today is Ryan Lurl, who is the president of RSI. I'm going to turn it over now to Ryan to get us started. Thank you, Jessica. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate the opportunity to be speaking with the members of the AAOE today, those that are here on the call as well as those that will be listening into the recording. We've enjoyed our relationship with the AAOE. I think we've been working together for a year now to great success, both with your existing members and within the orthopedic specialty as well. So we appreciate everything that AAOE does for us and all the time and commitment that the members have made to helping us learn more about the orthopedic specialty and teaching us about the tools and technologies they need for their practices. Today's presentation is, as you all know, going to be focused on helping practices measure historical performance as well as forecast future performance through CRM and EMR integration. We've got a presentation that we're going to go through for this, but this is a really unique talking point or a unique opportunity for us because we continue to see CRM technologies be adopted in healthcare. You're seeing it significantly in healthcare practices at scale, hospital systems, both regional or at the national level. And this type of information is really valuable for all practices because as these large organizations and large groups continue to talk about the benefits of CRM technology, you're going to see more players come into the space. So I'm going to pull up my presentation and take you through this here. But it's a really exciting time for us because we're really, as I mentioned, at an inflection point within healthcare where CRM solutions are becoming just as valuable as EMR solutions. And when you think about that, what's unique is CRM solutions are really built for the business team members at healthcare practices. EHR, EMR solutions, they're built for the clinicians primarily. And what's unique about this is you're seeing the clinician solutions start to attempt to build business management tools, but we all know that they have their own focuses and they have their own core competencies. So generally what you get when you start adopting those solutions that the EMR or EHR systems built are basically just good enough solutions. They're really MVPs. And what we think about from a CRM perspective, as mentioned, is a business tool. It's a tool that ties together departments and ties together functions, and then delivers communications, reports, education to either the practice or the patient that helps move that healthcare organization forward. So first and foremost, there's a couple of learning objectives I want to go over today. When you think about tying this data together and what we went into this presentation to discuss, which is measuring historical performance and forecasting future performance, there's really four key areas that I'm going to focus on today. Now there's way more learning objectives that can be accomplished when you start to understand and evaluate what a CRM can bring to your orthopedic practice, but these are just four main elements. And they're really uniquely designed for us to talk about because what you're going to learn is how you can tie these departments together. And historically, these departments run independently or in silos. They're all looking at data that matters to their department. But what becomes very unique when you have a CRM in place for a health organization is how each one of these departments become intertwined and ultimately become interdependent on each other's success. So we're going to look at how you can start to evaluate marketing spend optimization, right? What you're really doing there is looking at your marketing budget and evaluating, is this marketing budget performing for me? And how can that be tied across all the different departments to understand where there are bottlenecks in that process to make sure you're getting the most out of your marketing spend and budget. Contact center performance, understanding key and critical objectives from your contact center and the value of making decisions based off that data when it's tied across departments. Analyzing and improving scheduling capacity, whether that's by appointment type, provider, or location. And then also analyzing referring provider success metrics across the organization. And so those are going to be the four key data points that we look at. And we're going to look at those data points again. How do you put these reports together to analyze both historical and future performance? Because without understanding historical and future performance, you're generally going to fall flat or maybe miss your marks. So a little bit about us. We've been in business for 15 years now. We started as a marketing agency. Our journey has been unique. Starting as a marketing agency, we then started operating a call center that we actually had on Salesforce. And we connected to a telephony system called Five9. So we had all of the upstream marketing data and information. We then had all of the CRM capabilities of powerful system like Salesforce and a powerful system like Five9. But those systems and those data points we generally saw weren't available to all of our practices until we tied them together. Just last year, we handled over 600,000 patient interactions through our system, meaning actual patient communications, calls, and management of those patients through to care. That resulted in over $2 billion in charges across our customers. And again, our business model today is providing a solution where we're integrating all of the marketing functions at a business, all of the phone functions at a business or communication functions, the patient engagement tools, as well as the PM and EMR solutions into one system. So first, when you think of why would I want to start forecasting and understanding historical information, you want to think about some of the challenges that your business may have and your health care practice may have. The typical challenges for executive leadership functions within practices is that there's too much time and money spent on trying to effectively put together all of the data that you need to make fast, actionable decisions. And the reason this becomes very challenging for most practices, and you may find yourself in these scenarios, is you have multiple technologies in place and none of this data communicates. So what's really interesting is you actually see EMR solutions. Let's take a group like an Athena or a modernizing medicine or these types of systems. They have a ton of data and most applications run and connect to those data sets. But then all of those applications don't speak to each other. So any group at scale usually has three or four vendors that they're utilizing and leveraging across departments, and then they've got their EHR solution. So when you have several different platforms, it becomes very difficult to execute your strategy. It's near impossible