IN SO MANY WORDS

ECL Group’s Jim Alland

In So Many Words is a succinct, timely talk with a need-to-heed KOL.

Jim Alland

Jim Alland likes his new role — as president — of The ECL [Eye Care Leaders] Group, the year-old tech and professional services firm, and he likes the market — ophthalmic — that ECL serves. Mr. Alland, a veteran of the health-care technology industry, says many ophthalmologists are looking for ways to survive and thrive. “Besides delivering quality care, their key drivers are to maintain an income reflective of their years in school and to protect the business health of their practice,” he says.

But the brakes on the drivers — primarily federal regulations and third-party mandates — are sucking up personal time, injuring quality of work life. “We are providing products and services that surround and enhance the EHR, making practices run more smoothly and freeing up providers’ time to focus on patients and quality of life. Also, we offer our clients capital financing, helping them when and where they need it.”

OM: Please describe what Eye Care Leaders does.

Jim Alland: The ECL Group is a new initiative, part of the coordinating strategy of Eli Global, the private equity company. We believe eye care is a great market to help support providers in terms of their future direction. We have acquired six ophthalmology and optometry EHR companies. We now have 6,000 physician providers [as clients] across the U.S. We are focused on helping them use their EHR-generated data to improve practice operations, so providers can focus more on patient care.

OM: How will you help your clients?

JA: While we will continue to support them with software solutions … most of our customers have already invested in EHRs. It’s a mature market. Most of what we are hearing is “Help us to use the information;” “improve the work flow;” “collect more revenue more efficiently;” “reduce my denials;” “code accurately.” It’s all about becoming efficient and effective as opposed to just buying a software tool. For example, revenue cycle management: We look at the entire billing process and revenue cycle process; eligibility authorization, coding, billing, claims processing, collections.

OM: What are you hearing from your clients?

JA: We are hearing four things. One, they are feeling a pinch on their revenue from the market, third-party payers, from market dynamics. Outside forces are impacting their ability to continue to grow. They want help to thrive. Two, their professional time is negatively impacted by demands from compliance and regulations. Third, these compliance and regulatory areas, whether government-run like meaningful use or ICD-10, or from third-party payers, are getting more complicated.

Fourth, practice competitiveness, and a practice’s ability to position itself for success, is a challenge. They are faced with online reputation management, how to attract the right mix of patients, to deliver higher levels of quality care in a market heavily influenced by consumerism. Patients, patient populations and their providers are seeing changes in high deductible plans, changes in insurance through the exchanges; a lot of them are high deductibles and higher copays. Patients are spending more on health care. They are taking a close look at what they are getting. Are they treated well? Is it a good experience? In our customer base, we must be more consumer-savvy.

OM: Anything else?

JA: What we are seeing is the need to become a certain size of practice to be successful in a value-based reimbursement world. An eye-care practice might have to scale to 25 physicians in three years to have a market presence. We believe we are in a position to support that growth. How? Through our services, capital, our knowledge and expertise.

OM: Why ophthalmology?

JA: We think eye-care professionals are well positioned to continue to grow their services and add to the value they provide. Eye-care practices are highly sophisticated and have been mostly immune to consolidation from hospital systems. These macroeconomic associations among eye-care professionals, patients and consumers will continue to evolve and grow. Issues like diabetes, macular degeneration and more will continue to become more critical and more important as we move forward as an aging population.

OM: Will Eli continue to buy?

JA: We are not done. We are looking at others that would add value in different ways. How do we become a high-value solution provider? By helping them focus on what they do best, provide clinical and medical care, and we help them by supporting their business.

OM: What makes ophthalmology so different?

JA: The degree of specialization. It stands out as its relates to the care process, as it relates to disease profile and the number of unique situations that eye-care practices will get involved in. But the biggest differentiator is the larger volume of activity. And it’s only going to increase. The number of ophthalmologists has remained static. The only way to solve this problem is with technological expertise.

OM: Many specialties use technology.

JA: The specialty of eye care is unique in health care. Hospitals are not well designed to support an eye-care practice; most don’t have that specialization. What you will see in the future is a group of eye care-focused organizations that will begin to predominate in the market, and the needs of those groups will grow. We think we can help. We are not a company that is flipping and taking out costs and then going public — we buy and hold. We look for certain markets and invest in the long term.

OM: You left Allscripts. Why?

JA: I like ECL’s economic model and long-term perspective, to invest in the long term and build value over a long period of time. …

It is exciting to be involved in an organization with this view and perspective. I saw opportunity. OM