Greg Martinez on Using AI to Improve Healthcare Billing Efficiency

One of the challenges, Rockstars, when we grow our company that we face is the resistance that we get from our team. Have you ever tried that before where you try to grow your company and it starts to burn out the current team? Maybe there's even people on the team who aren't the best fits who use that opportunity to make their complaints vocal and bring the morale down. Well, today's episode is for you. This is Greg Martinez from Athelis, a $6 billion medical billing company wanting to go public in the next four years. That type of growth is so intense that it's nothing I've ever seen before. And as a result of that, Greg's going to share the lessons learned from growing a company that aggressively and that strongly. It will shock you how they approach growth and will give you inspiration on how you can talk to your team in a way that's going to be collaborative but also not be slowed down by the resistance that we get from some of the people on our team. My hope is that you'll learn how to grow in a way that will make your life easy. Enjoy the show. All right, well, Greg, we've had a great conversation about the secret to success. Why don't you share what you think success looks like for you professionally?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's one is the passion on what it is that you actually do. Right. The why behind the day to day grind, but more so the combination of the why with the people that you do it with.

Yeah. And that's what we were talking about, this idea that, like, who we do it with really matters 100%. Describe that for me.

Yeah, I think it's interesting. I didn't know that I cared that much about it until we started scaling things and expanding our team. And you hire all these people and you recognize they have these attributes and characteristics that can help you succeed. But more so, what I found fulfillment is in is seeing them be successful so their families are taken care of. And when you care about them as individuals and humans and you enjoy spending time with them and then their success actually means more to you than just hitting a number or achieving a goal, then work doesn't feel like work anymore.

Yeah, well, you have to do that because what you're doing right now is so intense and your team is so amazing. I was surprised with our billing company. Katie and I, we were just amazed. And we've said this to everybody. As big as your company is how personal it is. The most amazing individuals. Daniel, Kevin, like so many People that and everyone you meet, they're so amazing. How did you guys find each other?

It's a good question. It's a really good question. It's kind of like those life, life long things that you talked about. Right. So Daniel, is that one of those people for me? For sure. He was my last student. His last clinical rotation was in my practice and we just talked about business and ideas and big picture stuff and what was wrong with the field and why we couldn't make an impact on it. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so the first time I got approval to actually create this clinical team inside of Athelis, he was the first person I called and I knew he'd come. He immediately gave his notice and you know, he's been my right hand guy since that day. And if anything were to change, we'd go everywhere together. Like we are going to work together in the future no matter what. And then others have been classmates. I mean our first few people we hired. Todd was my classmate in PT school, one of my closest friends now and then Jordan was actually, I grew up with his family's brother and he was one of my assistants, my aides and I wrote his letter to PT school and those are the first three hires we made.

So you've known these people forever. Is the relationship more important than the skill set? Because I mean these were really intense positions that you hired them for. At a fella $6 billion company, your scaling goals are super huge. Your vision of course is to like take the PT industry and use AI to totally transform their revenue cycle. So when you're bringing people over, my first thought is like, yeah, I'm sure Dan, amazing. But how did you know he'd be amazing at this?

You don't always. Honestly, the true answer is you don't know. Right. You can't know. Exactly. Because when we scale this quickly on a business like this and the valuation continuously expands. Right, right. You just adjust on the fly. You do what you have to do every single day and it's a little bit different. You just have to recognize like it's not going to be perfect and structured and that's okay. Like living in chaos is how it's going to go and I thrive in that. I love that environment. So you can't know. But I do know that from a skill set standpoint, like he thinks operationally, he understands big picture, he's strategic and you can't teach someone a thing like that. So I know he's going to figure it out. And also he's super driven and very reliable. And it's like.

That'S more important than anything else to me.

Right.

And then the rest of them, from a relationship standpoint, it's the same thing. Yeah. I trust them as humans, we can teach them the skill set. They've translated their provider skill sets very, very quickly into a sales management role in less than a year.

