APS Healthcare: Bright Future
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Written by Meghan Flynn   
Saturday, 01 August 2009
APS Healthcare: Bright Future
This company's clear set of guiding principles is paving its road to success in spite of a challenging economy and uncertain future.


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The earnings of this third-party specialty healthcare provider has doubled in the last two and a half years, and chairman and CEO Greg Scott has few worries for the future in the face of looming healthcare reform and a weak economy. He attributes the growth of APS Healthcare (APS) to a three-part strategy: understanding the customer’s needs, setting aggressive goals to meet them, and following through.

“We have cultivated an achievement-oriented internal culture from the highest executive position down to our front-line staff,” he said. “We expect each other to aim for excellence and deliver on our commitments, and that is what sets us apart in a very competitive market.”

APS Healthcare: Bright Future
Greg Scott, chairman and CEO
APS works with Medicaid agencies, state and local governments, health plans, employers, and labor trust groups to design and deliver health management solutions. The company’s health coaches work one-on-one with patients, healthcare providers, and family caregivers to improve each patient’s health and reduce the cost of his or her care over time. Scott said regardless of how the payor system changes in the future, APS will continue to play an integral part in making healthcare more effective and less expensive.

“The healthcare bill is going to be huge, but we can help whoever ends up paying it because we make healthcare more efficient and effective,” he said.

Local approach
That is thanks, in part, to a Web-based goal setting program the company uses to keep everyone, from the CEO down, accountable. Supervisors formally check in on their teams’ progress twice a year and much more often informally.

The effectiveness of the company’s programs increased in the last year or so, as the company underwent a structural reorganization that has streamlined costs and will improve quality over time. Historically, APS was divided into three divisions: one for customers in Puerto Rico, one exclusively for Medicaid agencies, and a third designated for the private sector. But the public and private division became an artificial differentiator, Scott said, that resulted in too many redundancies, which proved costly.

In the third quarter of last year, the company consolidated its operations and increased its focus on local service delivery, with one or two large offices in each of the 26 states in which the company currently operates, plus Puerto Rico. APS’s health coaches have been able to operate much more effectively this way, Scott said. “We take a ground level approach for our services, which means we need to be intimately involved in the markets we serve and familiar with the flows of each unique system,” he explained. “Our regional management has been very effective in allowing our coaches to work closer with providers, families, and our customers.”

Data driven
Being a part of the continuum of care for each patient is what makes APS’s health coaches effective in reducing system costs and improving the health of the patients, which the company measures in a number of ways. The recent reorganization provided an excellent opportunity for Scott and his team to also consolidate the company’s data management software, giving APS an edge in this data-driven industry.

“We upgraded our IT platform, CareConnection,” he said. “It’s a Web-enabled tool that now houses all of our data, which had been spread across several platforms.”

The platform serves as a triage program for determining who in the company’s patient population needs what kind of care and how quickly. CareConnection is also accessible by healthcare providers who can access a more complete picture of their patients’ progress. Scott added that CareConnection enables a greater depth of cooperation among the various parties.

New software is also helping Scott and his team tackle the biggest challenge APS, like many healthcare providers, is facing: a shortage of qualified clinicians in some areas. The company’s HR department developed a program that more accurately matches the company’s needs with an individual’s skill set. So far, the program has dramatically reduced turnover and helped new hires hit the ground running.

“Its crucial that we get our staff trained to provide the highest quality service to the most people in the least amount of time. Hiring the right people for the job in the first place helps, and we’re in the process of rolling out a training program that will also help,” Scott said.

APS’ clinical leadership team designed the training program over the last quarter of 2008 and the first of 2009. So far, two modules have been launched successfully, and Scott plans to launch a third and fourth this summer.

All of these measures are positioning APS for greater success in the future, if recent accolades are anything to go by. This spring, representatives from the Ohio Department of Health, one of APS’s clients, were invited to the White House for a meeting with President Obama concerning creative workplace healthcare policies. Not six months before, Scott had recognized the APS team in that state for the single largest improvement in all metrics for 2008 of any other team with the first ever Chairman’s Award.

“Our group in Ohio succeeded through a solid adherence to our principles: understanding the needs of our customers, setting aggressive goals, and following through,” said Scott. “If we can all meet the standards they have set, our future looks bright.”
 
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