Sierra Management Group, Inc. is classified as a medical practice management & consulting company, or MSO (Management Services Organization). We have been a successful MSO facilitating the autonomous practice of medicine for our clients for 10 years. These years have been spent developing a shared business infrastructure for physicians who want to stay independent and not join a large medical practice as an employee. Our comprehensive Management Services allow our physicians to focus on the practice of medicine while maintaining full control of their practices. We accomplish this by establishing a level of integration specific to each physician, paving the way of streamlined decision making and productive strategic planning. We perform these services to allow them to do what they do best, practice great medicine. The Sierra Management Group mission is to assist physicians in maintaining control over their practices, medical decisions and patient care.
Facilitating the marriage of great business to strong medical care teams is a crucial component of our business model. We accomplish this by supplying both our management team and staff team to each of our clients. Our three-tier management team is a multi-dimensional, dynamic, and versatile group working together to perform the intricate levels of management across all clients. Our management team covers everything from executive functions, to guide governance, to site supervisors at the clinic level.
Our shared infrastructure also consists of a centralized reception, contracting, credentialing, surgery scheduling, medical billing/coding, and finance departments. This infrastructure is made up of all of our independent medical practices which eliminates the redundancy of these departments in each of these practices. Our shared Medical Assistant staff is cross-trained in administration and medical assisting across multiple specialty offices. We specialize in taking care of employees and forming a culture to facilitate our goals.
Sierra Management Group, Inc. has been successfully running urgent care and specialty offices for a decade. Our consulting projects range from market research to comprehensive medical executive governance projects. Healthcare is our business.
Sierra Management Group, Inc. is a Management Services Organization providing services to many physician groups across multiple specialties and locations with economies of scale and state of the art systems. We provide a wide range of administrative and management services to physicians, allowing standardization of services and a reduction in duplicated costs in individual private practices. Sierra Management Group, Inc. partners directly with our physician clients for MSO services, allowing small practices access to services it may otherwise be unable to provide while retaining power.
Our MSO model enables the private practitioner to lower operating costs and builds capacity that offers more options for the provider’s future. Facilitating the marriage of great business to great medical care teams is a crucial component of our business model. We accomplish this by supplying both our management team and the workforce of our staff team to each of our clients. Our three-tier management team is a dynamic, versatile multi-dimensional group working together to perform the intricate levels of management for the betterment of all of our clients. Our management team covers everything from executive functions and governance to site supervisors at the clinic level.
Our shared infrastructure consists of centralized reception, contracting, credentialing, surgery scheduling, medical billing/coding, medical administration, referral processing, and finance. This infrastructure is fully prepared to serve the needs of all of our independent medical practices, eliminating the redundancy and high cost of having employees perform these tasks in each of our client's practices. Our shared Medical Assistant staff are cross-trained to perform all medical assisting and administrative services in a wide variety of specialty, urgent care, and primary care practices.
We leverage what physicians do best, while fostering improvements that help independent medical practices stay competitive in a changing market. We believe that innovation and a commitment to high quality cost effective care contribute to the overall satisfaction of our clients and their patients.
Our in depth practice consulting experience and our past and current efforts in the development and management of independent practices makes Sierra Management Group, Inc. uniquely qualified as a Medical Services Organization. We are able to offer clients a comprehensive selection of medical business services. Each of our below listed services are available as part of our full MSO services or as a standalone service.
Sierra Management Group provides an organized, user-friendly management system designed to ensure that our clients are being paid the correct amount, and that all the relevant data is available when it is time to renegotiate. We evaluate current contracts, leverage negotiation opportunities, and suggest elimination of those contracts that are not contributing the the success of our clients' practices.
• Implementation of Contracts Management System
• Shared Risk Programs
• Facility Contracting
• Managed Care Contracting
• Contract Evaluations
• Contract Negotiations
Our in-house billing and coding services differentiate us from other MSOs. Our team knows our clinical and operational processes; interacting consistently with not only our rotating MA and administrative staff but also our management team. Integrating operationally allows for us to make operational changes and have intervention strategies that will keep our claims clean - increasing our productivity and our profitability. We are able to react to incoming billing data from a quality, production, and regulatory perspective. It's for this reason that so many physicians desire in-house billing because the information gathered from a controlled billing environment is crucial to the survival and success of their practice.
