Omar M. Khateeb
Head of Growth
Shreyas Gowda is collaborating closely with Gentem’s product development team to build technology experiences that actually make life for front offices easier.
After 15 years in revenue cycle management, Shreyas Gowda is keenly aware of how hard medical practice staff work. “Front office staff are literally multi-tasking all the time,” he says. “They have a patient, they’re on a call, and the doctor will be asking them something all at once.”
Add to that: clicking through clunky billing software, then going back and forth with the back office to understand whether or not a patient has coverage. Throughout his career, Gowda has seen inefficiencies like these waste precious time.
“A lot of solo and mid-sized providers that struggle with revenue, they just don’t have the bandwidth,” he says, explaining that being stretched thin typically means missed profit opportunities. “It just eats up their margin.”
As a revenue cycle manager and certified professional coder, he did what he could to pitch in and support busy teams. But he started to notice bigger, systemic challenges.
First, he saw a need for more intuitive, useful billing technology for front office teams. Second, he noticed a need for better incentives. Most outsourced billing companies, Gowda says, “they just do the billing. There’s no ownership or financial risk involved. You submit a claim, you collect a fee.”
That approach, he says, usually means revenue is left on the table. When Gowda found Gentem, he realized it was addressing those big-picture challenges head on. “Here was a company that was actually helping providers revamp their business,” he remembers. “That was something out of the box.”
By offering advances on payments, Gentem has real stakes in their customers’ success. By putting data and technology first, Gentem was well-positioned to create the kind of streamlined tools medical practices needed. And Gowda knew that with his experience, he could help.
Before beginning his career in revenue cycle management, Gowda’s background was in engineering. He has a keen eye for spotting patterns and inefficiencies that could increase revenue. He also knows how to translate staff needs into clear requirements for product designers.
Now, Gowda is collaborating closely with Gentem’s product development team to build technology experiences that actually make life easier.
“It used to take time for front office staff just to know if the patient had benefits or not,” Gowda says. “We had to run it on the back end, causing a delay. Now, eligibility and payments are all just the click of one button, in real time.”
Gowda points to other wins: In many systems, staff have to navigate through a number of screens to find what they need. Gentem is helping to streamline. Gowda is also proud that Gentem’s tools are compatible with many different platforms and are built to scale with growth.
He’s hopeful that these efforts make life a little easier for staff and clinicians. That’s what got him into this work in the first place. “We aren’t directly providing the care, but we are helping doctors,” he says. “We are touching a lot of lives.”