That's amazing. And it's such a cool concept because you have these two things at play that are really famous concepts. So rockstars, as you're listening, one thing that we talk a lot about is that you hire on mindset and you train on skill set. So that's what you're talking about with Daniel's strategic, high level thinking capabilities. You know him well enough to know that piece. But the second thing is trust. My favorite book of all time for business, no kidding, is a book by Stephen Covey Jr. Called the Speed of Trust. It's actually not that well known. Everyone knows his dad for seven habits of highly effective people. But the Speed of Trust was told to me by one of my mentors as his favorite book. And I thought he was exaggerating. And I read it and I was like, dude, this is so crazy because when we have trust with our team members, you can really lean on each other for all the hard stuff. And I know for me as an owner, Greg, like the hardest things was when I couldn't trust that someone would show up every day. I couldn't trust that they were like, the person I was hiring wasn't going to talk crap about me when I made a mistake. It's so easy to pick on the leader in that group. And so the trust that you guys have with that team is evident, as is proved by the fact that I see you guys talking to PTs and they're just totally feeling that connection. Despite the fact that you are backed by a very large company in artificial intelligence. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, man, so when every, every quarter, obviously you guys focus on growth. So what challenges do you guys face on those relationships as you are, you know what I mean? Because there's so much stress. How does that stress the relationships that you've built?

Yeah, it's. Honestly, it sounds cliche.

Yeah.

But when you go through these really challenging situations together and you win, right. You hit these goals that seem unattainable at the time and the last second seem impossible. And you know personally exactly what I'm talking about, like it builds this increased level of trust and camaraderie and just buy in right to each other and to this bigger picture of what we're building together, that it's like, hey, I would go to battle with you wherever we're at. Right. And it's just become so much more binding long term because you've done something so hard together that you can't experience any other way. Right. If it was easy, it wouldn't be the same at all.

Right. You wouldn't have the strength of the relationship that trust gets re fortified is what you're saying.

100%.

So do you ever have friction points? Do you guys ever have points where there's like you have to talk things out or.

All the time. I mean, the challenge with scale, right. Is you can't map things out perfectly. And so there's never like a fair just way to have everybody benefit equally as we grow, create new territories, create new teams, you know, scale at a really, really fast pace. Right. We're over 50 providers.

Right.

And to do that and keep it fair for everybody is impossible. So you have to have those conversations of like, hey, you have to recognize early on, my intention is not to harm you. I would do anything possible to help you be successful long term here. But you have to recognize as much as we try to keep it fair, it can't ever be perfect. If you trust me enough to remember that and give a little bit here and there so we can all win together, it's going to work out in the end, in the long run. Okay.

I love that how it came back to trust too, because you know, you have that trust with people saying you can trust. I'm not intentionally trying to hurt you. Because we're organizing chaos, which is all growth is. We're taking this unorganized matter and we're organizing it to grow our scale. We're in this position where there's going to be lots of mistakes. That's one of my favorite things that I've heard is we're either learning or winning. Right. And so the learning is more like what others would call failure, maybe friction within the team. Have you guys ever brought someone on that's not a fit?

Yeah. And again, the intention. I will literally tell every single person I interview this. Right. Our intention is to make this a win win. You need to be interviewing us as much as we're interviewing you.

Yeah.

This has to be a long term fit for both sides. And unfortunately sometimes that doesn't work out. And what we try to do is paint that path and picture for them to say, hey, our intentions were good. We did everything we could to make the Best fit possible. But I think we both recognize this probably isn't the best path or fit together long term. How do we help you find a better opportunity moving forward? So it does happen. It's again, not been very common, luckily, thus far, but I think the odds show that it's gonna happen sooner or later on occasion.

Well, what's cool about that too, is I think that a lot of times when we think that we have a dream team going, that we don't have friction points. And that's quite opposite A team, for it to grow and scale well, clearly has to be growing.

Right?

Is one of the things that you're saying. And so you're in this environment with the Thelis where you guys are growing super fast. You've got lots of energy behind it. And I will say this all the way up to your leadership. You know, Hirsch and these amazing people that, like, kind of make you feel stupid, to be honest. Like, I'm. I'm twice their age and they're like superhumans and you just. But they're so kind. You can't dislike them. Like, they're just. But it's the idea that, like, you have this trust, but you also have these clear focuses on outcomes that allow you to have these safe arguments about, like, what's going to be productive and what we should do or shouldn't do. Because everyone knows and trusts that at the end of the day, they're all wanting the same for all. They all want everybody to win. And so I think that is something that people get confused with when they have teams that or they've never experienced a dream team. They think that that's just not. Not possible at all.

