Nashville, Tenn.-based Accordias Healthcare Services has found its niche.
The company, a second phase startup in growth mode, provides business office and revenue cycle management services to critical access, rural community and independent hospitals nationwide.
Founded in 2012 by Carmen Voelz, David Rose and John Zimmerling, the company initially decided not to take on clients bigger than 150 beds.
With "our original practice, we were doing what we would gracefully refer to as upgrade or implementation recovery. We had a lot of sites that were contacting us after an implementation or an upgrade that didn't go well, and we would step in and resolve a lot of those issues," Mr. Rose, Accordias' managing partner, says.
Today, the company has nearly 50 employees, two service centers in the Nashville area, and is connected to about 50 hospitals in 18 states. It has also added a fourth partner, Chris Joiner.
Mr. Rose recently spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about the company's founding and its future plans.
Note: Interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Question: How was the company started?
David Rose: Healthcare Management Systems, which is a health information system company, had a service group they were going to eliminate. Mr. Zimmerling used to run that organization with HMS and the people in the organization called him and said, 'What are we going to do?' So he got in touch with Ms. Voelz and asked if we would be interested in going in with him on this enterprise.
Q: What specific need within the industry did you hope to address by founding Accordias?
DR: Rural community hospitals always have struggled with high-level Medicare resources or business services, normally just a lack of availability of high-end resources. Most don't need a full-time Medicare biller, so it just made sense to have an organization that supports those services.
Q: What kind of expansion or growth do you project in the next couple of years?
DR: We've doubled every year so far, and we expect to more than double this year. We're going to continue with the basic practices we have now, but we are going to add one additional practice. Probably in the fall of this year we're going to add analytics. Basically we're just going to provide some data mining and some other type tools to our rural community hospitals that could really never afford that kind of service from some of the bigger companies.
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