How Millennia uses Definitive Healthcare to find the opportunities worth pursuing

Episode transcript

Hi everyone, and thanks for tuning into an episode of “Customer Corner.” This is the Definitive Healthcare series that gives you a look into how companies are using the platform to grow their business. I’m Emily De Oliveira, and I’m a Senior Product Marketing Manager, and on today’s episode, I’m joined by Doug Sundlof, SVP of Sales at Millennia. Doug, thanks for joining today.

Yeah, glad to be here, thank you.

So to start, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so I refer to myself as a healthcare lifer. I started my career many years ago. I was actually a hospital administrator for the first 13 years of my career, and then I stepped out working for companies like Oracle, and Lawson Software, which is now Infor, before leading sales teams at companies like Global Healthcare Exchange, Cloudmed, and now here at Millennia.

Oh, that’s great, and I know in a past conversation, you mentioned that Millennia focuses on non-clinical aspects of patient care, so can you share a little bit more about how your solution helps healthcare providers?

Yeah, so statistically there’s a whole lot of surveys out there that talk about the patient experience, and the statistics have really flipped over the last several years. It’s now to the point where the patient experience even matters more to them as patients than the actual bedside manner of their physician. So it’s really gone a long way since the old days of showing up to your doctor’s office, and revering your physician, and working together with him. Now, they want the total experience, and that starts from the point of scheduling your visit, all the pre-work that goes along with it, how you’re greeted and arrived at the location, and then all the way through the patient’s financial experience on back end. And so what we do as a company, we try to consolidate all those experiences together, so it’s one seamless flow from the point of scheduling the procedure all the way to settling your claim.

Wow, it sounds like your services have a tremendous impact on not just the patient experience but also all aspects of the provider’s revenue cycle as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So we really stand on three pillars. One is we can elevate the financial performance for the practice or the hospital. We work with both physician practices, outpatient settings, hospitals, and health systems. So all of those entities where patients are seen, we help all of them. We generate a financial lift ‘cause we’re working with the self pay component of healthcare, which none of those groups typically have a great history of collecting the monies that are due to them. And with the change to all these high deductible health plans that started with the Affordable Care Act years ago, the component that the patient pays is about 15% of the total spend for healthcare. So it’s really important that providers be able to collect on that, and we help them achieve a much higher collection rate, and we delight their patients at the same time so the patient experience goes up, the survey findings on patient experience goes up. And then lastly with the shortage of healthcare personnel, and revenue cycle’s a big part of that, we actually help them augment their staff, make them more productive by taking a lot of work off their shoulders.

Wow, that is really critical services that really impact the whole healthcare industry. And so I understand that you partnered with Definitive Healthcare’s data integration services. So why was there a need to do so?

Well, when I first came here, and I’ve been here for about a little over a year, the board, senior management, we all realized that we needed a data source to tell us what is the total addressable market for us, and identify what are those accounts that we want to prioritize that really fit our target market definition. And so Definitive Healthcare represented that definitive source of information for us. But we also wanted to go a step further. We wanted to introduce all of that data back into our CRM system. We use Salesforce. So today with the benefit of the data and populating that into Salesforce, we have a really good record of all the accounts, the contacts we’re trying to outreach to, details about the size and magnitude of the account, and what it means to them in terms of potential lift we can provide them financially. All of that data, even our pricing, is all factored and driven by those parameters we import from Definitive Healthcare.

So, what was this data integration process like for you?

Well, it started with us doing a lot of housekeeping. We had a fairly dirty CRM with a lot of stray accounts, no common naming conventions, just a lot of bad data that we were working from. So we cleaned up our house a little bit before we started working with the integration team with Definitive Healthcare. So we had over 18,000 accounts. We purged that down to under 10,000. We then handed it off to the Definitive Healthcare team, and they went through that and they tried to merge records, consolidate the same customer that was identified slightly differently using some fuzzy logic around it, addresses and other factors that they tried to bring all that data together, and that cleaned up a lot of our problem right there alone. There was still gonna be some orphan accounts that we had to clean up on our own, but for the most part, they probably did 90% of the work for us. And in addition to that, they brought over 135,000 new accounts that we didn’t have in our system. So right away overnight we had an influx of accounts with good, detailed information about context, the size of the organization. It was just kind of a game changer for us because now from a prospecting perspective, my team knew the universe of accounts in their territory that were available and fit our target market definition.

Oh, that’s fantastic. And I’m so glad that the data integration team could kind of alleviate some of the time, and the resources, and just speed up that process for the organization. And so what was the result of this data integration project?

Well, it went pretty smoothly with the help from Definitive Healthcare and the work that they did on the front end. It took about two or three weeks for them to do that reconciliation with emerging records, deduping. There was still some records that we had to take a look at, the orphaned accounts we call them, that didn’t have connection to one of the accounts within Definitive. So we did some leg work there as well, and that’s an ongoing project. but I would say within a matter of four weeks or so we had a pretty clean set of accounts now inside of our system, and then on top of that we layered it with some automations. So whenever we request pricing, request a contractor, blows out an opportunity as a win, and transition from sales to services, we’re taking all that data that came from Definitive Healthcare, moving that right along with our records so that clients’ success and our implementation team, they all are working from the same information about who the account is, their size, systems that they’re using, the executives they are gonna be talking to, all that information comes together thanks to the Definitive Healthcare data set.

And so I’m also curious about the overall impact that this has had. So what has Definitive Healthcare enabled your teams to do?

Well, first thing for my sales team is it allows them to be more focused, so they now know what are the accounts that they should go after, so to speak. We’ve also built out a BDR team, business development team. So they too are gonna be using those data sets to understand what are the right accounts that fit the target market definition, and they could obviously then target them, as opposed to just scatter shouting across the industry for all accounts, all sizes, et cetera. So it’s given us a level of focus that we didn’t have before. It also takes the the burden of doing research off the shoulders of my sales team. And now we’ve got this data set coming to us, so that proactively, they don’t have to do all the research. It’s already there for them laid out in Salesforce. So pretty simple process on their part to identify what accounts they want to go after. They know a little bit about those accounts and they’re not spending a lot of time doing Google searches and LinkedIn searches and all that.

Well, it’s so wonderful to hear about how your teams have gotten value from the data, and really focusing on those high value opportunities and understand the market and really just streamlining a lot of those manual processes. So Doug, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time today, and I also wanna thank the audience for watching this episode of “Customer Corner.” If you’d like to share your story on the show you can reach out to us at marketing@definitivehc.com and you can visit our website to learn more about how other companies are using the platform to create commercial success.