Maria Todd has been helping physicians, health facilities and ancillary providers to win better- paying, lower-hassle managed care contracts with insurances companies, HMOs, PPOs, employers, and TPAs since 1983.

How she can help you

• Do-it-for-you contracting and negotiation: Maria brings the skills, tactics, and strategies needed to get you better paying contracts. For some clients, she’s hired to “handle it” from requesting new contracts through final execution and implementation. She charges an hourly fee for this service billed in 6-minute increments.

• Prices, bundled case rates for surgery and diagnostic testing and price transparency. Come January 2020, hospitals must comply with new Executive Orders that require you to post your fees and contracted rates with health plans for public access and review. Will you be ready? Maria has assembled a rapid response team to help review all the contracts in your portfolio, tease out what needs to be published (and what doesn’t) and they can even build the web page with all the transparency information for you.

• Cash pay pricing for self-pay patients. In the USA, insurance contracts and the games played with delayed and allegedly “lost” claims, and all the extra added labor can amount to as much as 28% of revenue to collect your money.  Maria will help you design an end-to-end cash pay system for self-pay patients who agree to pay in full on the day of service. All she needs to get started is the project green light and a bit of cost data to get started. She can even arrange no-interest, non-recourse patient financing to help 97% of patients who apply the cash they need to take advantage of this option. And no, the managed care plans can’t demand you offer them these rates, or pay you less. This is a distinctly different “product” than what they buy.  If they want the program, the negotiation is on your paper and your terms and conditions, not theirs. Turnkey setup includes pricing formulas, contract templates, program manual, financing, and more.

• Add a domestic medical travel program. Patients shouldn’t have to leave the USA to find lower prices on the surgery or diagnostic testing services they want. But if they can’t find your program or it doesn’t yet exist, they may drive right past your front door as they head to the airport and pay 100% cash to a foreign healthcare provider at a price that may be higher than your price. They do this out of ignorance and because they didn’t know you had such an option available to them.  Maria is the world’s leading expert and the most prolific internationally-published author on medical travel program development for facilities and medical groups. 

• Add an inbound international patient program. Many international patients elect to come to the USA from other countries to seek out surgery and confirmation consultations from U.S. specialists and researchers. High-ranking military, government and other prominent citizens often travel to the USA with everything paid for by their government public health insurance program if the services, quality, knowledge, or technology are not present or no trusted in their region. The average case expenditure in these cases is often between $240,000 and $260,000 per episode of care. Want some? Maria shows you how to structure the program or she’ll build it for you and then introduce you to the contracting connection so if your product measures up. 

• Coaching and Training: If you prefer to learn how to do these things on your own, Maria Todd provides the coaching, Master Classes, and multi-day workshops or group/departmental training to help your team improve and manage contracting internally going forward and lean on her for help when you hit a “bump”.  
  

Maria Todd offers managed care contract analysis and negotiation training workshops in St George, Utah.

Call for details. (800) 727 4160.

• Training is conducted at her location or your location and charged on a flat fee basis per diem. Ongoing support is charged hourly in 6-minute increments. If she travels to your location, travel costs are included in her flat fee quote. If you travel to her location in St George, Utah, training venue costs and lunch for your group are included in the quote, but not air or hotel costs.  She will arrange an exclusive discount for hotel stays and shuttle transfers.

Self-study options

If you’ll read the articles she’s published on this website and on LinkedIn, and apply the contracting principles she writes about in her textbooks and blog articles, you can increase your reimbursement by about 10–15% in the first year and another 5–10% the second year. If you attend her Master Class workshops, you’ll learn even more about how to pivot, change, and revise your payer contracting strategies by incorporating brand messaging into your mindset, skill set, and tool set.  She welcomes all and encourages self study as much as possible so that you get more out of her training and advise when you call her.