the best providers — a very cost effective, very effective provider for injury prevention. Think about it. When ATs work at schools, they're on the fields. They're on the courts. They're working with athletes - day-in and day-out - to make sure that they're staying on the field.

And that's a great analogy for work, right? Especially in the industrial sector — you want to be able to do your job, if you're an employee. If you're an employers, you want them to stay on the job. You want them to be effective. So let's get those people, Athletic Trainers, to help them be effective at their job and help them stay out of the emergency room.

Michael: Before working with Healthy Roster, were those athletic trainers that you mentioned - were they covering all of the shifts, all the locations. What were these companies doing before starting with Healthy Roster? 

Dan:  Typically, they're working at a bigger, larger employer group and they're typically working a first shift. You think about it, that's where they're the most employees are - on that first shift. That's when they're mostly working. So that's when they're trying to provide that onsite care... to affect as many people as they can.

So there's a little bit of a gap there. And we help cover that gap for them. 

Michael: Who are some of the companies you are currently helping? It's okay to name drop a little bit.

Dan: Groups big and small are using VIP from Healthy Roster. Groups like Work Fit, Concentra, Select Medical, Bon Secours Mercy Health. We work with big groups as well as small groups, you know, who are just in your community. And we work with regional groups and even your startups! So, basically, anyone who's employing providers, preferably Athletic Trainers working in the industrial sector already. And they want to grow their business.

Michael: What has the people you're working with told you separated us from what they were doing? 

Dan: Virtual Injury Prevention from Healthy Roster allows them to be everywhere, at any time. They they can't do that otherwise. They want to grow their business like we talked about. They want to cover the smaller, remote locations and the late shifts, but that doesn't scale. It doesn't scale for the employer group. And it doesn't scale for the provider. They can't get enough employees to be where they need to be. They can't get enough providers to be where they want to be.

And the employer groups really can't afford it — to have all those providers be everywhere, all the time. But you know what? An injury at a small location costs just as much as an injury at a larger location. So every injury counts. Every employee counts. And that's why you need to be everywhere. We already know that Athletic Trainers work on site, so let's just get them everywhere so that they can help everybody and then create even more of a Return on Investment (ROI). 

Onsite injury prevention works, especially with ATs. They reduce workplace injuries by 50%, decrease emergency room costs, and decrease days away from work. But they can't be everywhere. They typically, like I said, only cover those large locations, first shifts, but it's hard to cover all those shifts equally and nearly impossible to engage all those employees.

So what we found that our groups were needing were quick and easy documentation for their providers, ie their Athletic Trainers. They needed a system of record. And since they're in that system of record, they wanted to also communicate out of that system of record. So better communication and engagement. And that's the beauty of Healthy Rosters. We're all in one.

And guess what? At the end of the day, we're helping you cover ten times more, helping you get to more people, reduce injuries, lost work time, and win more bids. First of all, the Athletic Trainers, the providers, typically because they have an easier way to do it, they can access it through a phone, through an iPad on their computer. It's very simple to use. It's a mobile EMR (Electronic Medical Record.) But then also the bosses, they want to be able to interact and work with those ATs to understand how much of a difference they're actually making. They can be part of this system, as well. And then, the employees, they can interact with the provider through the system. 

So, everybody's on the same system. It's continuity of care. It's a circle of care, whatever you want to call it. Everybody, together, at the same time. And that's part of what we provide is that workplace EMR for those providers. You're getting that in addition to the ROI. We use surveys to promote engagement, and we'll get into that, but Telehealth is the big thing that really people get started with and this helps them understand how much of an impact we can make.

And the Telehealth is done through our kiosk, our app, and through a hotline as well. We provide a lot of different techniques that our providers can do utilizing these functionalities. A lot of our groups are setting up these kiosks that we provide inside their factories, inside their warehouses, on industrial job sites, and on construction sites. 

Michael: So, you have your people, the employees, who are continually going to the emergency room, especially at the smaller locations, and during the off hours. And your system is that filter — a way of preventing that from happening? 

Dan: Yeah, it's injury prevention. It's also triage of the situation. Let's take an example of a smaller location, and how this is helping, because typically that's where you're going to throw the kiosk, right? You're going to drop down a clinic, basically, as we like to call it, in a smaller location that doesn't have coverage already.

So, let's take one of our customers, they put a kiosk in a smaller location in the Northeast part of the country. And they had was a problem where they were seeing people go to the E.R. in a small location. I'm talking 80 employees at this location, and they were having 8 recordables, on average, a year for those 80 employees.

We put in that kiosk, provided them with a hotline. And with the app, so that the employees could use that as well. And guess what? When the employees started to interact with this, we reduced that number down to 1 recordable in 2021. 

So from 8 to 1! Significant ROI. But guess what? Also happy employees, too, because we're providing them effective medical care, at their convenience, in their back pocket. And guess what? If they're using the app, it doesn't have to be at the worksite. They can call it home, too, if they need to... they can pull it right up and use it.

