2315 - Turning Healthcare Challenges into Opportunities with Parable Associates' Jason Bryll

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0:58With us right now, it's Jason Brill. Jason, you are the founder and CEO of Parable Associates. You are found on the web at parableassociates.com. Jason, it's great to have you. Yeah, happy to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. For sure. So, hey, before we get into your superpower, the work that you do with your clients, what have you been doing for, what do you do for fun lately outside of work? Or what are you into? Yeah, so I'm a typical Midwest guy. So I got my tiger's hat on. We're, you know, in the playoff hunt right now. So avid into watching the Tigers, watching the Detroit Lions, rough weekend, but overall big sports fanatic.

1:40I was, I got a football behind me too, if you're seeing on video. I was a equipment manager at Michigan State University when I was there. So very much into the sports thing. Oh my gosh. The best time of year. So what does an equipment manager do? yeah so um i i worked with the defensive line it's more than equipment manager we also help facilitate practice so getting the balls ready moving stuff around moving dummies and pads all over um and there's a lot of stuff you do on game day as well on the sidelines so i've been to most of the big 10 stadiums um yeah it's and on the field it's it's it's it's a pretty cool experience overall did did any of the players that you worked with did they go pro absolutely so i a bunch so i I mean, I, I, well, most recently right now, Jason, it's because of you.

2:26That's yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, I, uh, I was there in a hot moment where we had, um, we, we just graduated Jeff Smoker at quarterback, but then we had, uh, Brian Hoyer, Drew Stanton, um, Kirk cousins and Nick Foles all were there while I was there at, at Michigan state. So we had a quarterback room. Nice. Nice. Well, Jason, let's talk about parable. Uh, and, uh, where are you based in Michigan? So I'm based out of Three Rivers, Michigan. It's just south of Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan. Yep. Nice, nice. Well, my folks are, I'm originally from the Kalamazoo area. So I just wanted to point that I knew the answer.

3:04So, yeah. All right. So, Jason, share with us a little bit about what Parable does. Yeah. So what Parable does is we really provide data team services for large health care practices. And so if you are a large business, ideally in health care from my own background, But if you're a large business and you're looking to build out data pipelines to build a data warehouse, lake house, your business intelligence solution, and now some of the new AI features that are coming out with different AI solutions, we're the team to help you get there. So we're not a SaaS company. We're going to help build everything on your own tenant, right?

3:37So you can focus on operations. You can focus on your own HR team, your own marketing team, and those types of things. But let us handle the data components for you. Yeah. Okay. Well, why? Yeah. So, well, first of all, healthcare is incredibly complex. And so we, I started out in healthcare. I mean, my background, I was a finance major at Michigan state and I landed into a healthcare world and my eyes were just like, boom, wide open at how challenging it is for providers to get paid. And so we call it the revenue cycle. But if you think about it, it's a really weird payment system, this three-party system where a patient goes to receive services from a certain healthcare provider.

4:15Then the claim goes to Blue Cross Blue Shield. they make a payment and then the patient still owes a responsibility. And what happens is you have massive amounts of data that are being accrued specifically in that rev cycle part, but you also have clinical documentation, you have standard diagnosis codes, and then you have operational items. It is one of the most complex industries to be a part of when it comes to data. And providers are not really taught this when they're going through school. They're so focused on clinical, which they should be. So, and these are some of the smartest people that we have in this country.

4:51These, these, these, these doctors are just brilliant people, but there's this gap. And so the way that I see my service is how can I help them grow and expand their footprint? How can they treat more patients or provide better care to the patients they currently serve? And so that's where I just see this gap of, we can really fit in there. We can help them accelerate and build out these analytic solutions and help them accelerate cash flow. We see a lot of that, actually. We see a lot of people going from, we call it DSO or day sales outstanding, the average turnaround to get paid on a service.

5:23Oh, yeah. We see it go from 40 to 30 days, right? And that 10 days, that's very meaningful to a business. And essentially, these practices are typically all small businesses. uh so a lot of times then i i would imagine you know there's the complicated uh working with insurances and stuff as well i would imagine that yeah yeah so so so we what we the line that we draw we are not the rcm rcm revenue cycle management we're not the claims management service company but we work so tightly hand in hand most practices do have a third party some use in-house team members to follow up on blue cross claims and so on but if you want to monitor performance if you want to see why did blue cross deny payment you hear all over the media like public media right now not just the health care industry this claim wasn't paid and it's very confusing so that's the data that we're working with to identify should you have been paid correctly and then hand it off to the right people to actually proceed with with getting that payment or that reimbursement.

6:26But we also do operational items as well. So yes, that claims processing, incredibly challenging to navigate. Very frustrating on the provider side, because you're thinking I provided these services I did right by the patient. Why am I not getting paid timely or accurately? And so we provide the insights to see, well, when was the last time that claim was worked? Did it get lost in the submission process? There's all sorts of areas that are bottlenecks or black holes where this claim can get unprocessed. And so we help pull those forward, bring them to the top, and ensure that the practice is as financially successful as they possibly can be.

7:05Well, I would imagine that you've been seeing some trends. And I'm curious, here we are in the second half of 2025. What trends have you been seeing this year? I know that there's a lot of consumer concern. You know, I've been on kind of the consumer finance and consumer stuff for a little bit. And there's a lot of frustration out there, a lot of, you know, concern. And I'm sure that that then drips into folks that are serving consumers on the health care side of things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so I would say from the practice side, here's what we saw a couple of years ago that I think was just generally an interesting situation.

