In response to  the changing needs of hospitals, surgeons and Advanced Practice Providers, J. Toby Gray, CEO, announces the rebranding of Advancing Practitioners, the company he founded in 2014. He unveils the new name, AP Health, as the company makes significant investments in technology to improve internal efficiencies. As more hospitals look to outsource Advanced Practice Providers (APPs), AP Health realized the need to increase the scalability of its service offerings.

“Whether a hospital’s surgical program is mature or brand new, they generally have limited resources to manage it.” There is a lot that goes into managing a team of SFA’s: recruiting, training, scheduling, retaining and billing,” says Gray,“ and they’re not  equipped for it–that’s where we come in.” 

More hospitals throughout the country are coming to that realization, which has driven the company’s significant growth over the past six years. “AP Health understands the market for Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants, Certified Surgical Assistants, and Registered Nurse First Assistants; it’s all we do-we’re meeting an acute need,” Gray says. 

In fact, AP Health has seen a 12-fold increase in the number of patient-encounters for the company in just the past four years. Gray sees that trend continuing and even accelerating. Keeping pace requires technology-driven modernization. “AP Health is in the business of making hospitals and surgeons more productive, profitable and efficient. In order to meet the growing demand, we had to improve our internal productivity and efficiency-which we did!”  

AP Health developed a new proprietary mobile application, LogistiSx 2.0, an efficiency tool for AP Health practitioners in the field and its administrative staff. LogistiSx 2.0 enables each AP Health practitioner to securely capture and report all pertinent surgical case information on-site at the hospital, creating a centralized document-of-record that drives everything from practitioner scheduling to case-coding and hospital and insurance billing. 

“It provides all stakeholders – our practitioners, hospital clients, surgeons and our administrators with a single source of real-time truth on each case,” says AP Health COO Greg Flanagan. He points out that LogistiSx integrates with hospital scheduling systems, automatically uploading each hospital’s 5-day surgical care schedules each afternoon. Every AP Health practitioner receives his/her next-day schedule through the mobile app and receives text alerts regarding any change to that schedule. “This ultimately improves the quality of service we deliver to hospital clients, surgeons and patients and allows us to scale staffing quickly based on surgical needs on any given day.” 

Flanagan believes such real-time data integration and front-line/back-office efficiency gains are crucial to improving AP Health practitioners’ productivity and satisfaction. “We’ve built AP Health by attracting and retaining the most qualified Advanced Practitioners in surgical care and by providing our hospital clients with a consistently high level of service. This is central to our continued success as a company.” 

Gray also adds that, “Recruiting qualified surgical practitioners and creating a culture that increases job satisfaction by honoring the work/life balance limits the turnover of staff. LogistiSx removes much of the administrative burden from our practitioners, allowing them to focus on their clinical mission, which, in the end, is all that matters to them and our clients.”  

AP Health’s surgeon-centric approach is another factor that contributes to the success of our hospital partners’ surgical programs. We provide our surgeons with a team that can anticipate their needs and work seamlessly alongside them. This betters revenue, time/patient management, and outcomes in the OR. AP Health’s outsourcing model helps the surgeon be more productive by giving them the ultimate support and control in and out of the operating room. 

“We are being selective with our growth; we’re looking for opportunities to provide value to surgeons, and hospitals,” Gray says. “Ultimately, this rebranding effort is the front-facing piece of a much deeper organizational commitment to delivering an ever-higher level of service and efficiency to all stakeholders as we grow.”