فصل 36

Section VI

The Forces of Natural Growth

36

The Foundations of a Successful Business

The launch of The Medical Manager at the Las Vegas trade show was a sight to behold. I flew out to see Systems Plus at work and to meet the company’s people. I had never been to anything like that show in my life. Remember, I had been living in the woods for years. At Systems Plus’s booth, THE MEDICAL MANAGER banners were plastered all over the place. It’s one thing to see your kid grow up for eighteen years and then watch her honored at her high school graduation. It’s quite another thing when your kid was just born a few months ago and was now center stage of a very professional production at a show the size of COMDEX. Systems Plus had one of the larger booths at the show, and everyone did a wonderful job presenting the product. The market was ripe for medical billing software, and there was tremendous interest at the booth. I marveled at seeing all the Systems Plus salespeople demonstrate the product. The Medical Manager had no warm-up period. It went from the quiet woods of Alachua to the big-time lights of Vegas without a single step in between.

There was no time to rest on our laurels. Systems Plus immediately started signing up dealers and selling the product. What followed was an avalanche of requests for new product features and customizations. Every specialty wanted something specific, and the staff of almost every practice wanted the program to do things exactly as they were used to doing them on paper. On top of all this, within a month or two of launch, Systems Plus informed me that in addition to the wonderful billing system we had written, the dealers would need appointment scheduling and other practice management features in order to continue successfully selling the product.

How were we going to do all this? None of us had any formal training or experience in medical software design. We had to figure it all out for ourselves—and we did. If you asked me how, I would tell you that my experience with meditation had shown me that there were two very distinct aspects of what we call mind. There was the logical, thought-driven mind that links together what we already know into complex patterns of thought in order to come up with logical solutions. Then there was the intuitive, inspiration-driven mind that can look at a problem and instantly see a creative solution. As it turned out, the years of spiritual work I had done to quiet that voice in my head had opened the door for almost constant inspiration. It seemed that the quieter the mind, the more that solutions became self-evident. This was also true for Barb. Somehow she had the ability to almost instantly tune in to the same creative solutions I had seen and then help me work out the logic. That is how The Medical Manager was designed, and it is a tribute to this process that we led the industry for many years. Our ability to rapidly design software became legendary.

In the meantime, the interest in the product was so phenomenal that we could hardly keep up. It seemed like we were being pushed to our limits in every direction. Take the example of our dealer training seminars. We held our first annual Medical Manager dealer seminar in a small guest suite at the Gainesville Hilton in spring 1983. That one room was plenty large to hold the fifteen or twenty people in attendance. Just a few years later, we were renting the entire Gainesville Hilton Hotel, including all of its two hundred rooms, conference facilities, and dining rooms. By the early 1990s, we had outgrown the Gainesville Hilton and the guest rooms of all the surrounding hotels. To find a hotel big enough to accommodate us, we had to move the dealer seminar down to Orlando.

The spiritual growth that came from keeping up with Personalized Programming was very deep. The diversity of tasks that now made up my daily life ranged from running the Temple and giving spiritual talks three times a week, to lecturing hundreds of dealer personnel on medical practice management. Despite all these outer changes, I did not become a traditional businessman. I remained a person whose spiritual path was surrendering to the flow of life and putting his entire heart and soul into what life was giving him to do. My twice-daily meditation sessions certainly helped to keep it all in perspective.

The year 1985 would turn out to be a landmark year. In only two years, Systems Plus had signed up more than a hundred dealers, and we were averaging more than a hundred and fifty new Medical Manager installations every month. Our template design for insurance billing became a huge success, and we were able to do billing to pretty much all insurance companies across the country. But before I could catch my breath, the industry was about to go through a tremendous transformation. As more and more practices computerized, it suddenly became possible to replace paper billing with electronic billing. The advantages would prove to be so enormous that an industrywide push was about to take place. As successful as we had been with our paper billing, we had no choice but to surrender to the fact that the entire health-care industry was being pushed into the age of computer-to-computer communications. Unfortunately, that was a topic we knew nothing about. The story of how we ended up leading the industry in that area is just another tribute to the perfection of life’s flow.

I remember our first design meeting for electronic claims. We realized immediately that the optimal solution would be to use templates, as we had done for paper billing. But doing this for electronic claims was way beyond the capabilities of our existing template design. As far as we knew, nobody had even attempted such a solution before. The general attitude of my programming team was that it probably could not be done, and they wouldn’t even know where to begin since all the different insurance companies could require very different electronic claim files.

Nonetheless, I didn’t want to give up. That very same week, another one of life’s miracles took place. On Sunday after services, a man introduced himself to me as a former resident at Amrit’s yoga community. He wanted to know if I might have some work for him if he settled in the area. His name was Larry Horwitz, and I vaguely remembered that some people at Amrit’s had told me how bright he was. I assessed his background and talents, and it dawned on me that, once again, life may have sent us the perfect person to tackle the problem at hand. Though Larry had absolutely no background in insurance billing, he got really interested in our innovative approach to electronic claims. I decided I might as well give him a try. After only a broad overview of the project, I left him pretty much on his own to see what he could come up with.

By himself, Larry studied every one of the 250 specification books from the nation’s insurance companies and mapped out exactly what we would need in order to use templates to handle the entire country with one program. We implemented these changes, and The Medical Manager now had an electronic billing program with designed technology that far surpassed others in the industry. The response was phenomenal. Larry became so busy creating the templates that we had to build an entire department around him. The insurance companies ended up changing their specifications on a regular basis, and twenty-five years later, Larry Horwitz was still in charge of electronic claims for the company. How does such a person just show up by himself exactly when needed?

The Medical Manager led the industry in electronic claims. Our ability to submit claims directly to the Blue Cross Blue Shield and Medicare insurers nationwide drove the success of the product. By 1987 we were the first practice management system in the country that was able to submit claims electronically in all fifty states. In 2000, The Medical Manager was recognized for its accomplishments in computerizing the medical industry by being installed in the permanent archives of the Smithsonian Institution. The tremendous work we did in successfully converting tens of thousands of practices to electronic transactions has been preserved for generations to come. I saw all this as just another one of life’s miracles.