Wayne Cross, Managing Director - JW Medical Management

Speaker: Wayne Cross, Managing Director, JW Medical Management

Wayne Cross: Hello, my name's Wayne Cross and I work for JW Medical Management Limited. I am the managing director of the company. We are an accountancy practice. A little bit different to a traditional practice, in that we only work in supporting doctors, clinicians, and consultants, working in private healthcare. And the variety of services that we offer again are quite unique in that we also offer those doctors regular sort of support services to help them on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Helping them with their practice from a perspective of billing and collection on their invoices to self-paid patients, to the private medical insurers, to helping them with their administration, bookkeeping, reporting, and so on and so forth. So there are a sort of a quite a wide ranging number of services that we offer.

Wayne Cross: So prior to using Glasscubes, we used the traditional method of bombarding clients with emails. Very frustrating, because, well, for two reasons really, you know, you would send emails out and invariably you wouldn't get a response certainly from the majority of them, but the issues that we were facing, primarily is that staff would forget that email has been sent so that task never got completed and it was only when we came to a quarterly sort of review for the VAT or a quarterly review for management reporting or year-end accounts etc that we realised that all these questions and queries had still gone unanswered. So, I found that very frustrating, it was, you know, a waste of resources, we were asking questions, not getting answers, but then still not getting to the bottom of that work to be completed. So, I realised that we needed to have a much better, much more efficient, system in place, and hence the reason we started looking for some alternative software. Now at the time as well we were using customer portals from a variety of accounting and sort of CRM systems. We trialled several different systems to find one that worked for us, and invariably if we found a good account system or or management system. The portals were quite poor, so we would have issues where clients would refuse to use the portal in the first place, or they would sign in, use a password, and then couldn't access it back in again, and we had all sorts of problems. So, twofold really, we were looking at an improved, more efficient communication tool, but one that we could also use as a portal that could be accessed by the clinicians without too much hassle.

Wayne Cross: So, of course, with any new software system there are always concerns about introducing something new into your workflows. How long is it going to take to get that system up and running? How easy or difficult is it to utilise and adapt to your own particular office working systems? Are the staff going to like it? Are the staff going to adapt to it? Are they going to use it? Of course, if the staff don't like it, you've got an uphill battle for actually getting them to use the system in the first place. So there was all sorts of, concerns, and just really pleasing to see that the onboarding that Glasscubes offer was absolutely excellent. So, from day one, when we got the system uploaded we had Kayleigh, who's our relationship manager that spoke to us on a regular basis We had Kevin that worked with us as well, and in the early stages it was a case of setting up regular review meetings, so we always knew that we were on track to get the most out of it. So sometimes you'll get a new software system and, you know, you'll have a bit of a struggle with it. You'll put it on the back burner, and it'll sit there for three or four weeks. Whereas these guys were quite proactive in making sure that we arranged regular review meetings to make sure that we were using the system and getting the most out of it, and you know that that was really reassuring. If we've got any queries, questions, any issues at all, getting used to the system, anything that we came across, we contacted Kayleigh and she either sorted it straight away or got back to, the IT team and you know, responded to us as soon as she'd got an answer. So the support was excellent, and that enabled us to embed, the software into our workflows and systems very, very quickly.

Wayne Cross: Ok, so once we've got our understanding of using the system, we immediately rolled it out to all the staff and made sure they had full training on it. Initially they struggled a little bit with the workspace idea, but we use our server, we use OneDrive, so there's a client folder for every single client. So once we sort of realised well you know we'll have a workspace for every single client and effectively that's their folder on the server. We then have workspaces for other projects and so on, and the staff very quickly got that understanding and worked with it very quickly. It's a very easy system, a very user user friendly system, and they started working with it quite effectively, quite quickly. We have several projects that that were often running. One recent one was trying to introduce new clinicians into private practice and project managing them through that process. So if a clinician wants to launch a private practice there's a hundred and one tasks that they've got to go through, whether it be regulatory, whether it be connecting with the relevant people like medical secretaries and so on. There's a huge list of things that they have to do. So we sold the service on project managing them through it, and we use Glasscubes as the foundation of that. So basically, we split Glasscubes request into five different sections, with some sort of fifteen to twenty questions or tasks in each one, and we literally guided the doctors through it one by one. And they found that really helpful, we found it really helpful, it meant everybody was on kept on track as to where exactly they were in the process and what key tasks were, were left outstanding to perform. So it really, really helped us sell that service, and it's been very popular. Another benefit of Glasscubes as well as the traditional, you know, sending out for queries and questions and things like that, and collecting data at quarterly filing dates, VAT or whatever it might be, we also found it really useful for management reporting. So, we have some clients that have, for example, a monthly or a quarterly management report from us, and quite often we were putting a lot of work and effort into these reports and not really knowing whether the client had read it, understood it. Never really came back to us with any feedback, again you'd ask by email, and you wouldn't get a response, so we started using the feature whereby we would upload the management reports as a PDF into the Glasscubes portal for that client and then we'd utilise the request options. So you can send a request for a signature. You can send a request for an approval. You can even send a request for a read receipt. So, what we tended to do is send the management report, ask them to provide us with any feedback, but in any instance please confirm by ticking the read button, so we knew exactly when they'd read it and that then allowed us to sort of any recommendations we put on that, it allowed us to act on them, so it was a really good tool for monitoring projects, with our clients.

Wayne Cross: So, would I recommend Glasscubes? Yes, absolutely. We found it's streamlined our workload. So, the two key areas, communication. We send Glasscubes requests whenever we've got any transaction queries. We know that clients do respond to it, they respond to it a lot quicker than what they respond to our emails, but the key point for me is we never lose track of that. That query will always stay open. So if we've sent ten transaction queries and eight have been answered, the remaining two will stay there and the client will be continually reminded until that task has been done. So for us, that's a really efficient process. And the portals have been very well accepted. The client doesn't really even know they're in a portal, they'll just click on the email, click on the link, and the questions will be in there, or requests or whatever piece of work we're involved with them. That will be there for them to act upon, and if they aren't able to get that full amount of response or data to you, at a set period, several days or a week later, or whatever, they'll get a reminder with that outstanding item, click on the email again, and it's really easy for them to access and respond to you. So, it's really streamlined the way we work, and you know I often speak to staff about their feelings about the software, which we always have a regular sort of chat through the systems that we're using. And they would be quite fearful if we decided to take Glasscubes away from them. They do use it regularly, they really like, and the staff have absolutely, you know, been sold on the product, absolutely, but I think one of the biggest benefits, and you know what we found is, we were debating whether the investment was worth it. We are only a small organisation, we are growing. We were probably still at that early stage where we thought, yeah, we need this, it'll be really helpful, but you know, we've got to be mindful of all the costs of all the other services and systems and software that we've got in place, but we decided to take the plunge, and certainly no regrets whatsoever because as well as streamlining the workload as we'd anticipated, it also opened a lot of other opportunities for us. Once we got used to the system we utilised it for a lot of other things, and again, as I mentioned earlier in the video, some of the projects that we've run, it's actually helped us win more business. So, I would advise anybody, if you're considering, trialling the system, go ahead, get stuck into it, and you'll hopefully find that it's been a really worthwhile purchase for you.