to get your information out of it, and then even more so impossible to harmonize your data sets to make decisions. And what you want to be able to do is you want to be able to capture that information and you want to be able to make appropriate cross-departmental decisions off of it. And what that does is create a more efficient process for your teams instead of having them work in silos. And when you can't access this information, you cannot grow. You're usually spending marketing dollars ineffectively. Your operations are staying static or they get worse because you're making decisions in arrears. And patients have poor experiences with all, which ultimately leads to them choosing new providers. This is very similar on the marketing side. When you think about marketing and operations, again, departments working in silos, it's very difficult for them to get measurements of their success. It's even more impossible to communicate this up to the leadership functions on the executive team. And so you generally have marketing focused on driving growth at practices, and operations are responsible for managing it. And so what that usually creates is a scenario where operators are overloaded. You're leveraging multiple technology systems in functions within departments that would be best suited using one. And you have a very limited insight into each department. Again, they're just operating on their own. And so when you do that, the decisions are made department by department, not with each other. And that's a problem. And then your practices have issues scaling. And the result of that is finger pointing. It's departments not working well together. It's having lopsided provider booking scenarios or providers booked with the wrong appointments because we're just trying to fill schedules versus making intelligent decisions about where to put patients, why, and understand the whys. And so what we've done is we've really built a continuous improvement process. And this is what you're going to want to put in place with your practices, right? You're going to want to centralize all of the inbound communications across your organization, inclusive of all your communication types, and marry that to your practice management data. And when you streamline these processes, you're going to in return get integrated data across all of those functions and across all of those departments. You're going to have performance analytics, and you're going to be able to run automation that's being delivered on time and with a concerted effort on improving a particular area. And so let's first look at marketing spend optimization. When you think about the historical issues with marketing data, you're probably mostly dealing with these today. You can have the most forward-thinking agency, but if they're not really running data out of your call center, if they're not really looking at that, if they're not really looking at data from your EHR solution, they're mostly talking about arbitrary benchmarks, right? We've heard this all before. Cost per lead, right? What does cost per lead really mean? Well, what cost per lead really means is it's showing you how much you paid for that lead, but it's not really telling you anything about how much money you made. And too many marketing agencies are looking at arbitrary benchmarks. We're going to talk about what you should look at. None of this tries to true conversion. To us, a lead has a very specific definition. It is a patient, meaning first name and last name, with contact information, with a procedure of interest. And that gives you the opportunity to understand a true patient inquiry or lead. But what becomes most important is appointments and revenue. You need to tie that data together, and historically that's not done. You don't have tie-ins to individual team member. Marketing are tracking things, but they're not tied to the VoIP solutions to see how each team member is performing. And anytime somebody does try to do this, you have a very slow feedback loop. This is the example of typical marketing reports. You've all seen them before. And what you're looking at here are the typical metrics that they hold themselves accountable to. What I always found fascinating about this data, myself and our team, is that this doesn't tie to the actual performance of the business, right? You can have a report like this that looks excellent. Your marketing team feels they've done great. Your marketing department feels they're doing great. But you then jump into another meeting with your accountant, and none of this matches. You're doing worse than last year, right in line. You're seeing less patients. You're generating less new revenue. So if these types of reports don't tie together, you have real issues. From a forecasting perspective, you want to turn this on its head by connecting it to understand attribution of ad campaigns and referral sources. You want to look at these campaigns, and you want to see exactly how many leads did I get. Now, you can define these leads, and you should. A phone call is not a lead, right? A phone call is a phone call. So what is it that we're going to attribute a lead to? Who's a booked appointment? Is there an attended appointment? And is there actual revenue? This starts to give you real information around whether or not that marketing spend is being optimized for the result that mattered to the future state of the practice. You want to make sure you're distributing your spend to your highest performing campaigns. You can only do that when you're tracking each individual campaign through to revenue, ads, search, email marketing, or patient education, evaluating, referring providers. And once you have that data, you can start to refine your spend decisions through real-time analysis. So this is what this report would look like in real time for any group or organization that's tying it all together. In this scenario, what you're seeing is every individual campaign that's being run or participated in. You can tie that into the upstream data from Google Analytics, from Meta, from the types of campaigns that you're spending dollars on, and attribute that all the way through to leads, again, by your definition. You can start to ascertain what the lead rate is, and then tie that to the actual appointments that take place, and most importantly, the actual charges and payments with the return on investment. So when you see this data in this format, what it allows you to start to do is really dive in. And when you think about it, marketing and operations are really one department, right? I can market to generate a lead, but then that dumps into my contact center or call center, and now they have to do their job. And if they do their job, they can get that appointment booked. It comes in, and now the clinician has to do their job. And only when you see this in a linear fashion from inception of that inquiry all the way through to profit, can you dive into it and understand where we have concerns or issues and where we need to fix those