Chair Lee on H&H revenue collection and insurance billing

And then in terms of the revenue collection, because I know it's probably a combination of the insurance reimbursements along with miscellaneous revenue, philanthropy grants, and that such combination.

Have the revenue collection improvements, if you could break down, if it's a combination of those or if it's, you know, how it breaks down in terms of those categories?

The revenue improvements has really been starting since eight years ago when we sort of first began this journey of learning how to bill insurance, right?

We're not interested in billing people.

We're interested in billing insurance.

We're not interested in giving for...

profit insurance a free ride by providing care for free and not billing them.

And so each year we have gotten better at it.

It's a complicated issue.

It involves things like making sure the documentation supports the bill, making sure that the prior authorization is done, making sure some of the contracts that I inherited when I came were poorly negotiated.

So they might give an overall amount per visit that was less than the vaccination that you gave during the visit because the overall fee included the vaccination.

So each year we look at the contracts, we improve the contracts, we improve our documentation is much better, and all of those things contribute to year to year

our increases are higher than inflation, which is how I view it, right?

If it's just 3% more, well, then that would just say I was just getting inflation.

But the fact that each year we've done better than 3% says that we are getting better and better at building insurance.

That's great.

And I know that just obviously on a much, much, much, much smaller scale, when I was running our Article 31 clinic, it almost felt like we were constantly trying to justify and get funding and reimbursements from the insurance companies, including Medicaid.

So I appreciate your efforts in that area for sure.