Meta Technologies, a health care payment technologies and software company based in Valhalla, along with subsidiary MediPay Compliance Consultants, launched its new Myriad Health electronic health record and medical billing software ”” its flagship product ”” this past month.
While Myriad is new to the market, and Meta ”” no relation to the similarly named conglomerate formerly known as Facebook ”” has only been around the past couple years, its work builds on years of experience in the health care payment industry, where founder and president Jeremy Shiner began building his experience from a young age. His father, Frank Shiner, was the founder of Retriever Medical Dental Payments, known now as Rectangle Health, also headquartered nearby in Valhalla and which Meta Technologies still works with as a partner.
“I’ve had a lot of experience just from growing up around the industry,” Shiner said. “I was blessed to have my father to look up to as a mentor, and he’s been retired for years now from the business, but I still consult him as a mentor. He always did things the right way, always took care of his clients and his employees, so I was able to benefit from watching that.”
Shiner said his father never had plans to be in the business. He had been focusing on being an actor and was working on the side at a payment processing company, and eventually became the top sales representative. After that, a partner at the company approached him to ask if he wanted to run it. He noticed that doctors’ offices had unique payment needs, and began offering the health care provider specific services that became Retriever.
Shiner joined the team at Retriever after college, working on its sales team for four years and working with over 1,000 clients, and gained a spot on the company”™s advisory board.
He then launched his own venture, continuing similar work with Meta and MediPay. While offering these services, Shiner and his team noticed the rising costs of overhead for private-practice health care providers, from malpractice lawsuits and insurance to rising costs of medical school and office space rent or prices.
“What”™s ending up happening is that’s why we see a lot of these private practices selling to huge conglomerates and hospital networks,” Shiner said. “I think they do a good job and I have nothing against them, but in my personal opinion, you know, being around health care my whole life, I really valued that patient-doctor relationship and that solidarity that they have in a private practice, where the doctor has a direct responsibility to the patient and they have a relationship and they choose which medications that they use based on efficacy, which medical equipment, which surgical equipment and the list goes on and on.
“When you get corporate medicine that goes away. Health care gets made more so with the bottom line in mind, rather than necessarily (based on) health care and doctors become employees on a salary. It definitely caps what they can earn, which in turn means that in the next five to 10 years, we’ll see less of our brightest and best becoming doctors, which is not good for the patients. And of course, I don’t believe it’s good for the doctors, or good for health care as a whole. And we have enough problems with health care and with what’s going on.”
Shiner said Meta Technolgies and MediPay”™s goal is to help reduce overhead and startup costs for doctors with integrated payment processing.
Now, the company”™s electronic health record and billing software, Myriad Health, is doing just that, making in-office processes more efficient and ensuring payment at the time of treatment. Shiner said its development was informed by input from providers compiled over the past five years on their levels of satisfaction with their current vendors and the needs that still remained.
According to Shiner, many doctor and health care provider offices said they were forced to choose from records and management software options that include so many integrations that providers have to sign up with multiple vendors, not to mention the high cost of these services. Myriad Health, whereas, is completely free to the providers who use it, as long as they use Meta Technologies”™ payment processing services. The average range of a profit margin for most companies that offer this type of software can be between 1500% and 2000%, Shiner said. Meta”™s profit margin on Myriad is 2%.
“We want to come in and we want to deliver a superior product for less,” he said. “And that’s important, because a lot of people hear free and they think it’s a gimmick, or it’s not very good, or that it will be monetized later. But no, it’s going to be very transparent. What you pay is a portion of that credit card volume, because that’s our background. No current client will ever be put under a subscription or asked to change. We have absolutely no plans to do that. And it’s in the agreement that we won’t do that. You can put it head to head with anything out there and it will compete with, if not beat them.”
Along with the price advantage, Myriad is a user-friendly, all-in-one product, including billing and full health records, along with a complete patient check-in software. There are no varied levels of pricing for extra services, doctors can use it to text patients an unlimited number of times, and there are no extra costs for unlimited e-prescriptions, insurance payments and insurance approvals through it. A unique feature is the addition of a payment plan advice calculator, which runs a soft credit check based on specific parameters for patients who may benefit from a staggered payment option. Meta also has the capacity to offer complete customization to any health care practice upon installation, with unlimited tech support and customer service.
For now, Meta is working on testing and preparing Myriad for a soft rollout around March, with a specialized dental version planned for an early summer release, offering the product to new and existing clients both here in Westchester and nationwide. Meta Technologies itself is in the midst of expanding, with plans to double its space in April and then double it again six months after that.
