In true entrepreneurial style, Arnold
“Arnie” Burchianti II saw opportunity in
the multiple difficulties the health care
industry was experiencing.
Burchianti saw shrinking reimbursements, a trend driven by insurers — particularly Medicare and Medicaid — to
encourage more home-based care and
heavy industry regulation as opportunities to grow his home health company.
An aging elderly population in
Allegheny County and across the state
was a sign to Burchianti, a physical
therapist by training, that the need for
services would only grow over the
coming decades.
With hospital-based home health programs losing money, Burchianti, CEO of
Celtic Healthcare Inc., has moved to
acquire those red-ink operations and
leverage scale and technology to reduce
the costs of delivery of care .
Because the industry lags in the application of information technology,
Burchianti decided to develop his own
software rather than use an off-the-shelf
product as one way to differentiate Celtic
Healthcare from the industry pack.
Home health professionals can spend as
much as 75 percent of their time completing documentation, draining valuable
resources from direct patient care. The
software — the Celtic Integrated
Business System — combined with care-givers armed with laptop computers,
allows the company to automate as many
processes as possible and thereby, cut its
administrative and record-keeping costs.
The technology has had other benefits,
too. Celtic Healthcare, with more than 200
employees, enjoys a much lower personnel turnover rate than the industry average, a result Burchianti attributes in part
to the technology that reduces red tape
and employee costs, thereby increasing
the time caregivers can devote to patients.
HOW TO REACH: Celtic Healthcar e Inc.,
www.celtichealthcare.com