Yeah, No, I agree 100%, and I think it's. It's fascinating. It makes me think of two things. Number one is, again, you have to be aligned with the big picture because will never be perfect like we talked about. Right. You cannot expect things to just run smoothly. You have to be willing to adapt all the time and recognize that not if, but when things don't go the way you hoped they would, that it's not personal.

Yeah, right.

Like it's going to happen and you can control how you respond, but not all the circumstances that you're put under. The other thing is fun for me is, you know, PT was so amazing. You know, how passionate I am about our profession. Totally 100% believe in what we're doing. Some of the dynamic relationships that I've been able to experience at a company like this. I don't Know how to really put a value. How do you measure the value long term to working with someone like you just mentioned? And it's not even just their resume, because resumes are crazy. Right. There are people from all over every Ivy League school you can imagine, from Harvard and Stanford.

They're amazing. But to sit in the same room as people that think and see things a different way than you, and to absorb the way that they analyze and process things and then bring our own personal experience to the table and see those things kind of mesh together is a pretty exciting experience. Right. And in PT it becomes so common because we're always with the same people all the time. It's not necessarily bad, it's just not the same experience.

Right.

And so they needed a bridge builder. Right. They are so smart, so good at technology, so good at automation. They think of things in ways that providers don't. Yeah. But they're also building tools for providers.

Right.

So they had to have a connector. Right. A bridge between end user and most brilliant minds in the world.

Yeah.

And we created that bridge of value that couldn't have come in another way. And so our value is great. It's just very different than what they bring. And when you put those together, it becomes something great.

Yeah, I love that story. Because we sometimes get trapped by being too similar with each other. But like the thing we don't want to be afraid to be, the thing that matters most and being similar in thinking is vision. Like values and vision. Because even if one person's a tech background and I'm a healthcare background, if we both want to disrupt physical therapy and make it the leader in musculoskeletal, you know, industries, I think there's a huge opportunity in my world. When I started getting coaching back in 2008 for physical therapy ownership, I almost walked away. Right. Like it was just too hard. I got to this point where my wife said, why don't you get a coach? And there was no coaches in physical therapy that I could find. There may have been, but I never found them. So I joined Entrepreneurs Organization eo. It's the largest in the world for just business networking. And they train you, they'll give you a mentor, 5,000 a year. So kind of like this low expense but high impact experience. None of the people who coached me were in physical therapy. And I'm so grateful for that. Having a CPA talk to me about numbers, having a roofing construction worker tell me about team building, like you just never know what value everyone has. But the big thing Was we're wanting to help people and make a difference. And when you're at a fellow, I mean, it's really interesting because what you're doing there is. It's always been interesting me that you guys are hyper focused on physical therapy, right? Like, you have. You have AI, you're focused on revenue cycle as well as a handful of other things. Now, why did you guys double down on pt?

Because a lot of critics would say, why would anyone double down on pt?

It's a totally fair question. And again, the obvious answer at the service level is that I was the first provider they hired. That was my background. That was my network, what I knew, what I was familiar with. And at the time, you have to just say, hey, we're building this new tool, this suite of tools. We need someone to use it. And early on, it's like, how can we get it in front of people as fast as possible? And that's my network. So it started just like, great, this is convenient, right? Then what we learned down the line, and again, that's the honest answer is, that's my network. That's why we started. I am biased. I'm going to continue to push for pt. I want us to have the greatest tools and skills and opportunities possible. But down the line, they saw that pts have a lot of opportunity in private practice. Most other medical specialties don't have as many private practice opportunities. They're part of a larger umbrella system, work under a hospital. But PT is so common to just break off and say, I'm gonna create my own thing, and I'm gonna figure out how to run this thing on my own, and I'm gonna scale it.

Right?

And very few other medical professions or specialties have that many entrepreneurs that are just building something great with a really, really diverse skill set like pt. And so I think it aligns really well with how we're building. They think the same way. There's a lot of synergy, and it made sense.

