“It’s pronounced Ares, like the god of war or the Ares rocket,” AREScms co-founders Daryl Price and Paul Leffler joke, before Price clarifies that the Vancouver company has little in common with its homophone and is actually an acronym for Acquisition Retention Enrollment Systems (the “cms” stands for contact management system).
For Leffler, ARES is a tool for the new era of healthcare, at the foreground of the Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). ACOs are groups of medical providers that accept payments based on quality under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP).
“There’s been a change in dynamics of how healthcare plans are starting to cater to the populations, especially Medicare Advantage, which is where we sit,” Leffler explained.
Formed by Price and Leffler after both broke away from a local company that offered a similar service, ARES is a cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) for healthcare providers to track everything about Medicare Advantage enrollment, with an emphasis on security, organization and compliance.
“What we are doing is making sure that if an agent is logging into our system, he (or she) has a right to [be logged in]; he is compliant with CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) regulation,” said Price. “There are so many training products that [agents] have to do every year to stay licensed. We make sure that those are up to date. In addition to that, we make sure that all the information necessary to enroll a person into Medicare Advantage is located in our system. We build all the reports that the healthcare provider requires and has to send to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.”
While ARES has been in business for nearly three years, the company’s founders still consider it to be a startup, and growth has been modest because of the attention given to ensuring the product is exactly what Price and Leffler envisioned, with numerous rounds of testing.
“The most important thing that drove us to doing this,” said Price, “was we thought there was a better way” to address the needs of the hundreds of health plans relying on expensive “big box” customer relationship management systems. “We started from scratch. We started building storyboards and mockups about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We didn’t really have anything to test for the first six to eight months. The precursor was just us knowing there was a better way of doing it.”
As a Saas, Leffler said the company has been able to stay lean while continuing to grow a client base. The company’s current staff of seven consists mostly of consultants and contractors.
Predicting ARES’ future growth is a bit more challenging, Leffler said, because much depends on how evolving health plan markets shake out.
“There’s going to be a lot of consolidation in hospitals, and providers are probably going to get a little more power than just the true insurance companies of the past because reimbursements will come from keeping your recipients healthy and happy,” Lefflier predicted.
“With the roadmap we’ve laid out, we’re probably going to go from seven employees to adding three more in the next year,” he added. “Maybe in another year and a half, if things go the way we think they could potentially go, especially with the changes that are coming in the health insurance marketplace, we’ll probably be hiring another five employees. In four or five years, we could be somewhere around 20 employees with project managers and sales support.”
Lefflier, a Vancouver resident, said that ARES will look to hire employees from Southwest Washington when it comes time to bring in new staff, and he explained why the cloud-based platform is tied to this region.
“One of the things that is helpful about being in the Pacific Northwest is we have a lot of newer health plans,” he said. “As more people move to this area, a lot of new health plans are starting to see that and making potential inroads into this marketplace.
“We really want to create solid jobs,” Leffler added. “We want to create a cohesive team here and part of our philosophy is once we create a successful company, our employees are going to start participating in that success and ownership.”
AREScms
www.arescms.com Employees: 7 Founded 2013