Our billing and coding services will increase the efficiency of claim processing thereby maximizing reimbursements and increasing cash flow. We are dedicated to clean claim dropping and follow up, ensuring timely filing and improved adjustment rates. Our Billing department staff is a professional and dynamic team with extensive medical billing experience in over a dozen specialties.
Our comprehensive coding services are available as part of our full medical billing services or as a standalone service. We offer a seamless integration with your billing system to ensure the highest degree of integrity. Our primary focus is in maximizing your reimbursements, which we do by providing the most accurate and ethical coding services available.
Our Billing and Coding Services include:
• Compliant, accurate, and timely filing for optimal reimbursement
• AAPC certified coders
• Specialty–specific coders dedicated to your account
• Temporary help or Long-term partnerships
• A comprehensive process that is tailored to each client’s needs
• Inpatient/Outpatient professional coding
• ICD-10 Training and Implementation
In response to national efforts to improve quality of care, policymakers and health care leaders have increasingly turned to quality improvement collaboratives as an efficient approach to improving provider practices and patient outcomes through the dissemination of evidence-based practices. With the shift to value-based care, a number of new payment modalities have emerged with an increased emphasis on quality. We achieve our client’s goals by analyzing quality data, implementing necessary audits based on our operational processes, and creating a strategy to improve performance thereby maximizing incentive payments.
Payment Modalities:
• Shared Savings
• Bundled Payments
• Capitation
• Capitation with Carve-Outs
• Partial Capitation
• Fee For Service
• Reduced Fee For Service
Pay for Performance Programs:
• HMO/IPA Shared Risk Programs
• HEDIS
• MIPS
By reducing denials, streamlining the administrative process, and collecting every dollar possible, we increase revenue and cash flow for our clients. Our team of experts implement our analytics-based approach to measure each phase of the revenue cycle. Based on our findings, we implement corrective actions to reduce the time it takes to get paid. Our method has reduced the average DAR for our clients by over 30 days.
Our RCM services include:
• Billing & Coding
• Denial Management & Appeals
• Reporting & Analytics
• Patient Calls & Statements
• Auditing
• Payment Posting
• Claims Processing & Follow up
• Credentialing
• Patient Collections
I created this MSO to help physicians retain their autonomy of practice and protect the art of medicine in the new age of healthcare reform. I was raised in an independent group family practice. The talks around the dinner table ranged from the coming of de-capitation to P4P. My close proximity to the collaboration and coordination that is at the core of independent medicine has allowed me a unique perspective as to what it means to fully care for a patient.
I firmly believe that we are better off as individual patients when we have a healthy, thriving community of independent, physician owned practices. These are trying times financially, operationally, and politically. Running a medical practice requires sound business-decision making and an understanding of what the future has in store. In the last ten years, I have been able to aid many individuals searching for solutions to market and financial forces, while offering them a true understanding of the process.
Each of the physician-owned medical practices that we manage operate independently. Our physicians can be entrepreneurial and make their own decisions while sharing in the infrastructure and access to the economies of scale of large groups. They’re not forced to compromise their independence or decision-making.
Medicine is an art. The longer you are in medicine, and the deeper you delve, you find that the best physicians rule with their gut instincts; instincts that take a career of experience to be able to develop. In building this MSO, I set out to preserve the autonomy to act on those instincts by keeping independent physicians in business. Our services are for those physicians who value the ability to make their own decisions about what’s best for their patients and their practice.
Our mission is to support and maintain the independence and autonomy of the independent physician. We believe that medicine is an art. To practice great medicine, physicians must have the autonomy to make decisions based on their training, experience, and instincts.
Physicians who want to help people live longer, healthier lives and value the ability to make their own decisions are the type of client it is our mission to serve. We firmly believe that we are better off as individual patients when we have a healthy, thriving community of independent, physician owned practices. We believe that strong, instinctual-minded independent physicians are best-suited to deliver high-quality, cost effective care that aligns with what we need as a society.
Our objective is to deliver the support that independent practitioners need so they can focus their energy on patient care. Independent physicians need to be able to keep control of their medical decision-making and use their clinical judgement as they were trained to apply.
Sierra Management Group, Inc. has almost a decade of experience operating multi-specialty medical practices. We have a team of executive level administrators and revenue cycle managers with the expertise to help your practice optimize its operational, financial and strategic performance. Our consulting team uses every available resource to evaluate, consult, and design a solution for every client who believes that we can help.