Yeah, I love that you have that. It's so cool because we did an episode last week with someone by the name of Tim Spooner. He's got a largest private practice owner here in Arizona, and he was talking about how this is the single best time to become a PT and start a practice. And the reason being is because what we don't realize as PTs is that this is a $600 billion industry called musculoskeletal stuff versus musculoskeletal recovery versus just the physical therapy rehab portion. That's like 30 to 40 billion. Sure. So there's this massive industry to come in. So I think that's another reason why Athelis and other larger companies are starting to really jump in here. Because you guys jumped in because you grew where you were planted. They planted a guy named Greg and he grew from pt, so that's where you continue growing. But now as you guys are growing and scaling, there's this tremendous opportunity for disruption scaling. And man, what you guys do in the AI space is so fun. So I know a lot of people are gonna be tuning into this episode because they wanna hear about how AI functions with revenue cycles. So talk to me about that. Like, what does AI, what does that even mean? Artificial intelligence helping people get their money as physical therapy practices?

It's a great question. It's so broad. There's just so many places you can start.

Yeah.

I think the easiest way to explain it is to think about the repetitive or monotonous tasks that are generally required to successfully create and submit a claim and then actually get paid on it in a timely manner.

Yeah, right.

There's so much repetitive patterns that have to go into place in order to actually get paid fairly.

Yeah.

So the question becomes, why do we have to do that every single claim, every single time, and then adjust that for each pair individually. Can't there be a way to automate that? Right, so the simple way of looking at it is do monotonous tasks at scale immediately. Let's take that piece out right now. Right. And then when you start automating portions of it, what you start to get is data. And when you have data, you can make more informed decisions about efficiency. And then you drive your decision making process based on actual results and objective numbers that are coming from some of the automations you've started and that drives more automation. And so it's gone from, hey, you know, we could probably streamline querying portals for remittances and the numbers we throw out, Right. Like we're going to get these 1800 remittances in about six seconds. So we scrape these portals, get the data we need, post them directly back into our platform and it's called Insights. And that would take a human about two weeks working full time, non stop doing. Right. And so it's like, wow, that's really amazing. Now that we can do that, how do we drive that data we're getting from remittances or eligibility checks right into more purposeful or meaningful automations and then it just starts to add onto that and the next layer comes and then we get users like physical therapists and practices starting to use it and they say, hey, this is amazing. What if you used it in this way? And then our engineer's like, that's a great idea, let's try it. Right?

Because you have so many engineers that can know that so fast.

So many. We ship new code every two weeks.

Jeez.

So we have well over 200 engineers full time engineers now based in the Bay Area and again, top, top talent in the world, right? It's like we're recruiting from. We can now handpick these engineers from Facebook and Uber and SpaceX and all these Bay Area companies and plug them into something that's traditionally so boring. Like nobody likes to do billing, right? But if we plug in automation, LLMs, large language models, right? These automations, like they get to move faster than they did at Google. Yeah, right. They're iterating their ability.

Yeah. Because those are such large companies you guys have, they get to really implement change and see it impact immediately.

Exactly, exactly. And again they get to be on the front lines of like, wait a minute, here's a use case for something I could build that could be immediately implemented into practice. We see results from that same day.

Same day.

That's fun, right? And so now billing isn't like this old drawn out, monotonous, boring task. It's like I could build something great that could be used at scale immediately. Like I want to work for a company like that. And then we grow that quickly and it's like, great, now there's opportunity for equity and progression and everything else. And then you have these teams that just get bigger and bigger with higher and higher levels of talent and it becomes this momentum that's just hard to slow down.

Dude, I love hearing the enthusiasm on the back end from your perspective. Because here's where I get excited about it. It's from my, my misery of being a business owner as a PT owner. Like, I don't know, I didn't, no one ever taught me how to do those things. And I felt super shameful not understanding revenue cycle. So it was like, okay, I don't understand how to do my billing, but I'm too embarrassed to ask for help. So I usually would invest in a company or like an individual. And that's why I started in the black, right? Because I had Katie Archibald, who used to be that one in a billion, who was this amazing person who could grow and scale it. So I found myself really passionate about medical billing, as boring as that might sound. Because what really got me excited was fighting the insurance companies. And in our heyday when we had this team just of amazing rock stars, it was like these team meetings were, were almost like rallies, like political rallies were like, you know what, I just got this payment from Aetna. I stuck it to the man and everyone's applauding and. Because what you realize. And I, I mean, look, in today's political climate, you can't say anything without offending half the population, Right?

Correct.

