Panacea CEO Brings Confidence, Clarity to New Role
Kevin Chmura / CEO, Panacea Healthcare Solutions
When you assume the top position at a company whose very name carries the dictionary definition of being a “solution or remedy for all difficulties,” you arrive facing inherently high expectations.
Panacea Healthcare Solutions CEO Kevin Chmura intends to meet and exceed them nonetheless.
“Since my arrival, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a large number of our customers, and have asked them for both their feedback and any advice they can give me. I’m delighted to say that every customer I’ve met has been complimentary towards our products, but more importantly, they have been complimentary about our team. Whether we are providing consulting services or software, we take a hands-on approach to ensuring customer success,” he said. “What I hope to hear from our customers in the future is that, even though we operate at a very high level, somehow we managed to get even better. Given the quality of our products and our large team of talented and dedicated experts, I am confident that in future conversations I will hear just that.”
Chmura’s arrival at Panacea earlier this year came after 16 years spent in key roles—VP of Business Development, then President, then CEO—with a similarly situated firm, Aergo Solutions, whose offices in the Iselin section of Edison, New Jersey are just a short trip up the Garden State Parkway from Panacea’s offices in Manasquan, situated right on the iconic Jersey Shore.
“I was very proud of what we built at Aergo. But as often happens in business, it was time to pass the torch so the company could move to the next level. As I contemplated my next career move, of paramount importance to me was finding a firm that took the same level of pride in the work that they do. Panacea was the obvious choice, based on this criteria,” Chmura said. “I have known Panacea since it was founded. Since Panacea was originally headquartered in New Jersey, I had the pleasure of knowing the founder and watching the company develop new products and services. There were even times where Panacea and Aergo operated in parallel with some clients. So, I had direct view of the company and its people. When the opportunity came to invest in and lead the company, I jumped at it.”
Panacea’s offerings range from areas such as auditing and compliance to chargemaster management, price transparency, revenue integrity, and software—and Chmura said he views his role in part as hinging on ensuring that focus on any one of those will never come at the expense of another.
“We often find incremental revenue opportunities that are being missed due to poor chargemaster integrity or issues with coding. Our tools and experts can quickly identify improvement areas and work with our customers to capitalize on them. The combination of these two elements positions us as a powerful partner on the journey to financial success.”
“Choosing which of our deliverables is most critical would be like choosing which is my favorite child,” he quipped. “Each has a distinct place in our continuum of services and is critical to the success of our clients. Leading a company with such a broad range of offerings presents a great opportunity to work with each customer to customize a suite of deliverables to help them overcome their unique challenges.”
Chmura’s arrival comes at an unusual time for the American healthcare industry at large; on the one hand, since January 2021, COVID-19 deaths have declined by 95 percent, hospitalizations are down more than 90 percent, and the federal public health emergency (PHE) finally reached its end last month, after more than three long years. On the other hand, a record number of physicians are reporting symptoms of burnout, an estimated 100,000 nurses have left the workforce over the last two years (with more than 600,000 more reporting an intent to leave by 2027), and more than 600 rural hospitals nationwide—about 30 percent of the total—are reportedly at risk of closing in the near future.
Choosing Panacea as a partner remains a sound investment for providers, Chmura said—not in spite of current fiscal challenges, but to a large degree because of them.
“We assist providers with two key elements to performance. The first is cost containment. We can ensure compliance with complex regulations at a lower cost than our competitors or internal efforts,” he said. “With insured compliance also comes the comfort of avoiding the increasing fines that are being levied to providers for failing to comply with regulations such as price transparency.”
“The other advantage of working with Panacea is revenue integrity and lost revenue recovery,” Chmura added. “We often find incremental revenue opportunities that are being missed due to poor chargemaster integrity or issues with coding. Our tools and experts can quickly identify improvement areas and work with our customers to capitalize on them. The combination of these two elements positions us as a powerful partner on the journey to financial success.”
Since its founding in 2007, Chmura said Panacea has since developed a pedigree for excellence in such work that speaks for itself.
“Our current customers are some of our leading salespeople,” he said. “The work we have done with hundreds of providers over the years has given us a reputation for quality and results that gives most providers comfort that we will deliver for them. More practically, we have developed pricing models where we go at-risk for results, which gives our customers a low-risk, higher-return opportunity to deploy our products and services.”
Chmura said the company’s mission is to build upon its existing position as a leader in what he calls the “continuum of healthcare pricing”—starting by ensuring chargemaster quality, then moving on to strategic and defensible pricing and compliance with price transparency regulations, before extending such services to include coding quality audits and education. Finally, he added, a comprehensive compliance program is wrapped around the entire suite of deliverables.
“Everything we do builds off another deliverable to allow us to meet any challenge,” Chmura said. “And as we grow, we will continue to develop and acquire capabilities in adjacent areas of the mid-revenue cycle, such as managed care consulting and denials analytics, just to name a few.”
“My vision for the future is to continue to be the leading provider of mid-revenue cycle products and services,” Chmura concluded. “Much of our client base today consists of hospitals, health systems, and large physician groups. We have a big opportunity to expand our reach to other providers—such as ambulatory surgery centers, reference laboratories, and dialysis providers—who face unique challenges that we are well-situated to assist with. As we expand our product and service capabilities, we do it with an eye on an expanding market to ensure that any provider can work with Panacea to overcome their challenges.”
Just like the company name implies.
About Panacea Healthcare Solutions
Panacea (www.panaceainc.com) provides software and tech-enabled services that help healthcare organizations improve their revenue cycle, coding, and compliance with front-line expertise in mid-revenue cycle management. In an era where 95% of provider revenue is driven by accurate coding and defensible yet optimal pricing, clients trust Panacea to deliver unparalleled value in strategic pricing, price transparency, chargemaster, compliance, and revenue cycle solutions.
