MADISON, Wis.—Rev360, a practice software and business services company for ECPs, began the new year with a new chief executive officer. Longtime health care IT executive Scott Filion assumed the title from company founder Scott Jens, OD, FAAO, at the beginning of this month. The challenge for Filion, who had joined Rev360 in September 2018 as president and chief operating officer, is to deftly build upon past successes and to drive further growth by helping the company’s ECP customer base operate more successfully.

“I am extremely excited about the opportunity that exists for both the company and the market,” Filion told VMAIL this week.

Filion, who previously held senior level positions at EMC Healthcare, Hosting and GetWellNetwork, said one of his primary objectives is to help all of Rev360’s ECP customers become operationally more efficient and to maintain or grow their competitive advantage in the market. One way to do this is through identifying and offering best-in-class services and solutions, he said. “We’ve kind of had a model under which we said we are going to bring everything to you, versus listening to the customer and asking about their top needs,” he explained.

“Coming into this company, Dr. Jens had a vision,” Filion said in the interview this week in which he discussed broadly some of the tweaks the company is making to enhance the way it works with ECP customers. “We have not discarded that vision, but we’ve altered the focus." (Jens has been named a senior advisor to the Rev360 board of directors, as VMAIL reported.)

Rev360’s core product is its cloud-based medical records software platform RevolutionEHR, with many of its other products and services offered as part of the program, including RevAspire, which assists RevolutionEHR doctors through the entire process of CMS quality reporting.

“The main difference for what we’re doing now is, No. 1, there is a little more focus," Filion said. "I think this allows us to build sustainable and impactful innovation instead of having a vision of offering everything and it not being best-of-class.”

In his early round of customer meetings, Filion said much of the customer feedback was about the importance of the core RevolutionEHR platform. In addition, ECPs have told him that they want Rev360 to deliver products “that help take care of patients in the most efficient, effective and quality-focused way,” he said.

Overall, 2018 was a solid growth year for all three of the strategic business units under the global brand Rev360, Filion told VMAIL. The three business units are: the core RevolutionEHR practice software, the Professional Eye Care Associates of America (PECAA) alliance and RevAdvance/Visionary Partners, a recent initiative under which Rev360 takes an ownership position in independent ECP’s practices.

PECAA, which acquired the alliance OD Excellence in 2018, as VMAIL reported, had another “strong year,” Filion said, noting that he expects the alliance to roll out some new initiatives this year and, also, to work more closely with Rev360 in the area of partnership opportunities. (The PECAA unit consists of more than 3,500 doctors and over 2,500 practice locations.)

The RevAdvance/Visionary Partners unit, which Rev360 calls an alternative concept to the traditional private equity acquisition model for ECPs, now has an ownership position in approximately 20 to 30 practices, Filion said. The program has drawn significant interest, he said, noting that many of the RevAdvance-affiliated practices are in the West. Filion said the leadership transition in 2018 may have slowed the growth of the RevAdvance segment, but he expects to “get back on track” with this business in 2019.

In 2019, the goals by business unit consist of focusing on execution, efficiency and expiation within RevolutionEHR; within PECAA, the objectives are growth, partnership and engagement; and for the Visionary Partners/RevAdvance segment, 2019 will be a year to build scale, collaboration and empowerment, Filion explained. Overall, he said the preliminary 2018 results show that “we will have double-digit growth basically in all of our businesses” according to a preliminary review of the operating results. “It’s been a great year for Rev360 and for the EHR business. PECAA has reached all of its goals and milestones, with new members, and it continues to grow,” he added.

“Rev360 is a powerful company in the ECP space,” Filion said. “We are going to continue to lead from the front… I do, functionally, feel like focus and execution are a big part of what we do. Our key cornerstones for the company going forward are transparency, accountability, structure/consistency and innovation,” he added.

Filion said those are the messages that he has been delivering to employees and customers, noting that he wants to be very transparent with communication and accountable to what the company says it intends to do. “We’re going to provide structure, consistency and productivity for the doctors and for our internal employees,” he said. “And we’re going to continue to innovate and to deliver the best-in-class solutions for the market.”

He added. “We have refocused on [the core] and going forward we are going to change the model a little bit. Our initiatives will be totally customer focused. That’s how we are going to wake up every morning.”