Russ:  Hi I’m Russ Capper and this is BusinessMakers USA coming to you today from Nashville, Tennessee and I’m pleased to have as my guest John Griscavage, the CEO of PlayMaker CRM; John, welcome to the show.

John:  Thanks for having me.

Russ:  You bet.  Tell us about PlayMaker CRM.

John:  Sure, so PlayMaker CRM is the leading sales platform for the post acute care industry.  Post acute is whenever someone leaves a hospital that’s acute setting and they go into another care environment, whether it’s in the home or a facility, that’s considered post acute care.  So we provide a sales platform that helps those businesses grow their business through getting more referrals from their network.  The second is gaining better visibility into their sales team activities as well as the referral network and lastly is really improving their sales productivity; so really kind of cost management around their sales activity.

We do that in kind of four different things that set us apart.  So the first thing is we are a mobile forward technology, so we deliver native built IOS and Android applications that our sales teams can us in the field.  These are outside sales reps and they need something that they can use on their device in the field.  We also have vertical specific workflow.  So by that I mean we think about the unique needs of what a sales rep is going to be doing selling home healthcare or selling hospice care and we make sure our technology, our platform, is designed around them.

We also have – we integrate with our clients’ EMR and an EMR is an electronic medical records system; so we make sure we pull that information into our system so the sales rep has it at her fingertips when she’s having that conversation with the physician about the status of a patient and what have you.  And lastly we incorporate market intelligence information so that a sales rep can know if a particular physician is worth talking to in terms of like volume of referrals, the type of competition that she might be facing in those particular accounts.  So those four things combined really set us apart in our particular vertical market.

Russ:  Wow, interesting.  So you win a new customer, they install the system; I imagine it’s somewhat sophisticated – do you guys play a role in the installation?

John:  We do, we have an on-boarding process and a project manager; in order to map the data from a client’s EMR into our system it’s definitely a process. So again, getting back to it, we want to increase rep efficiency; we want them to spend less time what we call windshield time and more time selling, and also going into accounts that are worth going in to that have an interest in the type of services we sell.

Russ:  It’s like you’re at the epitome of advanced CRM and advanced post acute care.  Would that be right?

John:  Yeah, I think that’s right.  I mean obviously there’s been a migration of software from kind of large, horizontal application on prim solutions to then large horizontal cloud-based solutions and sales forces is a very successful example of that, but that solution doesn’t solve the needs of a lot of specific vertical markets and so we saw a real need around addressing the unique concerns and needs of the sales activities in the post acute care world.

Russ:  But the PlayMaker CRM, your customers are the providers of those rehab services, the companies now that are focused on home healthcare, the hospice companies.  So you actually call on them and I would suspect that at least some of the smaller ones operate without any sort of a CRM.

John:  It’s funny you say that.  So when you think of healthcare it’s often a late adopter of technology and in our industry it’s probably the latest adopter of technology.  Usually what we’re competing against to your point is not so much another software provider but just the inaction or inertia of just well, we’re managing it on paper or spreadsheets.  You may be able to kind of bumble through that but long term it’s not an effective way of keeping track of your sales activity.

Russ:  It’s fascinating because my mind keeps going who are the big customers and it seems to me like the rehab facilities might be your largest opportunity?

John:  Yes, I would say the company really had sort of its bread and butter was in the home health and hospice space so our largest customers are some of the publicly traded companies in that space.  I think over time we’ve begun to diversify to include the long term care and rehab facilities; Durable Medical Equipment, so this is home oxygen therapy or home infusion where you’re getting kind of internal nutrition or other things in the home, those are newer areas for us and we’ll see a lot of growth in those areas too.  So really anywhere where care is being provided outside the hospital, those types of prospects all have the same type of sales need; they have an outside sales team that’s calling on a set or referral sources and they’re trying to manage that activity in a consolidated way.

Russ:  Okay, so I’m curious, did the Affordable Care Act play a role in the company at all?

John:  It hasn’t really had a big impact.  If anything we think that as there’s a shift to lower cost settings there will be a drive for more utilization of post acute care.  I mean if you think about it a hospital stay – I’m not going to quote numbers I’m not entirely sure of, but you now hospital days are upwards of $5,000.00 a day if you’re not in the ICU and a home health day could be $100.00 a day.  So the ACA certainly focused on driving down costs and pushing people into that setting.  Also with just a proliferation of more people insured that that’s certainly more activity for our prospects to – so our home health agencies to get more business and so that would be a good thing for our industry.

Russ:  Okay, so is PlayMaker CRM strictly focused right now on what you described up front, this whole post acute care category, or do you see opportunities to kind of broaden horizontally into other healthcare initiatives?

John:  I do, yes.  So there’s a lot of runway for us in post acute right now but when we think about the idea of sales management, marketing activity and kind of referral network management as the healthcare industry moves towards ACOs and to population health we see a real opportunity to play a pivotal role there.  As we sort of understand the market dynamics we have we aggregate our own information, understand what’s happening; we look at these different referral patterns.  We think we can serve that broader need whether that’s with a healthcare system or a hospital setting or something else, so that’s where we see this going over a period of time.

Russ:  Great, well it’s definitely interesting software business for sure and John I really appreciate you sharing your perspective with us.

John:  Yeah, thank you so much.  Thank you for the time.

Russ:  And that wraps up my discussion with John Griscavage, the CEO of PlayMaker CRM and this is BusinessMakers USA.