But you can literally say insurance. The insurance system is evil. And everyone goes, yeah, that's right. Like there's no offense to that. We just accept it. You're reunited and it's, it's. So what's fun is fighting the suppression because again, until I owned a billing company, I didn't realize that, like there was these automated systems that were absolutely just meant to make it hard for me to get paid for my, for my partners. And with, with this automation coming in, I mean, 600 remittances in eight seconds.

Or something like 1800 six. Yeah.

I mean, there's no human being on the planet that can play the game at that level. It's almost like we're going to the insurance companies with these, with this new playbook and we can just play at a much different level. Do you worry it at all, do you worry at all at Athelis that they're going to come back with their own AI sabotage systems to make it harder? Have you seen anything like that?

Yeah, yeah, it's a fair point. With all the technology that comes out, you have to recognize everyone's going to try to utilize it in their favor. Right?

Yeah.

It's who can adapt to the technology the fastest and then again, who has urgency. I think that the thing is with payers, they don't have to be urgent.

Yeah.

Because they have all the control.

That's true.

They've been in the driver's seat for so long, they can change the rules whenever they want. Where's the urgency? And so for us, we, we can hold them more accountable because we have a lot of urgency for the practices that we represent and we can iterate so quickly. Like you get an update of technology, you'll hear it in the news. It's implemented into our tech stack the next day.

For real?

100%. Because we can move so quickly.

Right? Yeah.

And so that's exciting. So. So yes, to go back to your question, payers are using technology right now against us. Right. They are using AI to deny claims and there's just an article I can reference. But yeah, you know, Cigna is denying 1.2 seconds per claim is taking them 1.2 seconds denial. Right. We know that's not ethical. It has to be a physician that actually reviews the claim itself.

Like it's impossible.

You can't even open the claim in one to start reviewing. Right. So they did 300,000 claims in less than two months. 300,000 denials were. Come on, Crazy.

Yeah, crazy.

And unfortunately even the scarier part is we're so all overwhelmed with the day to day and the grind and trying to keep up and everything else. Less than 5% of those 300,000 denials were ever even resubmitted by practices.

Less than 5% just because they are so busy and they get overwhelmed and frankly they're so busy the owners have no idea that it's even happening behind the scenes. Their billing companies are too busy trying to fight all the bigger fights, not going after the lower hanging, the higher hanging fruit. So it puts them in that position where they just disappear and people just learn to accept their lower reimbursement for what it is.

They just basically go with the status quo because they don't know there's a better way. Right. And again, they're trying to just survive. Like, can I get my current claims out?

Yeah.

If I can't do that, I'm not going to stay afloat. I'm going to focus on that first. Maybe I'll get bandwidth down the line to go chase down these denials, but that takes more time than just submitting. So I'm going to start here.

Yeah.

Or I'll just resubmit them and hope it goes well, but not make any adjustments and maybe the insurance company won't catch it. Right. It's not a sustainable way to run a business or to scale. And so it's like how do we plug technology in and make it do that for them?

Yeah.

And let them focus on what they.

Want to do, which is treat and focus on the claims. There's a book that we're teaching a seminar tonight called AI and Physical Therapy here physically in Arizona. And there's a book that I'm, I'm handing out to everyone who attends that I'll put in the show notes for all the rock stars who want it because I can't remember the name of it right now, but the whole book, it's exploding on the New York Times bestseller list because it's all about AI, how it's offloading providers so they can focus on better care. I Mean, there's all these trends. Virtual assistants for replacing non clinical staff. You have AI filling in systems so that the provider can just hyper focus on their care and get super, you know, impactful with the community like they were intending to do from the beginning. One of the things that you guys have developed is ascribe technology to help offload the biggest headache of all time, which is notes and documentation. There's a lot of great softwares coming out there and I think many of them are fantastic. Yours has had some tremendous results. Why do you think that you guys like what I've seen? People, I'll just say it. This one friend of mine in Arizona told me the first day they implemented it, that night two of his pts cried on their way out out because they realized they would never have to do a note again because your AI just sits there on the phone and actually plugs everything in. Tell me about how you were able to get to that point as quickly as you guys did.

Yeah, again, one of our main, main values at Athelis is speed above all else.

Speed above all else.