concerns or issues. That's a really important piece for larger organizations because as you grow you can only make decisions by data. The feelings and the emotions need to be removed from it. That starts to tie into the contact center performance and the historical information. So when you think about contact center performance, I'm going to show you what you probably all have out of your VoIP systems like your ring centrals, your go-to connects, your dial pads. All of that data is in silos, right? When the contact center is looking at the contact center they're just looking at how many calls did we take, how many calls did we answer or miss, right? They never tie that data to actual appointments booked. They're never looking at well where did the calls come from and can we make tweaks or adjustments to the types of calls we even allow into the team because we're overloaded or because the calls were getting never booked. And so that's really important fundamental information to look at. And once you can start to look at data outside of the typical data sets you can again start making decisions. So this is examples of the typical information practices have to them. What's my average call wait time? How many calls did I miss? This is not good data, right? This is typical data that practices have today. But the way that you want to look or should be using this data is well where are these calls coming in from? So it's fine that I'm missing calls, right? Because no one's going to answer 100% of their calls and it might not make financial sense to be over capacity on Mondays and Tuesdays when you're very busy and be significantly under capacity on Thursdays and Friday, right? Everyone has these lopsided operational schedules because of the way that the patients interact with the practice. But when you really start to tie this data together what you want to be able to understand is well what drives these calls in? And there are there any things that's driving calls in that are just not good? That we just can't convert or just aren't of qualified patients? This is some additional data, right? The typical data that a call center looks at and they're always focused on shorter call times, right? Less abandoned calls. They're always looking at how much time is our agent on the phone. Again, I would caution you to think of this a little bit differently because these data points just they're important but they just don't matter for the greater good. The amount of time on the phone isn't the benchmark to be looking at. It's how many actual calls were actual leads and of those did they actually book? And so what that looks like from a future perspective is being able to make marketing decisions based off real-time information. So that's great we can see all of that data but of that data what we want to understand is how many appointment types did we drive appointments in from? And of course we want to know who's handling these calls or web leads but we want to understand are there marketing impacts on my operations, right? Are we running campaigns on specific days when we just don't need that additional support because we don't have the team to handle it? That also gives you the ability to make real-time decisions inside the contact center. So how can we leverage IVR and lead routing scripts to get the highest performance on our calls? How do we deliver real-time updates to the marketing team about what's going on in our contact center to scale down marketing initiatives if we are at capacity? And how do we train and coach our team on managing this information and producing like-kind data that supports all of our departments? We want to get into that real-time feedback loop, right? We want to understand what's happening from marketing that's driving calls in and all marketing don't just think you know SEO, don't just think paid search. Referral marketing is marketing. Existing patient marketing is marketing, right? So you want to make sure that you're evaluating the entire business as you put this data through and the outcome of this becomes tools that tie all of this information together where you can start to look at every individual team member not just by how many calls they took and how much time they spent on the phone but how many actual patient inquiries did they take that were leads for the practice? How many web leads are they handling, right? A lot of people are handling inbound web leads that just don't show up in the call data and so it's really important to get a full picture. How many team members are handling text or emails to these patients? That's also time generally not seen and this data has the tie to the booking data because Ryan could handle a hundred calls and be on the phone for a hundred minutes and book zero appointments. Whereas you know Johnny could handle a hundred calls, 50 of those become appointments and 35 of those come in and see providers. So now we start to look at that a little differently, right? And we start to say now that we're looking at this differently, who's really the more valuable team member or what is it about Johnny's calls that we don't really need in the call center department focused on scheduling appointments because they're not actually leads for the practice. They're not actually a value for the practice. So how can we start to move this around to make sure that our team is performing up to our expectations but giving them the types of calls or the types of inquiries that we need to give them in order to perform. That then blends into what's happening off all of these calls. So it's great we're getting calls but what are we booking? If marketing's job is to drive up as many new patients as possible but we're not seeing that trend take place and we're spending a ton of money on marketing and advertising. We're driving in a ton of calls but that is not resulting in more new patients. Then that's a problem and the best way to see that is by tying those marketing initiatives to the call center to the actual appointments being booked. Lastly, tying that clinical data to the call center. So again you have all of these calls coming into your business but what's the throughput? Where are we putting these patients? What providers are they scheduling with? What types of availability do our providers have so that we can start to play chess with our schedules and make sure that that contact center team is playing that game of chess. If we have a new patient in, sometimes you see contact centers just start to freely book with team members or other providers that they're comfortable with when they might not be the best provider to book with. So we've all seen the EMRs produce these find first available tabs. That doesn't mean that that's the best person to put that appointment on and so by customizing some of the data that's available to your contact center leads they can now help coach those team members on exactly where we want to be putting appointments, at what time and when, to make sure we have the best schedule across the