Judson Ivy, CEO of Ensemble Health Partners, expects the revenue cycling firm to create about 200 jobs in the coming months. The workforce will continue to grow as Ensemble adds hospital clients, and the company intends to pursue acquisitions next year.
Ensemble currently has about 4,670 employees spread across its headquarters in Mason, another office in Winton Hills and one in Huntersville, N.C.
“Our target for Q1 is right at 4,900,” Ivy said of the total number of employees. “We have a couple of new deals that we just signed. I can’t share with you the names of the hospitals, but we’ll be adding more staff in November and December.”
Ivy founded Ensemble in 2014 in North Carolina but switched the firm’s headquarters to Mason last year. The firm plans to relocate 2,200 employees to a new Blue Ash headquarters early next year. Ensemble is now renovating the former Procter & Gamble Co. research and development complex in Blue Ash.
The Blue Ash complex encompasses 400,000 square feet, and Ensemble employees will move in by departments starting in February.
Another 161 Ensemble employees in Greater Cincinnati either work from home or at a client site. In addition, about 256 Ensemble employees work remotely elsewhere in Ohio, and about 285 work at client facilities elsewhere in Ohio.
About 300 work at the Huntersville, N.C., office, and another 100 work remotely in that state.
Ensemble had about 200 employees in 2016, when it was acquired by Cincinnati-based Bon Secours Mercy Health for $60 million. An additional $40 million in payments was linked to the startup hitting financial incentives, which Ivy said it has done.
In August, Bon Secours Mercy Health completed the sale of 51% of Ensemble to Golden Gate Capital of San Francisco, a private equity firm that reportedly paid $1.2 billion in cash. Bon Secours Mercy Health retains minority ownership.
“Our valuation was above $1 billion, but to me that’s not the story,” Ivy said. “I never set out to say, ‘How do we create a billion-dollar company?’ It’s how do you create a company that provides value to customers and people like to work for, and the rest of that comes.”
Ensemble now has 220 health facility clients, which includes all Bon Secours Mercy Health hospitals in Ohio and Kentucky as well as Christ Hospital in Cincinnati.
Ivy expects the workforce to grow by 10% to 20% every year as Ensemble adds hospitals as clients. He said that range was a conservative estimate.
“It’s a people-intensive business,” Ivy said. “That’s what has made it successful. We anticipate it will continue to grow, depending where we grow in our business. Certain businesses require more people than others in what we do.”
Ensemble checks insurance eligibility and submits bills to payers, but the firm also ensures that medical services are coded properly and fields questions about billing from patients.
Ensemble will hold a job fair 3-7 p.m. Nov. 13 in hopes of filling at least 50 new, full-time positions within its Physician Revenue Cycle team. The open positions include accounts receivable, billing, cash application, denials and coding jobs. Applicants are asked to bring a resume to the hiring event at Ensemble’s Winton Hills office, 6210 Center Hill Ave. For information or to apply online, click here.
“We hire for attitude and aptitude,” Ivy said. “We are looking for people that like to solve complex issues. People that enjoy working in teams. We’ve got people with everything from traditional accounting backgrounds to hospitality.”
While Ensemble is looking to hire people with an MBA or traditional accounting skills, “that’s not the primary thing we’re looking for,” he said. “Do you like to be helpful to customers? Are you innovative and willing to think outside the box?
“For us, we have equally or more successful people with backgrounds in theater and hospitality and the arts,” he said. “It is really hiring people that have a passion for impacting health care. We’re not care givers ourselves. But we enable good care.
“One of the reasons I started the company was U.S. health care is fragmented,” Ivy said. “It is very confusing for patients. That’s a result of the payer and provider and consolidation and also regulatory things. What we try to do is make it simpler for the patient.
“That may be one consolidated statement for physicians and hospital together so the patient can easily see what they have going on their information,” Ivy said. “Those are all very unsexy processes, but ultimately have an impact on patient satisfaction.”
Ensemble revenue was reportedly $333 million last year.
“I have never run the company in a how big are we going to get or how profitable are we (fashion),” Ivy said. “I don’t think about it that way. I think more about being the largest is not our objective but being the best is.”
And yet, Ivy expects Ensemble to grow through acquisition next year, probably by the second quarter. He explained what kinds of firm Ensemble might target.
“It’s a mix of technology and services, primarily driven around ways to improve patient engagement and also automation to make it a more efficient process for patients,” Ivy said.
“We’re looking at a number (of possibilities) across the country,” Ivy said. “We’re being very diligent. The objective of this is not to go out and acquire a bunch of bits and pieces. It’s to acquire things that are complementary and that integrate very well with our technology.
“We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at some of our competitors in this field and maybe some lessons learned that it’s not about building a huge company for the sake of being huge,” he said. “It’s about building something that’s beneficial to our customers, so we’re being very pragmatic about what we acquire. We’ve got some things in the works but no official acquisitions.”