Speed above all else. We move fast because we again, waiting, analyzing, trying to be perfect at something just slows down iteration. The faster we get it in front of users, the faster we get feedback, the quicker we can iterate and refine and actually improve the product in day to day use. So what we did is we had a lot of practices that are PT specific, right. Like we talked about that were already using other product lines, they were using rcm, right. And they were happy. And we basically said, hey, here's the new technology on documentation. We know it's a pain point, would you mind using it and giving us feedback? So we had them just pilot it and pilot it and pilot it and we got so much feedback that we could iterate over and over again in a safe place. And even our most basic version was like game changing. They were like, oh my gosh, there's no templates, there's nothing. But the fact that I can just turn something on to record an encounter, have it tell what my voice is compared to the patient's and have it spit out a transcription that then is formatted to what I want it to say at all to look like a soap note was game changing and then you just iterate and now we're, I don't know how many versions in now.

Right.

But now it's, it can basically completely free you from doing any documentation outside of the clinic.

Dude, I would have killed for that. It's so crazy. Because there's this whole thing in the book of speed of trust. I feel like this is our theme. Because speed above all else, right?

Yep.

So the biggest thing that creates trust in a quick way is results. So you talk about speed above all else. It begs the question, especially when you're piloting things, knowing that you're not producing ideal results, how do you not break trust when you're in this mode of going so fast that you're like openly knowing that you're not going to get it right the first hundred times, but you're trying to get through those hundred times as quickly as possible to get it to where it's productive. How do you not break trust with those individuals?

It's the name of the game. I mean, you hit it on the head, Will.

Yeah.

That is hard to do. And that's where I think, honestly, our background as providers, right. Having empathy, being able to communicate clearly, like wanting sincerely to serve. Right. Like the team that I have, we don't, I don't tell them to sell it. Like, how can you serve these people? And when you come with this servant mindset and you are very clear on communication, expectation setting of, we are here to help you, we recognize it is not ready and it's not perfect in its current state. But together working on this and communicating about it through this process will get us to a point that will help us both long term. And then we obviously incentivize them, like, hey, what can we do to help you? To reward you for taking a risk. Right. And piloting with us so that it is this joint risk that we share in this joint venture long term that benefits us both. And I really do think that, again, a clinician or provider PT specific background has been essential to set those early expectations so that we build trust and they recognize they can come straight to us with honest and open feedback that will listen to and apply and not feel like they just have to suffer in silence and hope that it one day gets better right down the line.

Yeah. I think that's something that's very new to a lot of our listeners and rockstars. This is a masterclass on implementing change in general. Because what Greg's talking about here, and I love this, is this concept around, like transparency. The way we get around it is, number one, serving the people in our teams. Like, if we're changing something within our company as an example, we want to be transparent around the risks and the rewards. We want to always say we're piloting it. Like I always tell people, never Say you're changing anything, but you're piloting every idea first to see if there's traction, and then from there making adjustments based on their feedback quickly. Because what builds trust more than anything is results. And being transparent that there's going to be some out points almost sets you up for building trust when we are in a position where we can gain their feedback and make adjustments quickly. So transparently. Greg doesn't know I'm going to say this, but we had a chance to meet with dozens of people who've been on Athelis and I got to meet with them kind of after hours when, you know, no one was around except for us. And they've had a few drinks. And it's amazing what people tell me.

When they've had a few drinks, honesty comes out.

Honesty comes out. And I was like, so what's it like really? And they all said the ones who were the earliest adapters were like, the first reiteration of these things was rough, but they were always transparent about it and there was incentives to stick through it. Like you said, there's got to be an incentive, like there's an exchange always present. We can't just expect people to make changes without that happening. And then the results came. And so because those pieces were there, that couldn't go on indefinitely. But the way that going back to speed, above all else, going back to the book, speed of trust, going back to like fighting the insurance companies, even like the fact that like technology gets released on a Tuesday and you guys are implementing it on a Wednesday because it's the most important value that you guys have is, is, is vital to building that trust and keeping results. So it's fun to see how you guys are pivoting in that space as you look to the future. Greg, what is it that you see? I mean, look, man, you and I both are big fans of Athelis. What do you think is going to happen with Athelis in the future? What would you like to see happen.

For the industry as a real. Not just Athelis, but AI? What would you like to see down the road?

Yeah, there's some personal bias here for sure. So surface level, what I'd say is, can we create enough integrated technology on a day to day user experience to where a provider can choose if they wanted to see more patients without feeling any additional burden? Yeah, right. If that's their choice, great. If they don't want to, great. It's up to them. They can actually make decisions based on what they think is best. For their personal.

