According to Dan Gotte, Chief Financial Officer, ImagineSoftware, the traditional foundations of the CFOs role are still there and always will be. The concepts of stewardship, processes, and controls, financial reporting will never go away. “You can think of a business as made up of various sub-business cycles; production/development, sales/customer acquisition, HR/talent acquisition and management and so on. My feeling is only the CFO has the unique position to be able see all those cycles and how they fit together financially to optimize financial performance for the company,” he explains. “Being a med-tech company, I liken the CFO to a patient’s primary care physician. That physician knows the health of the patient irrespective of the tale the patient’s maybe telling the doctor. I see CFOs the same way.” They can see the various business cycles and from the results start to understand what area is not performing optimally. Having that that perspective makes the CFO vital to becoming a strategic partner and not just a green eyeshade finance person.
As per Gotte, healthcare billing is an extremely complex space. There are multiple points of failure that can happen if one relies on manual processes or outdated systems. The key difference with Imagine is that this removal of human intervention through automation helps speed up the billing lifecycle. “We recognize that it is our responsibility to protect patient data at the highest standards. By nature, medical organizations are subject to numerous laws, policies, and procedures to ensure that patient data stays secure,” he says. Imagine has countless processes in place to mitigate risk around vulnerabilities and threats for our clients, including data encryption, multi-factor authentication for access, multi-layer infrastructure environments, and more, to keep this information safe.
"Imagine is aligned to several objectives in the marketplace: client automation, patient experience, and intelligence and analytics."
Strategically Imagine is aligned to several objectives in the marketplace: client automation, patient experience, and intelligence and analytics. “We’re using those objectives to drive our technology roadmap, from investing in AI and robotic process automation to enhance our current product offering to continuously improving several of the core elements of the billing platform that already automate many of a healthcare organization’s pain points,” he explains. “On the patient experience front, we have added multiple feature functionalities to our arsenal that aid in patient communications and capturing payment from patients. We are also building a robust API around those features that will allow us to scale and distribute solutions quickly within our client base.”
The new hot topics are business analytics and business intelligence (BI), referring to a company using BI internally to analyze various business aspects. Gotte adds, “At Imagine, we have developed and use tools on customer’s performance to then work with them to determine if they are using our system optimally or not. This insight we offer to customers is key to developing and keeping customers, reducing churn, and maximizing ARR.”
For Gotte listening to stakeholders, customers, employees, and vendors is an important step to success. “We maintain relationships, we ask as well as listen to what are they needing or looking for. However, you can’t stop there, you have to also be willing to introduce functionality into the market that were not asked for, but that you can see helping the clients,” adds Gotte. “Using the iPhone as an analogy, until Apple introduced such a product into the market, no one ever knew they needed one. At Imagine, we are the same way. We introduce ideas/applications into the marketplace that helps to automate and give insight into a client’s business.”
Advising the budding entrepreneur, Gotte says that gaining many experiences to understand the big business picture can help immensely. “By this I mean, yes, you need to have your specific skills, but understand customers, and how and why they buy, understand the employees as well, how they are unique and a valuable resource to your company. And aligning all those various elements is a differentiator of a truly successful company.” Imagine will continue to add to and enhance our market offerings and strive toward complete client satisfaction. IE
Dan Gotte
Chief Financial Officer of ImagineSoftware
ImagineSoftware is the leading provider of medical billing automation software and revenue management applications. The cutting-edge technology for medical billing offices, practices, and hospitals improves efficiency while increasing cash by applying high quality standards to data integrity. We are committed to innovative development and intelligent automation to help clients achieve peak performance and measurable results.