Transcript:

My name is Douglas Swords and I’m the Chief Financial Officer at Azalea Health Innovations. I also manage our medical billing operations. For what I do, I’m helping manage the finances of a small business in the Valdosta-Lowndes County area, and it could be tricky. We’ve been doing it for four years. I have to keep expenses low, while at the same time we’re trying to expand. 

We’re trying to move our marketing efforts not only from South Georgia, North Florida area, but we’re trying to expand regionally and nationally. The type of software we provide, the type of services we provide, really can be sold, offered on a national level. We’re trying to compete with large, national competitors that have been established for longer than us.

We have portions of our software and services that are better than our competitors, but my task as the CFO is to say, how do we get the word out there while keeping within a certain budget? Because, you know, we started basically from scratch; we didn’t have any initial funding, capital investment. We’ve – basically homegrown.

So as far as budgeting for marketing, expenses, hiring sales people, computer programmers, medical billing experts, client relations and sales, it’s been a very challenging to try to keep within a certain budget and still get the word out there. I think we’ve been very successful.

We have our department heads meet regularly and we look at budgets. We figure out, you know, we have to say, okay, there’s ten medical conventions we want to visit this year; we can only afford to go to three. You know, how can we determine what efforts can we do to go out and decide which conferences would be more beneficial for us. So we’re constantly looking to try to stay lean, agile, and at the same time, you know, get the best marketing bang for our buck.

Now, on the other end, I also help manage the accounts receivable, medical billing aspect for our physician providers. They’re also small business owners. So every dollar they get is very important to them as well. So we help physicians manage their medical claims, their reimbursement. We let the physicians know their coding, their ICD-9, their CPT coding. If there’s issues that is causing them to get less or more money, that is where our expertise is.

So not only am I helping manage what we do to get the name out, we’re also helping physicians, providers, giving them advice on how to properly get reimbursed ‘cause physicians get paid differently than from other professionals. They’re not getting paid just from an invoice like an attorney would. They have to file a claim to the insurance company; there’s rules, regulations. Medicare, Medicaid all have different rules on how a doctor can get paid for what they do. So they need experts like us who can go in and advise them so they can get paid the way they should.

For more information, we can be reached at (877) 777-7686. You can also visit our website www.azaleahealth.com. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter.