Honesty, integrity, and ethics are the three guiding principles that drive Jose Carreras to excel professionally and personally. As the COO and vice president of ProMD Practice Management, Carreras has always been aggressively motivated to lead and succeed.
Under his guidance, Carreras has helped his South Florida practice management company develop a niche in improving a medical practices operations. His firm distinguishes itself from other billing companies by examining an offices operations from a total management perspective as well as combining billings and collections with practice operations.
“We provide ala carte billing services for physicians using their own practice management system,” says Carreras, “as opposed to a billing company that makes you use their system. While this makes it more efficient for the billing company because theyre using the same system for all clients, we dont believe that its the best for the doctor because that doctor doesnt own his data.”
Usually a doctor has two choices: to do billings and collections internally to maintain control or outsource the work and lose control of the data. ProMD provides the best of both of these worlds because physicians can still outsource billings and collections to a company which has this expertise without giving away control.
“Were going to do it using that doctors practice management system,” says Carreras, “by tapping in remotely through the Internet into that doctors system. At anytime that doctor can audit us. If at any point, theyre not happy with us, the data remains in their system. So every month we really have to prove our worth to every doctor to whom we provide a service to because we can easily be terminated. With a regular billing company, it would hurt the day-to-day operations if he or she had to change it.”
By providing billing and collection services with an operations perspective, ProMD is not just collecting data; it is also identifying trends and looking at maximizing the performance from an operations standpoint.
“We provide practice assessments where we perform an operational assessment of an existing practice to identify strengths and opportunities,” says Carreras. “If the physician is not satisfied with our findings and recommendations, we do not charge for the assessment.”
ProMD uses benchmarks to evaluate a Practices performance established by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).
“We want to ensure that we meet and surpass the industrys benchmarks in billings and collections,” says Carreras. “As of today, our collection rates are over 90% in 6 months and over 95% in over 9 months. Both surpass the industry standards.”
Those who know Carreras shouldnt be surprised by his firms success. Success follows him wherever he goes. In fact, in 2006, he was nominated and selected Best Practice Administrator by the readers of the
Florida Medical Business Journal.
Carreras attributes his values, drive, and determination to his professional background and education. He has been involved in the healthcare industry since 1982. He started out at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he remained for 11 years. During his tenure there, he earned his bachelors degree and then a masters in healthcare administration, where he was on the national deans list throughout the program.
“My masters degree, combined with my hands-on management experience, has made me the type of manager which I am today,” says Carreras. “I try to instill in my managers the same management techniques I learned to create a culture in the company that looks after our employees and makes them feel that they have ownership of the products and services that we provide.”
During his second phase of his career, Carreras helped manage medical centers. Later he went to work for United Healthcare in its Sunrise office as its director of operations overseeing its claims resolution unit, the provider appeal unit, and risk arrangements. Carreras then went to work for the private sector as a practice administrator for South Florida Prenatal Medicine for six years before ProMD was spun off from this organization.
“We pulled out the management component of the medical practice and created a management company which was ProMD,” says Carreras.
Ask Carreras about his career influences, and he quickly credits ProMDs founder, Dr. Jorge Gomez.
“His vision inspires me to grow as a professional and to grow ProMD because he was the visionary of ProMD,” says Carreras. “We are where we are today because of his vision of providing an innovative, proficient and focused company that has the best interest of maximizing the physicians practice performance and profitability.”
