Miriam Allred (00:10)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the lab. Today I am joined by Christian Sullivan, an account manager at Altra Home Care in Indiana. Christian, welcome to the show.
Christian Sullivan (00:21)
Thanks for having me, Miriam. I have been a long time listener, so I'm excited to get my shot at chatting with you.
Miriam Allred (00:26)
Yeah, thanks for being up for it. I'm going to put you on the spot with a lot of questions, but I was just telling you this is your bread and butter. You're doing it day in and day out, and so don't feel like you have to be anything that you're not. Just answer honestly and openly. Let's start with your introduction. People likely don't know you. You're a little under wraps, but I'm giving you the platform to introduce yourself and talk a little about your background, pre-home care, how you got here, and then kind of roles and responsibilities today.
Christian Sullivan (00:38)
Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, like I said, I appreciate you having me on. I, like you mentioned, have not been in the home care industry, um, for too long. I came from a background in sales, mostly software and tech. Um, and so I find myself, uh, as I may have mentioned earlier, but, uh, find myself, in the home care space now. And I feel like a lot of the guests that I listened to sort of happenstance end up in home care, which,
You know, I think to me is maybe a different central calling. ⁓ but nonetheless, I ended up actually meeting the, one of the owners of our company at my apartment complex. our dogs became friends first. so they were playing in the field and, you know, made small talk and, learned that him and his brothers had moved out here to start a home care company. and I heard a little bit about the ins and outs of that. and he had asked me several times to, come join him.
while he was opening a second office on the South side of Indianapolis. Took a little bit. But after a while, I think I got tired of the sales environment in the tech sphere. took him up on it, joined as a recruiter down in our Greenwood, Indiana office, worked my way up from.
Recruiter to lead recruiter, which was basically a recruiter with a little bit more hands-on training for some of the new hires. And then we opened our third office in Kokomo, Indiana, back in March of 2024. And then I took over in August or at the end of August, and I've been here ever since.
Miriam Allred (02:21)
When I say account manager, people may pause, like what does that mean? The business structure of Altra is a little bit unique and the titles are a little bit unique as well. Explain kind high level, introduce Altra. You mentioned Indiana, you mentioned kind the office numbers, but give us a little bit more context about just like the landscape of the business.
Christian Sullivan (02:40)
Yeah, absolutely. So, so account manager, it's kind of a versatile title. I do a whole lot of backend stuff as well as a business development. So account manager, office manager for those companies that have like an office manager. I, you know, I do a lot of marketing as well for us. So I'm pretty much the person that handles all the high level backends dealing with authorizations and things like that, as well as marketing, business development.
⁓ and then pretty much anything that, ⁓ might go wrong and usually gets passed on to me. but Altra as a whole, ⁓ we are a home care agency. also, ⁓ recently in the last year or so lost launched Altra home health. so we are doing the, the prior authorization skilled nursing, ⁓ HH hourly stuff like that. sister company and then, Altra home care. Yeah. Yeah. So
Miriam Allred (03:29)
hours, yeah, hours and payers.
Christian Sullivan (03:32)
Yeah, so we do or we work with the VA. We work with Medicaid and we'll dive into the fiasco that is Indiana Medicaid at the moment and then private pay as well. So we cover quite a few, quite a few payer mixes. And then on Medicaid specifically, we have the Pathways for Aging program, which is pretty much anybody 60 and older. Then we have the Health and Wellness waiver, which is 60 and under, and then Traumatic Brain Injury waiver as well.
So those that have a TBI we can assist with as well.
Miriam Allred (04:03)
And is Medicaid your primary payer source or if you had to just kind of like break down private pay, VA, Medicaid, what's kind of the payer mix breakdown?
Christian Sullivan (04:12)
Yeah.
So it varies by office. My territory, Kokomo specifically is kind of mixed right now. We actually, we probably are 60, 60, 38 VA Medicaid split, 60 being VA actually in our area. With it being a new territory in the transition to the managed care entity model. You know, it's been a little bit slower of a go at it with the Medicaid side of things, but
Nonetheless, I would say as a whole, our bread and butter is definitely Medicaid, serving the Medicaid population. It's been an interesting last year and a half working with a lot of these new organizations, the big three, Anthem, United, and Humana. But it's been a fun journey, to be completely honest with you. So I enjoy it and I'm excited to see this continue to grow.
Miriam Allred (05:03)
You're one of few that say they thrive in the chaos. You didn't even come from healthcare. Now here you are, know, like running a Medicaid VA heavy home care company in Indiana. And it's just like, you know, the complexity of this industry. I wanted to ask you that like before you came in or when you came in, what was your initial take on just senior care in the state of Indiana? What surprised you? What worried you? What excited you?
Christian Sullivan (05:10)
Yeah, I joined at a very interesting time because was right off the back of the pandemic. So, you know, a lot of people were getting a ton of services, which was, you know, great for business. But what ended up happening pretty much a year into when I joined was that the state of Indiana reconvened and looked at their Medicaid budget, realized they had over budgeted over about a billion dollars. So come
The end of what would be 2020 or the middle of 2024, when the transition actually happened, they brought on the managed care entity model, introduced the three insurance companies managing what used to be the aged and disabled waiver through traditional Medicaid now called Pathways for Aging. So when I first joined, it was straight Medicaid. So you had your aged and disabled waiver, your health and wellness, and then there's a slew of other waivers underneath that.
⁓ and then it was the VA pretty, you know, cut and dry, straightforward VA home care. and then private pay as well. yeah. So then once the, once the switch up happened, it was, basically like starting fresh, ⁓ trying to figure out, know, who we need to be contacting, who we need to be reaching out to. How do we, how do we get more referrals? How do, who do we call if, if an authorization doesn't come through or services are being stalled by the company. So it was, it was a big fact finding mission.
to figure out who the right people to get in contact were. ⁓ But like I said, I kind of enjoy the chaos a little bit. It keeps me busy, keeps me on my toes. So I've enjoyed it so far.
