This past April, Nationwide Medical acquired Dynamic Healthcare Services (DHS), giving Nationwide, the leading provider of specialized respiratory care and home healthcare solutions, a new source of home respiratory supplies, durable medical equipment and oxygen therapy products across multiple East Coast markets.
The acquisition was Nationwide’s first in its more than 24-year-old history, but not its last: Nationwide has two more providers ready to close, with additional acquisitions in progress.
These acquisitions represent a significant change in the journey of the longstanding home-based care equipment provider. For many organizations, this change takes time. These types of acquisitions are far too often a “hurry up and wait” proposition, as the acquiring company often spends months manually porting its acquired company’s data into its system.
Nationwide is not in that bind. With their longtime partner Brightree behind them, Nationwide ported all of DHS’s data into their system in 30 days.
Within just 90 days of the acquisition — the same timeframe that many have for the system integration alone — Nationwide was able to increase DHS orders by 10%. They are projected to continue this strategy and reach a 20% monthly increase by the end of the year.
“We have been working with Brightree for a very long time, and what we’ve been focused on recently is our growth strategy: organic growth through our sales team and inorganic through acquisitions, all while scaling our operations,” says Sara Cruz, Nationwide Medical EVP of Operations.
That is the Brightree playbook for growth. Here is a look at how Nationwide has executed it.
Growth Playbook Step 1: serve your patients based on their needs, not yours
A DME provider, Nationwide Medical began operating in 2002 with a heavy focus on sleep and CPAP. Their partnership with Brightree runs about 18 years. They implemented Brightree’s SNAP Resupply program for resupply about three years ago, giving them a scalable resupply program.
“Prior to us working with SNAP, we were heavily relying on manual processes,” Cruz says. “We didn’t have many electronic methods to reach our patients. Now with SNAP, we are able to scale up our resupply program and feel confident that we are reaching our patients in a method that they wanted to be reached.”
With SNAP Resupply, Nationwide can serve their own patients while positioning themselves for future growth.
“In this day and age, nobody wants to receive phone calls all the time,” she says. “We are able to reach patients in a different method at the time that is convenient for them. Additionally, the ease of ordering makes it easy for the patient as well as low or no touch orders for Nationwide.”
Growth Playbook Step 2: build an acquisitions strategy
Historically, Nationwide’s growth has been organic: sales reps travel literally nationwide to build their network of patients and referral partners and increase patient volume.
More recently, in the past two years, they’ve added acquisitions to their growth strategy. That puts their growth into two buckets: organic and inorganic. Brightree’s greatest value for Nationwide, Cruz notes, has been the opportunity for Nationwide to leverage Brightree’s technology to scale operations efficiently while continuing to support growth without the need to add additional resources and labor proportionally.
“Brightree has been a major focus for us and our core business,” Cruz says.
Growth Playbook Step 3: find a partner that will accelerate acquisition onboarding
Because of their capabilities with Brightree, Nationwide has been able to chart a course for expansion on faster timelines than might otherwise be possible.
“We want to fully integrate a company within 90 days — that’s the goal,” Cruz says. Prior to the acquisition, DHS was not on SNAP Resupply. Nationwide found bringing DHS aboard extremely smooth easy, all things considered, hence their ability to start making order gains with DHS in the same timeframe that other companies require simply for alignment.
“Essentially what Brightree is doing is taking the data of an acquired company, in this case DHS, and crosswalking it into our system,” Cruz says. That means pulling over DHS’s active patients, physicians, payors, documents and inventory. Categorically, this is all the same data that Nationwide has.
The DHS set simply has to be translated into Nationwide’s language. That’s what Brightree does.
“What Brightree allows us to do is take those fields and crosswalk it into our database in a very seamless and efficient manner,” she says. “Once we crosswalk it, then they take all of that information and they put it into our Brightree system, so that they’re now operating in our database under their own branch.”
Without Brightree, Nationwide would need a massive analytics team, or a high-level programmer on staff purely dedicated to integration. A large customer database could take months.
“That’s not the case for us,” she says. “We can now quickly add a company into our database and operate efficiently. That makes a huge difference to how well that acquisition is set up to succeed.”
This Views article is sponsored by Brightree. To learn more, visit them at brightree.com.