Michael: I can hear someone. They would say, 'I would love a solution for this place', but it goes back to ROI, like you said. Having someone there full time just doesn't make sense. It's too expensive. It's hard to cover. Where VIP would be the ROI option.

Dan: You should ask them — are there other facilities where we could help you? Are there other shifts that we could help you with? 'Yeah,' they would say. 'But we don't want to pay for another provider for that. We'll just stick with this and have them talk to you. You know, maybe in their off hours when they get a chance.' 

Don't let that time gap happen!

You know, be there when it happens, so that you have a more effective way of preventing that injury, preventing them from going to the emergency room.

So let's say you have the kiosk, you have the app, you have the hotline. A hotline is just a way for them to call line. Maybe your truck drivers want to call and talk to somebody on the other end. It all filters as you use that word, it all filters to your providers. But let's say that you're just having trouble engaging your employees. You want another way to get them interacting with your providers. So we developed a solution where we enable you to create surveys.

Our survey platform provides an extremely powerful tool for engaging with your employees. Using our robust form builder, you can create dynamic questionnaires and deliver them to an entire group of employees or to an individual. Surveys can be sent on a recurring schedule or on an ad hoc basis, whatever works best for you. Any information collected is available in your custom dashboard to view the results and identify trends.

Plus, Healthy Roster also provides the ability to customize response plans based on the results of a survey. For instance, an employee might receive a wellness survey, every 30 days, to gauge whether they are experiencing any soreness or pain in their shoulders or low back. Based on the responses, a protocol can be established with specific action steps to respond to the results.

An automated response message can be sent back with a scheduling link to engage with a provider. The provider can be notified that there is a survey response requiring follow-up. The provider can be given step-by-step instructions on what should happen next. Once these steps are completed, the provider can check them off. They can also include any relevant notes for future reference.

This creates an audit trail allowing for accountability and a standardized response protocol across an entire organization.

Two things to point out there that I think is important. Number one, you're seeing that this is the system of record that your providers are in. So it makes it more conducive for them to do their job. And number two, those surveys go out via text. It goes right to their phones via text.

Why is that? We found that employees are more apt to engage with you if it's coming from text as opposed to an email or just a physical form. They're actually going to get it to you more quickly. And then, because it's just more effective and it's actually HIPAA-compliant too, we've created a way to basically send it to a secure portal for them to fill out that information.

And third, I guess a bonus feature — it's all being tabulated for you (from a documentation and reporting standpoint.) At the end of the day, that's what's going to matter. It only matters if you've got the results to prove it. Well, we can show you in real-time through our system. That's the beauty of it. That's why you have an electronic medical record, system of record, because all that data is being tabulated in real time.

While documentation is important, all too often the results of that documentation are ignored because the analysis requires a lot of hard work. Healthy Roster provides customizable, interactive dashboards built to provide the information you need at your fingertips in near real-time. Of course, the raw data is always available for export and analysis when desired, but our dashboard can provide insight around the efficacy of your program and identify trends as soon as they appear.

These trends and engagement metrics can be broken down by location, department, time horizon or any other important demographic. No need to wait on your next quarterly business review to find out what's important to you.

This is what matters. This is what's going to help you. As a provider, or provider group, this is what's going to help you win more business. Expand your reach is because you're going to be able to show that you're making a difference at where you are and you're going to be able to say, 'Let's go other places with this.'

You have that data, because it's all in one place. That was the key. Those were the major hurdles. Number one is what's the right type of provider to handle all this? The injury prevention, the triage, to really help me? It's an athletic trainer, we believe. Okay then — how do we get everywhere?

That's the second hurdle. Virtual... or Virtual Injury Prevention? And number three, how do we really aggregate all this data that's meaningful? How do we get it all in one place? Well, before you're probably doing a spreadsheet, you're pulling from this system, you're pulling from that. It's all right here, all together. And that's why it works, because it's all-in-one: 

• Communication
• Documentation
• Reporting
• It's Virtual Injury Prevention — VIP.

If you ever talk to anybody who's in software, they always say, 'Well, the number one thing is ease of use.' But it's true. I mean, that's why you get software, because it makes it easier for everyone to utilize. And then the more people that you can incorporate, the better off you're going to be.

We want to be partners with you. I don't want to just give you this technology and say good luck. No, we want to help you grow because if you're growing, you're going to continue to work with me, right?

That's the true meaning of that partnership. And that's what we want to create, is meaningful partnerships with you to help you grow your business. And then I grow as a result.

Michael: Thanks, Dan! 

Are you a healthcare provider looking to expand your coverage and grow your business? Looking for a workplace EMR designed to help your providers improve documentation and communication? Looking to improve employee engagement? We can help. Talk to Healthy Roster today!