826: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with David Preece, Vice President of Products, AAPC

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio. I am here with co-founder of the EdUp Experience, my friend, Elvin Freitas.

Elvin, we've been doing this podcast for over four years. We've interviewed over 830, 840 people across higher education in that four-year period. We have passed 371,000 downloads of this podcast over that four-year period. And we've done, I don't know, 10 conferences over that four-year period. This is absolutely coming to the top or one of those at the top of our conferences, Insights EDU here in Phoenix, Arizona, a conference put out by Education Dynamics all about online students, students in general, marketing, enrollment, and so on and so forth.

It's the conference basically that you can't miss if you're interested in enrolling marketing and know efficiency and enrolling more students. It's simply the one you need to come to. And we're joined today again. I think we've done six or seven of these podcasts where we're getting there. We're getting up there to our daily record, which I think is 13, perhaps in a day. My voice will be gone. I'll be very tired and I'll be finding the open bar to have a glass of milk, to have a diet coke.

Ladies and gentlemen, here's our guest today. His name is David Preece. He is the VP of product at AAPC. David, welcome to an EdUp Mic. How are you?

David Preece: I'm doing great. Thank you. It's usually not this messy around here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: But you know, I'll believe you. It's half a day. Believe me. OK, we are professional. I just want you to know. Totally professional. I am totally professional.

David, tell us about AAPC. Start from the top. What is AAPC? What do you do? How do you do it? Who do you serve? Give us the elevator pitch.

David Preece: Absolutely. So AAPC is a credentialing organization. We offer credentials in medical coding, billing, everything that they call in the industry within healthcare as revenue cycle management. Really the business side of healthcare. We're also a professional association of over 250,000 professionals. So we're really the primary credentialer. And we're looking to just partner with higher education in ways that we haven't done before and provide new solutions to fill jobs. And we know that when you fill jobs, it leads to enrollment for schools. And that's really what we're all after.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Now, David, have you been on a podcast before?

David Preece: No, I'm on a radio station. It's way more scary than being shut in a glass fishbowl.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I do want to just let you know some of the ground rules. This is how we go. This is how this goes here. This is what you need to be prepared for. I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions. I want to have them answered immediately. As long as we understand each other. That's fair, right?

David Preece: Yes.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay, let's start from the top. AAPC, all of the medical coding, billing, backend services, getting people credentialed jobs and partnering with universities in ways that you haven't done before. Like how?

David Preece: Good question. So we have licensed partners, about 400 some odd different community colleges, schools around the country to provide the curriculum by which they teach to lead to our credentials. What we found in our own education delivery offering, we get a much better success rate on our exams. So they're more likely to become certified and we have the right relationships with the professionals being the association to be able to teach. It's just an ideal scenario.

We've also seen in the tech space, a lot of boot camps popping up, right? And different organizations have been partnering with groups to provide education and maybe software engineering, stuff like that, to fill the jobs. Well, there's a lot of jobs in the medical billing and coding revenue cycle management that's there that these credentials lead to. And because of AAPC being the association, and now we've kind of been behind the scenes, and now it's time, I think, to partner with higher education with universities to provide boot camp style training that leads to the certifications but also provides the skills necessary to fill the jobs.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And is that because higher ed institutions are the training that they are providing for these careers is not leading to those students getting certified as well as your curriculum leads to those students getting certified?

David Preece: Right. We know those that use our curriculum get a 35% increase on pass rates. That's not insignificant. And I think it really comes down to like a lot of education. It's the right people teaching the right stuff at the right time. So we have that connection in the industry. And there's no reason for AAPC to do this on our own. We really feel strongly that if we can partner with certain universities and get more of a local attention based on the schools and the partnerships we have, that we can really get the word out there that there's these jobs and that people can transition maybe instead of going straight for a degree, getting a credential through a bootcamp, getting a job, and then maybe going back to a degree with more tuition assistance from employers.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That is epic. The pathway to jobs is important, right? To your point, students are, the journey is not linear to where I've graduated high school, I'm going to get a degree. For some it still is but for most, at least a thought that I should, maybe I need to get a job first, maybe I need to get this skill, I need to make my money. First-gen students, students of color, students from lower economic backgrounds, need a skill need to start working, their families may be putting pressure on them to get out, get started, start working, they can put food on the table. And the skills pathway is a very important pathway, but it's got to lead to a job.

Talk about the jobs themselves. How many jobs are out there in healthcare and revenue cycle management? I mean, exactly. For you guys to do what you do.

David Preece: Yeah, you really put me on the spot. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but we're going to have thousands of jobs. We have a partner that helps us identify the jobs in the markets. And it's in the thousands. And the reason I don't know from a national perspective is I haven't really done the math yet. But in other words, what we're looking for are the markets that have the jobs to identify the right universities. But it's in the thousands. I think we looked at the state of Virginia and it was, you know, four or five thousand jobs in the last 12 months.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So you're going by state. You're going by area to say, wow, there's a lot here. Because what we're looking for is to find the right partner, right, in the areas where the jobs are so that we can then leverage the industry relationships that we have to try those jobs. Can you dig it?