We specialize in:
• Practice Startup & Recovery
• Strategic and Scenario Planning
• Cash Flow Management Reporting
• Expense Management & Allocation
• Workflow Analysis & Redesign
• Business/Operations Plan Creation
• Regulatory Compliance
• Integration Models
The average lifespan of a medical administrator in their position is two years. Most of the administrators in small practices are asked to be IT, management, team leader, human resources, the AP person, the quality assurance person and more. They are forced to wear every hat because that’s what’s expected of them. No one leader is good at everything. It’s no surprise that medical administrators don’t typically last very long.
At Sierra Management Group, we’ve created a team of directors with the necessary bandwidth to focus on the excellence of our product and have a “service of leadership”. We’ve banded together leaders that are very clinically strong, like Bre Howard, leaders who are very revenue cycle management strong, like Melissa Mayfield, leaders who are very project management strong, like Liz Scriven, and leaders who are very governance and strategic planning strong, like Ian Boeye, to create a dynamic team. When we work together as a group, we compliment one another’s skill sets and work together to govern across multiple practices. We work within our lanes for each of the practices to avoid the wearing of many "hats" so that we can focus on excellence.
The second tier of leadership within SMG is our management team that has been fostered from within our staff. We believe that to manage is a supportive function. A manager is a supportive person that functions in service to the staff that they manage. Our management team’s sole function is to make sure everyone on staff has the tools they need to be successful. In team-based management we operate collaboratively and collegially to solve problems as a group. We aim to make sure we bear the right solution and resource for our staff.
The average lifespan of a medical administrator in their position is two years. Most of the administrators in small practices are asked to be IT, management, team leader, human resources, the AP person, the quality assurance person and more. They are forced to wear every hat because that’s what’s expected of them. No one leader is good at everything. It’s no surprise that medical administrators don’t typically last very long.
At Sierra Management Group, we’ve created a team of directors with the necessary bandwidth to focus on the excellence of our product and have a “service of leadership”. We’ve banded together leaders that are very clinically strong, like Bre Howard, leaders who are very revenue cycle management strong, like Melissa Mayfield, leaders who are very reception and quality strong, like Nicholette Dinardo, and leaders who are very governance and strategic planning strong, like Ian Boeye, to create a dynamic team. When we work together as a group, we compliment one another’s skill sets and work together to govern across multiple practices. We work within our lanes for each of the practices to avoid the wearing of many "hats" so that we can focus on excellence.
The second tier of leadership within SMG is our management team that has been fostered from within our staff. We believe that to manage is a supportive function. A manager is a supportive person that functions in service to the staff that they manage. Our management team’s sole function is to make sure everyone on staff has the tools they need to be successful. In team-based management we operate collaboratively and collegially to solve problems as a group. We aim to make sure we bear the right solution and resource for our staff.
We are not a staffing company. We are a shared staff. We stand by the saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, made famous by Mark Fields. We believe that any leader that is tenured in what they do knows that is true. If you want change within your organization, you’ve got to start with your culture. Your team has to be able to bear, accept, and drive the change you want to implement. What we’ve done at Sierra Management Group, Inc, is create a culture that can be shared amongst our clients. We spend a lot of time and resources fostering a positive culture of the love for medicine and a shared value-system.
At the start of Sierra Management Group, Inc. it occurred to us that if we link together groups of independent practices who can share resources, the groups as a whole could share in that cost and therefore share in those resources. We created that economy of scale with the management group. Soon after, staffing became a really important economy of scale for our specialty clients because they don’t need staff on site every day. We want our offices to be open every day to answer patient phone calls and help with patient issues. We’ve accomplished this by centralizing a call center staffed by the medical assistants that are working in the practices. Our MA’s have relationships with the patients and know their physicians. We keep our call center integrated with our clinic by rotating people through both systems. For a surgery office, the MA who may have been your medical assistant yesterday in clinic is answering the phone today talking to you about your post-op concerns and scheduling your next appointment. Now you have all of these offices that can operate independently. We give physicians the ability to share in the infrastructure and have the economies of scale of large groups while also owning their own companies, being entrepreneurial, and making their own decisions. Our physicians are not forced to give anything up or compromise their independence.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
