When Jonathan Lujan, the new CEO of MatrixCare, talked with HME Business Vice President and Editorial Director Bob Holly earlier this month, Lujan had been in his new position for only a few days.
Lujan was appointed MatrixCare’s CEO after the company was acquired by Frazier Healthcare, a deal announced on Sept. 1.
MatrixCare — a leading provider of cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) and revenue cycle management (RCM) solutions for out-of-hospital care settings, including skilled nursing, senior living, home health and hospice — had previously been owned by Resmed.
Lujan’s first days as CEO were spent meeting MatrixCare’s customers, as well as Lujan’s new team.
“I’m going across the country, and I’ll be going across India as well, to meet as many customers and employees as possible — to listen,” Lujan said. “I just met with our largest customer on our skilled nursing facility side of our business, and one of our largest customers on the home health and hospice side of our business. I’m approaching this with a lot of curiosity.”
Lujan emphasized that he wanted to meet “a broad spectrum” of customers in post-acute care, including smaller businesses.
“I want to hear from our strongest advocates,” he said. “I also want to hear from customers who are frustrated, and really learn the most from that second group.”
Protecting human interventions
Regardless of the size of these customers’ businesses or their specialties, Lujan emphasized labor difficulties that healthcare providers face.
“That’s really the workforce crisis challenge,” he said. “In a skilled nursing facility, you walk down the hall, and you can literally hear residents and patients calling out for help. The healthcare team is trying their best. You see the fatigue on their faces because there’s such a massive patient demand, and there’s just not enough workers in the healthcare space, and specifically in the post-acute care space.”
That’s where technology such as MatrixCare’s can provide critical support: by taking over repetitive administrative tasks to free people to perform the kinds of care that requires human intervention.
“They need technology that allows this scarce pool of clinicians and caregivers to spend their time on the highest-value activities,” Lujan said. “And the biggest challenge is really helping our customers solve that. And the second: This is true across all of healthcare, because I’ve been in many different types or subsectors of healthcare, and healthcare is just complex.
“Healthcare has a tremendous amount of administrative, regulatory and financial complexity between government regulations and revenue cycle management and third-party payers. So the challenge of developing the right solutions to help our customers with the right technology and making sure that we’re always keeping up with state regulations, federal regulations, and making sure that we’re connecting with the third-party payers appropriately and understanding what their needs are for documentation, etc. There’s a lot of complexity that we just have to constantly stay on top of.”
As for changes now in the works, Lujan said, “MatrixCare stands proudly as an independent post-acute healthcare technology company whose success is directly tied to the success of the markets and the customers that we serve. We don’t have to compete internally with a large parent company for attention and investment.
“This is going to allow us to make decisions faster, invest with greater focus, and really organize ourselves around our customers’ priorities. For teammates: I don’t want this to be a job for them. I want this to be a calling, where every teammate wakes up and goes to work, and they’re proud because the work they’re doing matters. Because the people they’re doing it for matter greatly.”
The interview for this story was conducted by Vice President, Editorial Director Bob Holly.
