Fellow Health Partners, Inc., a New York based medical business solutions company, today announced the opening of their Knowledge College™, a first in the growing $22 billion dollar business of medical billing. The in-house training facility is designed to guarantee that the necessary “people skills” of their teams are grown and maintained at the highest level.

“We really want to help patients, doctors, and medical practices”, said CEO Michael N. Brown, “and the best way to do this is to provide customer service that is far above the quality coming from off-shored call centers or untrained representatives. The Knowledge College™ is designed to train our teams to use their communication skills consciously rather than unconsciously, which makes the difference between being effective only some of the time and being effective all of the time”.

He added, “This is especially important today when high patient deductibles increase the problems in collecting from them and when insurance companies are even more aggressive in denying claims. We discovered that many problems often came down to a simple fact - that the person representing the doctor or the hospital wasn’t as well trained as the person representing the insurance company. This meant that the under-trained person was less effective in influencing an outcome than someone who was well-trained and consistently updated in application of their skills. And it was no different when trying to influence a patient with billing issues. The better trained person was more effective.”

Research shows that many companies minimize training in “people skills” because they continue to view it as a cost rather than an investment, ignoring the downstream consequences of under-trained staff, which might include negative referrals, bad reviews, depressed physician revenue, and workplace stress.

“We know of no other company that continuously trains employees in people skills”, said Michael N. Brown.  “Our Knowledge College™ has a staged curriculum, diplomas, and continuous refreshers, all focused on helping our staff improve effectiveness and customer service, demonstrating that we treat people as an asset, not as a cost line item.”

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