Success Magazine: Tom, you and your partner Matthew Gough began AdvantechHealth last year. What was your goal for this new venture?

Tom Guzek: Our goal was very simple. We both recognized that the small physician practices were struggling financially primarily due to the lack of technology deployed in their offices. In 2009, federal stimulus funds became available to independent physicians as an incentive to deploy technology to maintain their patient health records. Our question was: "How was spending billions of dollars on an EHR program in a practice going to help reduce costs while improving the delivery of health care?" We spent months researching this question - intently studying the operations, practices, and costs of small physician practices. After considerable review, we determined that the incentive plan was nothing more than another federal spending program that was aimed in the wrong direction. However, we also found that an opportunity existed for creative thinking and a novel approach to getting physicians to adopt simple technology advancements to gain productivity and reduce cost. We started AdvantechHealth to bring our significant business process experience and the successful use of technology that we applied in our previous business ventures to the small independent physician practice.

SM: What is the AdvantechHealth Physicians' Alliance?

TG: The Advantech Health Physician Alliance (AHPA) is an alliance of independent physicians who have joined together to utilize innovative health information technology to extricate cost savings out of their practices.

SM: How can AdvantechHealth improve practice business operations while reducing costs for physicians?

TG: The alliance is primarily aimed at small physician practices (1-5 physicians) in all medical disciplines. These practices typically have the highest operating costs due to their inability to negotiate lower prices for practice management functions such as operation software, revenue collection, transcription services, and credentialing. By joining the alliance, these practices are able to utilize the strength of the membership scale to reduce costs of common product and service purchases. The alliance has negotiated significant and progressive ongoing cost reductions with suppliers of practice management software, electronic health care records management, revenue cycle management and other services which can offer savings of thousands of dollars annually to the average practice. As membership grows, the suppliers have agreed to offer additional rebates that are channeled back to our physician members on an annual basis.

SM: What is your five-year plan for AdvantechHealth?

TG: We would love to be the supplier of our Physician Business Suite to a large number of the independent physician practices throughout the Capital District and upstate New York. We are currently deploying the ADVANTAGE AEX Health Information Network which allows all of our members interoperability with any ambulatory or acute care facility as well as labs, testing facilities, and any other member or non-member physician. It is the most innovative network being deployed in the small physician market. We believe that this network will offer our members significant new revenue opportunities through online consulting as well as online patient care. We want to improve our physician membersí revenues by 20% to 30% over the next five years.

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