Access Healthcare earmarks 5-10 million USD for acquisitions, ramps up manpower

The company added about eight new high-value customers in the last six months and is also mulling on tapping voice work opportunities especially in Coimbatore, where it has received an encouraging response. 

The Dallas-based specialised BPO firm has been strengthening its robotic process automation (RPA) tools to service the healthcare stakeholders comprising service providers and insurance companies (payers) even as its hiring plans for Chennai, Pune and Coimbatore is gaining momentum. Access Healthcare is looking to ramp up its headcount from the current 8,000-plus staff to about 10,000 employees by the year end. 

“The key processes where we are ramping up include medical coding, clinical and non-clinical documentation services, accounts receivables call centre services,” says Vardhman Jain, VC, Access Healthcare. He adds that the company, which is looking at crossing $100 to 150 million by December, had made significant investments in developing its automation platform which would be launched within a couple of months. 

“The platform, the first-of-itskind in the industry, leverages market leading technologies for RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and industry specific frameworks such as medical language dictionaries. We have already implemented these in the organisation and found the process automation technologies have been successful in automating close to 600 FTEs equivalent of work,” Jain elaborates. 

Beefing up the leadership team with the addition of Amitabh Vartak as the COO for offshore operations, and Payer Industry veteran Jim Carlough as the SVP for North America Operations are some of its implementations on the hiring front. 

“Several new leaders have been onboarded in operations, HR, automation, and IT services at senior levels,” Jain says, and points to recognitions that include being featured as leader in Everest Group’s Peak Matrix as a leader in the healthcare provider BPO space and making it to the coveted lists such as SMU COX Dallas 100, and Dallas Middle Market 50 lists. 

The company’s acquisition strategy is to invest in the range of $5-10 million, he says, and adds several inorganic strategies are being pursued.  

“We are preparing for growth in our RCM BPO services and have augmented our leadership team proactively. Also, we see a lot of horizontal areas of healthcare competencies namely in clinicals, coding, call centre, and revenue cycle data processing services – and so, our organisational design has moved to a horizontal and vertical structure. We see a lot of potential to apply our automation platform to create value for our customers and are focused on creating go to market solutions around that,” he notes. 

Access Healthcare supports over 1.5 lakh physicians, serves 80+ specialties, processes over $50 bn of A/R (accounts receivables) annually, and ascribes medical codes to over 10 mn charts annually.