This is the first of a weekly column presented by the North Texas Enterprise Center, or NTEC, Frisco’s only business accelerator and home to 2 dozen startups. We’ll be covering NTEC and tech news.
HOW A FRISCO STARTUP FOUND THE SOLUTION TO HEALTHCARE’S BIGGEST PROBLEM: CUTTING COSTS
The biggest challenge healthcare systems are facing is cutting costs without compromising standard of care and a Frisco startup has found a solution in what is being called a “new frontier of savings” in healthcare.
Changes in healthcare laws, rising expenses, state cutbacks, fewer paying patients and the struggle to pay employees fair market rates all contribute to higher budgets for healthcare systems across the country.
Chris Heckler, CEO of Valify, noticed, during his 11 years in healthcare, the number of vendors hospitals were using for purchased services was in the hundreds. There was no database of vendors and there was no benchmarking, so hospitals couldn’t evaluate and make comparisons based on previous data. Finding savings within a hospital meant hiring consultants to pore over thousands of spreadsheets over several months time. By the time reports were completed, spending had already changed dramatically. Heckler knew there had to be a better way.
Heckler knew that consolidating the number of vendors hospitals use would contribute to savings and knew that benchmarking would make it easier and faster to find savings.
One of the challenges for hospitals was recognizing what fell under the umbrella of “purchased services.” Heckler created his own list to include managed services (foodservice, laundry, housekeeping), Revenue Cycle Services (collections, billing, reimbursements), some IT/Telecom (EMR, phone service), a few HR categories (Staffing, clinical education software/services), and Support Services (couriers, freight services, etc.) to name a few.
That’s how Valify was born. With the help of a developer, Heckler created a patent-pending technology that simplifies the analysis of non-labor spending. Valify also created the industry’s largest categorized vendor database. Hospital spending data is uploaded and within 5 days, a complete analysis has taken place, providing hospitals with access to an intuitive online tool that organizes spending data, enabling them to identify savings opportunities, prioritize savings efforts and better prepare for vendor negotiations. Use of the software has resulted in an average savings of 10%-20% of a hospitals operating budget.
Valify is one of the two dozen startups that operate out of the North Texas Enterprise Center, or NTEC, in Frisco and now serves close to 150 hospitals in 22 healthcare systems across the country continues to grow.
NTEC is a business accelerator that provides resources and mentorship to startups and entrepreneurs with a future in Frisco.
Valify is enjoying steady growth in its first year in business and Heckler hopes more hospital systems will recognize the solution to cost cutting is at their fingertips.