Professional life and then the balance of home, you know, and spending time and quality time with family, they get to choose. Right now it's like you either do it or you're not going to survive.

Yeah, man.

And you feel like you're a victim every day. Like you just have to do things a certain way because they're dictating all the rules at you. And no one understood that when they went into medicine. Right. So that's where I'd say I'd start is can we get enough automation in place? Right. Continuously on the documentation, the revenue cycle side, potentially the EHR side. Right. Combining these things to have such an amazing day to day experience that the essence of going into the field is returned.

Yeah.

They're doing what they love because they get paid fairly again.

Right.

Like that's number one. Bigger picture is, man, can we actually fundamentally change the way healthcare is rendered? That's where I get really excited. Right. I mean it is so important to recognize how broken a system is that says we go to school, right. We pay all this money for an advanced degree, we have this amazing skill set, we offer amazing care, we have all this overhead and cost. We render this excellent experience for a patient and then we have no guarantee we're going to get paid.

Yeah, man.

And then we go pay someone to try to get us, help us get paid. And we still have no guarantee that we're going to get paid. Right. Just broken, broken, broken. And so could we actually hold payers accountable because we're doing such a good job at collecting that they have to fundamentally pause and say can we continue to operate in this manner or not? Right. That's what I would love to see happen. There's some personal bias in there. I recognize if you ask our CEO and he may say something different. But I want to hold payers accountable. I want providers to practice how they feel like they should practice because it's the right thing to do and not because they're playing by rules that they had no control over making.

Man, I love that vision and I think what's so when I hear you say that, it makes me think about what AI really is. You know, it's like money. It's not good or bad inherently, it's a tool. And as PTs as leaders and PT guys, rock stars, the more we can harness this for our benefit to push forward the thing that we love the most, which is this industry. You know, my favorite people in the world are PT owners and leaders and people who want to be leaders in our industry because they're the ones who are clearly choosing it not to be rich right now. These are people who lead with their heart in such a big way that I just want to challenge everyone to look for technology, look at profitability as the tool that it is for us to make the change that is coming. Because it is coming. People are starting to fight and they're starting to win their battles against insurance companies. With tools like AI, we are able to hold people accountable in a way that they've never been held accountable before. And when you were describing things earlier, Greg, like this thought occurred to me how we're like the least of their worries. Like they would never see it coming, this movement in physical therapy, their smallest industry of healthcare, the weakest professional in terms of how we've been structured. But yet we're still around for a reason. And the reason is because the demand of what we do is so high and because we're so passionate about what we do, I, I defy other healthcare providers to be as passionate as pts. I'm sure they're out there, but for us to come together, it's going to have a. We're going to have to use technology like AI and other technologies to help us grow and scale. So I hope we get to hear more from you, Greg, in future podcasts. Man, this was a phenomenal time. I really appreciate you being here. If people want to get a hold of you and learn more about a fellows or anything about what you see as an AI expert in the physical therapy space, how can they get a hold of you?

Yeah, I think the easiest way is email. My email is greggetathellis.com and then again, if you go to our website, you can look at more opportunities of what's there and you can certainly learn more. But if you do fill out like a anonymous form of learning more information, you're going to get a random person calling you that's probably not a pt. So audience being PT focused and specific, I would say the best thing would be to come directly to myself or one of my teammate, you know, team members that can speak more specifically to the PT experience through AI and technology.

Yeah. And I can tell you firsthand, I've talked to at this point probably 50 plus companies that have been working in this space. I've never heard a problem. I haven't heard that there hasn't been a problem that hasn't been overcome. Better said and I am a big believer. So guys, thank you so much for tuning in. Greg, thank you for being on the show.

No problem.

All right, see you guys next time. Guys, thank you for taking time to listen to today's episode. If you found today's information to be useful, could you take a minute and help me? I would love it if you could leave a podcast review in your app so that other people who are looking for this information can find it. Plus, my dream is to have the largest network of medical entrepreneurs and leaders in the world so that together, we can change healthcare to make it better for all. So, in addition, if you can think of anyone that you could send this to, not only would that mean a lot to me personally, but it would build this network so. So that we can make healthcare the way that we want it.