David Preece: I can.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Who is the right university partner? Because university partners, there is a spectrum of university partners. There's a part of that spectrum that is a speed spectrum and acceptance. Right. So you can go to university partner and they're going to say, boot camp. We don't do boot camps here. We're a degreed institution. And we're not going to water down our product. And then you're going to have institutions that say, yes, any kind of skill stacking skill pathway. We're going to grow and serve an adult learner, we're going to do it. Can you talk about that spectrum from your experience?

David Preece: Yeah, for sure. The latter, what you mentioned, universities that have the vision and understanding that skill-based education is critical to their long-term success makes sense for us. Is it that professional education, professional development? These won't be degree programs specifically. It doesn't mean they can't be a bridge to degrees. The credit could transfer if you wanted to and you're going to create PLA. Assuming that obviously the university would help us with that process and it's really up to that university.

But let me tell you a story. My oldest daughter went about her education in what I see as a very good way of doing it coming out of high school. She got her associate's degree as an RN. Got a job as a labor delivery nurse and then got her company that she works for to pay for her bachelor's. So I think we need to rethink the way we're doing this instead of just kick them off to college, start from scratch. Why not provide them skill like you're talking about Joe and maybe they get a job in an industry, you know, industry has more skin in the game as well. She had to commit a certain amount of years to work with them, the amount of benefits she got, you know, now she's a BSN working labor and delivery. She's not even 23. That's pretty good, for half the cost.

So, when you look at it, even within the business side of healthcare, there are similar paths out there. And we, as AAPC want to, again, partner with the right universities to help get the word out, because we realized that from an educator perspective, their brand is going to be strong. It's us together because when students realize we're the credentialing association as well. It makes sense to partner with us as opposed to somebody else.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I got a question. So I think, what happens is that we hear certification, certification, and we hear about taking exams. Do you know anything about these exams and like how long it takes to prepare for one? How long is the actual exam? Is it in person, is it online and the intensity of if they fail once, can they take it over again? Talk to us because we just kind of gloss over all certifications and you have to take an exam. Let's get into the weeds a little bit.

David Preece: Yeah, you've got to be prepared for the certification. And that's part of the curriculum that we've developed. In fact, we have curriculum specifically to prepare for certification. They can take it multiple attempts. There's a cost associated. We, at AAPC run more of a voucher system that they buy vouchers to be able to sit. We've transitioned a lot to online, right? Because of COVID. And we're able to smoothly transition it through that.

Students that come to us are going to get probably more preparation than anybody else because it is our certification, right? If you look at the amount of people that we certify, we probably are involved in about a third of the education experience for those that certify for our certifications. So it's still pretty minimal, right?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And these exams, like are these like the SAT? Do you know if it's like three, four hours? It's like, they take it online. They take a couple hours, usually, typically.

David Preece: Yeah, it's pretty intense. There's a lot of information they got to know.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Talk about the 250,000. Right? Did I get that right? Credentialed hours and credentialed members. What do you do at AAPC to serve that membership? Are you offering continuing ed and webinars and all that? Can you give us the infrastructure?

David Preece: Yeah. So we provide continuing education. We provide webinars, provide trainings, we provide regional conferences. We have a national conference coming up in Vegas in... My team's going to kill me. April, I think, the end of April. So yeah, we take the association seriously. That's really how AAPC started. That is our bread and butter is to take care of our association. Make sure they're educated. We have an annual convention. We have a series of different classes and credits that they can take to make sure that they're maintaining their credential and they're up to speed because there's so much that changes pretty consistently, obviously in the medical field.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So what's the benefit of a university to partner with you? What am I getting out of this if I'm the university?

David Preece: Yeah. So the university gets obviously added enrollment. I think a pathway to maybe re-enter programs. I think a lot of people probably drop out of programs because they don't see the job, right? Or they get disenchanted. So I think we have opportunity there to bring back maybe students that they've lost through this program, to help them get jobs through these credentials and training and then hopefully they long term exist or may persist. Obviously, there's a revenue share model, obviously, that we're going to engage in with university. That won't be Title IV funded. You know, it's gonna be outside of that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, and I really wanted you to bring that up and I had that feeling. One of the things that universities are doing is trying to diversify revenue streams and if you're trying to diversify your revenue stream you want to think about doing it outside of Title IV. Title IV comes with so many constraints and you know, you can get more Title IV, you can do things with Title IV, you can even merge with an institution that does Title IV. But if you don't have a revenue stream that is non-Title IV, that can grow unbound, so to speak, then you're really not diversifying in the way that you can. So you're offering a diversifying revenue stream.

David Preece: Absolutely. That's absolutely right. You know, there's financing partners that students can use to still get loans. I think from a student consumer perspective, they're not so worried about who's giving them their loan. They're more worried about the terms and does it make sense for me and can I repay this? And more importantly, am I going to have the job to be able to repay it?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Job, job, job. What else do you want to say about AAPC that we haven't said?

David Preece: I think we touched on everything. I think it's great. We're glad to be here. Like I said, we're getting a little more out in front and hopefully we get a chance to talk to some more universities.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first. He's a first-time podcast guest. He sure likes podcasts. He did a great job. He'll be on more podcasts now. He's going to hit the circuit. Watch out for him ladies and gentlemen. He's David Preece. He is the VP of product at AAPC. We hope you had a good time on your first EdUp Experience.

David Preece: Absolutely.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Not everyone will be as fun as this. I promise you. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just had EdUp.