What it is
Sublime Medical is a cosmetic and medical dermatology group in California. It opened in Riverside and grew to three offices serving the Inland Empire and Orange County, and it practices today as Sublime MD.
In 2015 its schedules were full and its patient base was growing, but collected revenue kept trailing earned revenue. Fowler's summary at the time was a very good provider running a very sloppy practice. Everyone inside the building read the shortfall as a collections problem, and the usual answers were to chase harder, add a biller or hand billing to an outside company.
What Common Ground did
- Fowler took the fractional COO seat, his first fractional seat, to run the practices day to day for four months.
- He ruled out demand first: full schedules meant the shortfall was not a volume problem.
- He traced a denied claim backward with the billing lead, from the payer's rejection to the chair where the procedure happened. The defect sat at submission, in the billing code, not in the follow-up.
- The codes were stale because the practice was on a software tier that did not carry updates, had never bought the plugins that did, and had never finished its setup. Nobody owned the question.
- The fix stayed at the level of the defect: the right software tier, set up properly, the codes corrected, and one named person inside the office running a weekly check that every code in use is current. No new platform, no new hire, no outside billing vendor.
- The office paperwork was rebuilt with the people who use it, and a written line was drawn between staff and practitioners on the business side.
- The weekly check was owned inside the office from its first week, so it was already running without Fowler before the seat ended.
Results
- Insurance billing rose 42 percent month over month by month four.
- The practice kept the weekly code check and the rebuilt paperwork system after the seat ended.
- The same patients, procedures and billing staff produced more paid claims, because claims stopped failing before a person ever saw them.
External links
- Public data room: Sublime Medical data room
Public record
- Sublime MD
- Sublime MD: our practice
- Yelp: Sublime Medical Aesthetics, Riverside
- Yelp: Sublime MD, Mission Viejo
Stories from this work
Everyone called it collections. It was maintenance.My first fractional seat was a four-month run as chief operating officer of a three-practice cosmetic dermatology group in California, in 2015.Insider truth
Origin: Sublime MedicalSublime Medical was my first fractional seat, in 2015: three cosmetic dermatology practices, full schedules, and a back office that could not turn the work into cash.Insider truth
At a glance
| Project type | Revenue cycle and operations turnaround |
|---|---|
| Industry | Healthcare services (multi-practice medical group) |
| Seat | Fractional COO |
| Ran through | Common Ground |
| Dates | 2015 (four months) |
| Duration | Four months |
| Location | Southern California |
| Public data room | Sublime Medical data room |
| Related pages | Common Ground, Jesse Fowler |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |