Inside the World of SYNERGEN Health
Big letters outside the building read HNB Grameen. But we’re at the towering structure down Nawala Road to visit a different office, nestled inside. A large orange sign lets us know we’ve unmistakably arrived at SYNERGEN Health. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, it’s only because “all our clients are in the American market” Senior Manager Solutions, Angela Thayalaseelan explains. The company is actually a subsidiary of SYNERGEN Health LLC based in Dallas. According to their website, they’re in the business of ‘transforming financial processes for everyone in the healthcare industry.
What does SYNERGEN Health really do?
What SYNERGEN Health does in a nutshell
To put this catch-all definition into perspective, we met Angela and her team. “The American healthcare system” we’re schooled, is not making strides for its efficiency. Helping to mitigate this, their brand of solutions makes payment collection and transition from one party to the other, seamless.
It doesn’t stop there however. A projector in SYNERGEN Health’s conference room comes on and the screen is now bursting with info-graphics. Those well versed in medical finance jargon we’re assured, can make immediate sense of the numbers. They’ve designed these data-intense dashboards to answer any statistical question in a few clicks. In offering dashboard solutions like DOCTRIX, “we offer a self-exploratory analytics platform that helps Healthcare practice management” Angela says. DOCTRIX is the brain child of Senior Manager Product Nimshan Fernando. Angela elaborates that their products can integrate to many systems and data sources. In a nutshell, they offer an efficient way of looking at healthcare financial data.
Their software service solution captures Key Performance Indicators which any practice manager should be looking at during the life-cycle of a claim. Starting at the time of appointment and submission of a claim, SYNERGEN Health follows through to the latter stages of invoicing and collecting on the claim. Wherever applicable they also look into trends inherent among denied claims as well.
This leaves doctors free from the sticky task of manually claiming their fee from insurance companies. Since most of SYNERGEN Health’s clients are enterprise level clients they deal with tons of data.
Beyond the dashboard. Primarily we learn, the company’s focus is on Revenue Cycle Management. Since 2013 however, analytics has also risen to become a vital part of SYNERGEN Health’s offerings. It all comes down to how you present the data, according to the Analytics Team. You can still show where a business stands on simpler formats like Excel. Yet, the clarity, complexity and ease of grasping the numbers is what has made systems like DOCTRIX popular. While analytics and clean presentation of facts can entice a client, it takes a combination of RCM and analytics to keep them interested. About 20 prominent health care providers in the US have up to date invested in the dashboard solutions we learn. For the 4-5 member Analytics Team which keeps an eye of all 20 plus profiles, the task can becoming harrowing. SYNERGEN Health is at capacity they share. There’s a waiting list of clients to come on board once they’ve got more hands on deck.
On the RCM front however expansion has happened “at a rate.” The 20-odd people force is now 300 strong and is continuing to expand. The solutions team however is split to handle internal process automation projects the enterprise has embarked on, and SYNERGEN’s external products.
The current crew flying SYNERGEN Health’s colors is on average 24 years old. They’re on the look-out to expand, they disclose. If you’re a graduate who knows the advanced workings of Excel, have at least a year’s experience in RCM you might potentially find a slot on their operations team. “The problem with recruitment is that when we go out there” they’re presence as a solutions company isn’t vastly popular in the island.
Conquered storms and the voyage ahead. If anything the 20 plus clients and more in waiting suggests, it’s that popularity isn’t an issue in the US market. SYNERGEN Health has actively taken steps to spread their gospel, attending relevant medical conventions for this purpose.
Going-in blind by building for a foreign market was only complicated by the vast number of practice management tools already available. You can have about 1000-1500 systems out there in the US market. They’ve however found a way around this by integrating the “top 20 Practice Management Systems into their product. Fishing out clients who used these systems was also a teething problem they’ve grown out of.
“We have competition, obviously” Angela admits. SYNERGEN Health’s products are not the only financial dashboard in the market. “But I would say it is the best” she feels, owing to the level of detail they’ve managed to compress into a single product. Quitting while they’re ahead however isn’t an option. “We’re looking to expand into the clinical side” we’re told.
Moving from quantifiable integers the next step is to accommodate indices to monitor the quality of patient care. Going by the parameters observed in the US, she explains, the system will essentially observe the efficiency of a doctor. “For instance, if a Doctor sees a patient three times and the patient is still not better,” this may suggest a substandard service on the doctor’s part.
These developments however are still within the sphere of the healthcare industry she says. With a product road map that stretches out far beyond, the next conquest for SYNERGEN Health is the healthcare solutions market. SYNERGEN Health is a services and software solutions company. On software solutions side, they provide their patent pending DOCTRIX Analytics and other solutions to different healthcare customers. Some of the products they are building are Collection and denial management system (CDMS), SYNERGEN Pay, Order management and automation solutions. CDMS allows them to streamline their entire collections and denial processing workflow across the entire company into a single platform. By building knowledge management and machine learning into the operational workflow, they expect to significantly improve their efficiencies. They are planning to launch not only this platform for their internal workflow management but also provide this as a service to other customers. SYNERGEN Pay is an innovative payment solution for patients and providers to efficiently manage patient collections. They are providing better tools to estimate patient responsibility, propensity to pay, patient account scoring and payments using different methods directly into the system. Also they do have a lot of ancillary care customers where ordering and resulting process is not completely integrated with revenue cycle management. We are building SYNERGEN Order management product to enable referring physicians and laboratories to efficiently manage orders and results along whilst optimizing the revenue cycle process. They believe that thse solutions will add significant value to our customers and SYNERGEN Health. Sunil Konda – the Vice President Technology at SYNERGEN has stated that they are constantly looking for skilled and energetic people with different technical skills to join their team.
