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By: The Encircle Team
Needing to adhere to stringent documentation guidelines for medical referrals and legal requirements across different states.
Flexible and detailed documentation process to meet specific requirements.
A more sustainable and profitable process that closes the loop between doctors and patients.
John and Diane Bohde, Vice President and President of The Mold Pros, started their company back in 2009 in Kansas City. They’ve grown significantly since then, opening up several locations across the US.
THE CHALLENGE
Operating a multi-state mold remediation company presents a unique set of challenges for The Mold Pros. While mold remediation business can come in from different sources outside of the traditional property insurance claims ecosystem, the documentation requirements are equally important, and often more complex.
“Over 70% of our new business comes from medical referral,” states John. “So someone who’s suffering effects from some environmental illness, or exposure to bacteria or mold — those are all in our wheelhouse.” This places additional pressure on The Mold Pros to not only notify an additional party, but also provide even more thorough documentation to ensure the patient’s health and safety. “We are the doctor’s eyes and ears on the ground; with an environmental illness, if you don’t address the environment, the patient never gets better.” It falls on The Mold Pros to bridge the gap between doctor and patient by providing thorough documentation, and seeking out the appropriate permissions from their client to share critical information.
The documentation process becomes even more challenging for The Mold Pros because they operate across multiple states — it needs to be flexible enough to suit their different locations. Individual states have different regulatory and legal requirements that need to be adhered to; “mold is a little more heavily regulated around certain states, which requires different verbages on contracts, different consumer disclosures.”
These challenges are all so specific that The Mold Pros had originally created their own app to satisfy their documentation needs. And it did work — for a while. But, the cost to create and maintain their own app became less helpful and more of a hindrance over time; “just the effort around putting it together, doing the enhancements, doing the updates…it made a lot more sense to have the pros do it.”
THE SOLUTION
Enter Encircle, the app that brought the level of detail and flexibility that The Mold Pros needed for their mold remediation documentation!
Encircle's field documentation platform provides The Mold Pros with one place for their techs to document everything that they do for a job, including the testing that they may need to perform. For instance, they may need to test an air sample, a surface sample, a dust collection sample, or even a carbon-filled glass tube sample. Indicating in their report which type of test and which lab that they sent the test to is enabled by Encircle. “Once we run all the testing, we document all of our sampling in Encircle. Then once we get the laboratory data back, we type up a report with our findings, and attach it to the Encircle claim. Then we build a scope of work to mediate the problem.”
To further enable their crucial documentation process, The Mold Pros leverage Encircle’s custom forms for their contracts, as well as their on-site processes. “Encircle has made it really simple for us. It offers the flexibility to create and maintain our contracts within the platform,” John raves. “As we go through our process, we have drop-down menus to select which lab type we used and which sample type, as well as whether the customer accepted and/or rejected it. We need to capture a lot more detail for what clients accept and what we recommend. By having customized forms and reports built in, it works well with our process.”
This flexibility also allows The Mold Pros to meet the specific requirements for all of their different locations. Providing the proper details in the proper locations is key to keeping them compliant with differing legal requirements between states.
“Encircle has done a great job in getting our forms updated and compliant with those inter-business different state guidelines.” — John Bohde, Vice President, The Mold Pros
Once The Mold Pros have the detailed documentation gathered for their location, the other half of the equation is providing that information to the referring doctor. In order to get this permission from the client to release their personal information, Encircle provided a customized option that was a game-changer. “What we’ve done, and this is really key with our ongoing relationships with our doctors, is we had the Encircle team build in a permission section in our client contract to confirm we could share our results with their doctor. So we can send our results and reports to our client, and then we also send it to the referring healthcare provider.” Furthermore, The Mold Pros also customized their client contracts to ensure that they have the consent that they need to keep the medical referral in the loop. These small, simple customizations make all the difference in keeping all parties informed, and more importantly, safe and healthy.
THE RESULT
So what are the biggest advantages to using Encircle for mold remediation? According to John, it starts with detailed documentation; “we can go back in and explain what we did, why we did it, and where we did it by having that documentation in place.” Compared with the systems that they had in place before, John states that it’s much more detailed now that they’re using the Encircle app. They no longer feel the need to maintain their own app, because why would they? Encircle provides the flexibility and level of detail that they need at a lower cost and with greater ease. “Long story short, we feel like Encircle has a better product than what we had developed,” concludes John. “We didn’t have the carrying costs for our products and the ROI was better.”
The Mold Pros have also been able to leverage Encircle to help their other revenue streams, which include property and facility management. "Encircle provides consistency and documentation to keep our property management and facility management firms out of court. And now we have a 22 step process for our remediation that essentially builds credibility with what we do." This consistency of process addresses one of John’s main concerns of running a multi-state operation: “one of the things that’s important to me is that I have multiple locations, and we have to have eight branches doing things exactly the same,” says John. “The client experience should be exactly the same in Atlanta as it is in Florida or Oregon, for example.”
Thanks to Encircle, The Mold Pros can close the loop between the healthcare provider and the patient, and have also ensured a consistent client experience across different business locations. “It’s good from a business standpoint, and good from a patient outcome standpoint,” commented John. The overall result? A healthier business and healthier clients.