organization. Furthermore, looking at future appointment tracking. So we all have this data we know who's booked up and when into the future based off all of the appointments and so if you're not using that data in your contact centers to make sure that every day we're adjusting who the individuals are scheduling these appointments with, then you're likely falling short on your goals to be as efficient and effective as possible in your contact center. And again, this impacts marketing, right? Because it's not just about making sure your contact center is making your clinicians effective, but we also want to make marketing effective, right? If we're driving leads in but just booking them three months out then that becomes a problem. And so lastly we get into some referring physician data and what we're talking about here is just making sure that you know we're looking at all marketing sources. So I bring up referring physician data because it's such a critical component of our practices in orthopedic and the other specialties that we work with. So you want to make sure that you're very readily available to evaluate all of the inquiries that come from your referring physicians. They are not all created equal, right? Every one of your referring physicians is not created equal just because they refer to you. You want to be able to capture all of those referrals over to the practice. You want to be able to start analyzing that data, where they're coming from, when they're coming in, and what types of patients they are. And you want to be able to look at that data and really start to assess a feedback loop on how you improve the way that those referring providers are working with your practice. So ultimately this is a marketing source and we want to and with the right CRM in place you can start to see where all of these patients are coming from by referring provider. You can start to see how many of those are booked for appointments and what those attendance rates are. So a couple of examples of saying they're not created equal is if you get 10 referrals from provider A and 10 referrals from provider B but the referrals from provider A never book and 50% of those from provider B book every time. It starts to tell us we really need to communicate with provider A about the right patients for our practice or we might need to politely tell them we don't need referrals from you at this time because the patients that you're sending just aren't getting the level of care that they need because we're not the best people for them. And so once you can really evaluate the referring provider data through one system you can start to make decisions across your business about how that impacts marketing, how that impacts operations, and how that impacts you know the clinicians both yours as well as the referring providers in your community. So as we come up on time here lastly I just want to you know I just want to confirm you know every practice can do this. You're either going to do it on your own or you're going to adopt a solution like a CRM that can do all of this for you. That's what they're designed to do. But when you think about what you and future state of your business looks like it's really about continuous improvement through integrated data and automation. And the best way to do that is by connecting all of the systems that you use interdependently throughout each other. And in some cases you may be able to do that with your current vendors right if your third-party applications that you're using have open API's whether it be to the data sets or to marry the automations with the tools that your teams use then that's an opportunity to do this. If not you may look at additional solutions that you can adopt and do this for you. But by connecting all of the upstream marketing and referrals and inbound communication touch points into your teams. And when I talk about into your teams I mean your front desk, your contact centers. And those communications are basically for today. You have phones, you have text, you have inbound emails, and you have fax solutions. When you capture all of that data in one place and marry it with your practice management data you can finally start to map that patient from the initial entry point all the way through to purchases and profit. But then most importantly you can start to understand lifetime value. You can communicate and automate messages to those patients to ensure that they're coming back. And ensure all that very difficult and challenging front-end work that you did to get them into being a patient in the first place is capitalized on. That continuous improvement looks like integrated data sets for you all. You want to objectively define the patient acquisition process and then be able to see that in real time at any time through the data sets that you create. You want to analyze performance analytics. That is all departments independently but also together. You need to tie all of your individual departments together. Everything that marketing does is impacted by operations. Everything operations does impacts marketing as well as the clinician. Everything the clinical team does impacts the performance of operations and impacts the performance of marketing. All of these departments must be completely connected, connected by data, and the entire organization educated on how those data points are going to be looked at and what the executive leadership team is effectively asking for from that data and how they're going to be able to make decisions. With that, I do want to leave you my contact information. You can see my email address here. You can also see my direct phone number. Feel free to reach out with any additional questions. Feel free to contact me either, you know, call or text. I'm open to either. Again, we really appreciate the opportunity to work with the AAOE today and with the continued work we've done with the AAOE over the past year. We're looking forward to the upcoming conference in Atlanta. I believe, again, that's May 2nd through 5th. We'll be there. We're looking forward to participating in the speed meetings again, and we, again, appreciate all of the opportunities, the partnership, and the work that we've done together with the AAOE so far. So thank you very much, and we look forward to working with you all in the future. Thank you so much, Ryan. This was a great presentation, and I really appreciated the way you went through all the different processes. I think everybody has a little bit of a silo problem at times, and to be able to figure out ways to break those down, it's so good. So we will look forward to seeing you in Atlanta, and as a reminder, this was recorded, so anybody can watch that in the AAOE Learning Center. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful afternoon.

CRM EMR integration

healthcare practices

operational silos

data-driven decisions

patient acquisition

resource allocation

CRM integration

EMR systems

cross-departmental collaboration

patient experiences

strategic decision-making