7:48I started Parable in 2018. And from 2018, all the way through, I mean, honestly, COVID was a bit of a blip, but not much in terms of the investment into the healthcare industry. And we saw low interest rates. And so we saw a lot of growth and expansion of the footprint of these healthcare practices of adding new brick and mortar. We've recently seen a slowdown. And the feedback that I'm getting is it's mostly related to some of the interest rates and just risk in the industry right now. But, you know, I would say what I'm seeing is kind of an optimization of that patient experience right now. So ultimately, if you're not growing and expanding outward, it's how do we grow and expand and support things inward.

8:32So I think it's a good story right now for the patient experience and the patient journey. And we also see a lot of AI tools and solutions that are being deployed. So making scheduling easier, making, you know, obviously employee management, staffing management, much easier and simpler, making consistency in the care being delivered, you know, improved. So there's a lot of things going on right now. And the data side, we see a lot of interest in the agentic tools right now. And so if you're running a business or whether you're healthcare or not, we deploy tools like there's common ones out there.

9:09We use Microsoft Fabric quite a bit, but there's, you might've heard of Databricks or Snowflake or all these other platforms. What they're doing right now and what we're helping clients deploy is once you connect that data in, now you can ask free text questions with your information. So who was my top producing provider? Well, what were the top insurance companies they serviced with those, the patient mix they had? What was the patient mix they had, gender, age, et cetera? Those types of diagnosis codes, missing charges. We see a lot of things in that side too, where it's like, hey, we had a COVID diagnosis, but we didn't have a COVID lab.

9:47And so we can identify those missing charges with the data and using these AI agents and also creating alerts and warnings. But these are tools that are very accessible. And we're the service company that implements them. So we are testing everything in the market right now and seeing what's, you know, the best in breed. But that's what we see a lot. And I think any business can benefit from starting to look at these tools and solutions. Jason, what types of clients or what size clients are you typically working with? Are you working with multi-location offices or give me the gamut on who you serve?

10:22Yeah. So our niche, we are in the, I say, 20 to 200 providers. We actually have, when I say providers, I mean clinical staff members. So there's a multiple on top of that of administrative. But typically, these are multi-location. I would say probably more than half, maybe 60-40, 60 % being private equity-backed organizations and brands and logos that we work with. I will tell you that that's a product of, you know, if they pull the data lever, the value is there to offset like the ROI opportunity is there and they're willing to move quickly. The tools that I had mentioned, they're actually accessible below that mark.

11:06So don't think like as we talk through this, that's my target market because we're a service company. But if you want to try these things internally, I think it's a good opportunity right now to start looking at data solutions for your practice and connect to your CRM and connect to, in healthcare, your practice management software and your clinical software. These are things that, you know, the door is now open more than it's ever been. It's more accessible than it's ever been. But, yeah, so we work with larger organizations. We provide teams that include data engineering, architecture, BI development, and business analysts.

11:39we have anywhere from one fractional employee working with an account all the way to a team of like five people working in an account so we have quite the gamut in between but usually it's larger organization large organizations are doing this so for those that are like thinking i want to operate like the big like the big players this is what they're doing they are building a data warehouse or lake house they're building bi on top of it they're using ai to generate those insights and they're using alerts and monitoring. So if a key performance indicator or KPI goes out of their threshold, they're alerted.

12:14They're alerted in Teams or Slack or whatever their mechanism is. They're alerted by email. So these are things that they're deploying right now. Well, Jason, it sounds as though you likely have a solution that is probably gonna be a positive ROI solution for most of your clients. I'm sure you see that. Absolutely. And it's a hard thing to sell because you don't always know where it's going to come from. Right. So like what we don't have today, mind you, what we don't have today is a point solution where it's like we solve this one problem. What we solve is the one problem is we help you aggregate all this information from your HRIS system, your practice management system, your CRM, et cetera.

12:58We help you aggregate all this data and then turn it into something meaningful. What we do is we help you find what that bottleneck is that's holding you back from the next level. And then you have the data to monitor it ongoing, whatever the solution is that you deploy, and then continually find the next opportunity that's going to be your next breakthrough. Right. So we help do that. But, yeah, we see things from cost reduction strategies. We see a lot of cash acceleration, like I had mentioned in the revenue cycle and the claims processing, employee satisfaction. One of the things that I just to think about as a business leader is if you give your team members, hopefully they're all superheroes already, right?

13:41But if you give them these tools like great reporting and analytics that they're a part of building out and they have their own customizations in it, if you give them these solutions, that's like giving Batman a utility belt. like he's just going to be even better she's just going to be even better at their job so that's the way that i look at it is we really help those superheroes get even incrementally better we give them the tools to be more successful i like that your website parable associates.com to our friend that's listening uh i know you have both resources and obviously uh opportunities to connect with you but uh where does our friend who's been listening to this conversation where do they go from here yeah so the the best way to get ahold me personally, I answer everything on LinkedIn personally.

14:23So if you find Jason Brill, B-R-Y-L-L on LinkedIn, I'm happy to address anything there. If you're interested in getting a quote or learning more about analytics for your business, please go to our website, parableassociates.com. There's a submission form on there. And then we'll get back to you very quickly on that. Nice. All right. Jason Brill, again, founder, CEO of Parable Associates, found on the web at parableassociates.com. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for your time.

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