Item 1. Business
Item
1. Business
Overview
MTBC,
Inc. (“MTBC” and together with its consolidated subsidiaries, the “Company”, “we”, “us”
and/or “our”) is a healthcare information technology company that provides a full suite of proprietary cloud-based
solutions, together with related business services, to healthcare providers and hospitals throughout the United States. Our Software-as-a-Service
(“SaaS”) platform includes revenue cycle management (“RCM”), practice management (“PM”), electronic
health record (“EHR”), business intelligence, telehealth, patient experience management (“PXM”) solutions
and complementary software tools and business services for high-performance medical groups and health systems.
At
a high level, these solutions can be categorized as follows:
●
RCM
services, which include end-to-end medical billing, eligibility, analytics, and related services, all of which can often be
provided either with our technology platform or through a third-party system;
●
Proprietary
healthcare IT software solutions, which can be bundled with our RCM services, including:
○
EHRs,
which are easy to use, integrated with our business services or offered as Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) solutions,
and allow our healthcare provider clients to deliver better patient care, document their clinical visits effectively and thus
potentially qualify for government incentives, reduce documentation errors and reduce paperwork;
○
PM
software and related tools, which support our clients’ day-to-day business operations and workflows;
○
Mobile
Health (“mHealth”) solutions, including smartphone applications that assist patients and healthcare providers
in the provision of healthcare services;
○
Telehealth
solutions, which allow healthcare providers to conduct remote patient visits;
○
Healthcare
claims clearinghouse, which enables our clients to electronically scrub and submit claims to, and process payments from, insurance
companies; and
○
Business
intelligence, customized applications, interfaces and a variety of other technology solutions that support our healthcare
clients.
●
Medical
Office Practice Management Services are provided to medical practices. In this service model, we provide the medical practice
with appropriate facilities, equipment, supplies, support services and administrative support staff. We also provide management,
bill-paying and financial advisory services.
Our
solutions enable clients to increase financial and operational performance, streamline clinical workflows, get better insight
through data, and make better business and clinical decisions, resulting in improvement in patient care and collections while
reducing administrative burdens and operating costs.
The
modernization of the healthcare industry is transforming nearly every aspect of a healthcare organization from policy to providers;
clinical care to member services, devices to data, and ultimately the quality of the patient’s experience as a healthcare
consumer. We create elegant, user-friendly applications that solve many of the challenges facing healthcare organizations. We
partner with organizations to develop customized, best-in-class solutions to solve their specific challenges while ensuring they
also meet future regulatory and organizational requirements and market demands.
Industry
Market
Overview
In
February 2020, Healthcare Finance reported that healthcare spending in the U.S. is projected to rise to $8.3 trillion by 2040.
They reported that nearly 60% of the total cost goes toward hospitals, physicians and clinical services. The Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) also projected that U.S healthcare spending will grow 5.4% annually on average during
years 2021 through 2028, reaching $6.2 trillion by 2028. CMS also projected that health spending will grow 1.1% faster than gross
domestic product (“GDP”) annually during the years 2019 through 2028; and as a result, the healthcare share of GDP
is expected to rise from 17.7% in 2018 to 19.7% by 2028.
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Additionally,
analysts from by Markets & Markets have estimated the US Healthcare IT industry market to be approximately $177 billion with
its largest sub-segment RCM to be approximately $87 billion in 2019, growing at a 12% compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”).
The North American EHR market has been estimated to be approximately $40 billion, growing at a CAGR of 6% per year. The Analytics
and AI sub-segment was estimated to be approximately $30 billion, growing at a 27% CAGR and the Telehealth market is estimated
to be approximately $20 billion with a CAGR of 17%. Standalone billing and practice management solutions are reported to be declining
in the market today as medical practices move towards integrated, end-to-end systems that incorporate front and back office data
flows, provide seamless access to clinical data from EHRs, and streamline the entire revenue cycle management process.
Our
Market Opportunity
Considering
the evolving needs of our clients and the market, we believe we continue to be uniquely positioned to provide tremendous value
and support for our clients. We believe there are dynamics at play that are significantly increasing market need for our products
and services. We are constantly monitoring and focused on how our role can address the evolving, day-to-day challenges our clients
face so that they can focus on providing excellent patient care and expanding their businesses.
Medical
practices and health systems alike are transitioning to increasingly complex reimbursement delivery models. As an example, the
industry has been gradually shifting from fee-for-service payments to value-based / clinical outcomes-based care payments. This
transition comes in a multitude of forms including reimbursement models associated with quality incentive programs, capitation
payments models, bundled payments and at-risk payer contracts.
There
are continuing legislative and regulatory reform efforts, as well as growing compliance requirements mandated by the federal government
and other governmental agencies. This ever-evolving regulatory landscape increases the pressure placed on healthcare organizations
to stay abreast of these changes and in compliance.
Our
clients also have to factor in the rising cost of health insurance, changes in health benefit plan design, and the impact that
these factors have had on the increase in patient consumerism. Patients are seeking lower cost care in response to insurance carriers
shifting more of the cost burden onto patients, causing healthcare organizations to reconsider the full patient experience. Healthcare
providers now need to think more deeply about patient expectations. This is especially true as COVID-19 has reshaped the sector
and accelerated its digital transformation.
Strategic-thinking
healthcare organizations across the country are aggressively addressing these new realities and are finding opportunities for
growth and expansion. We see medical groups across the country and within all specialties and market segments, growing through
consolidation and investing in their businesses at an accelerated pace. This is also leading clients to focus on delivering emerging
and disruptive care delivery settings. Much of this change is driving executives and leaders to assess their IT and data strategy,
reevaluating what it means for the future of their organizations.
The
healthcare industry has seen tremendous change over the past decade. Our study of the evolving needs of our clients leads us to
believe that there will be a continuing need for our services and products and emerging needs for the products and services that
we are already developing. These trends will fuel growth over the next several years. In order for healthcare organizations to
continue to succeed, these new realities require robust solutions and careful execution. Legacy tools that once powered these
healthcare organizations are insufficient to support their growth and long-term strategies. Our solutions facilitate the transition
needed by these organizations to drive their future growth. Our expansive product and services portfolio enables us to displace
competitors and gain market share. We will continue to pursue this vast addressable market, from the small group ambulatory practices,
to large, complex enterprise medical groups and health systems across a vast array of specialties and care settings which are
focused on providing excellent care to patients across the country.
Our
Business Strategy
Our
objective is to be a market leading provider of integrated, end-to-end SaaS and business services solutions to the healthcare
organizations. Our mission is to create flexible and comprehensive products and services for our client segments. To that end,
we invest significant resources in improving our current offerings and architecting a new platform that will be the backbone of
our long-term strategic initiatives. We expect to have increased software capabilities and offer additional complementary business
services that will address the needs of the ever-changing, dynamic market conditions of the U.S. healthcare space.
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To
achieve our objective and mission, we employ the following strategies:
Providing
comprehensive product and services suite to medical practices and hospitals. We believe that healthcare providers are
in need of an integrated, end-to-end solution and a flexible service delivery model to manage the different facets of their businesses,
from care delivery software, to claim submission, financial reporting, and data analytics.
Enhancing
our solutions. We intend to continue to enhance our solutions with new functionality and features leveraging our own teams,
partnerships and acquisitions. We will continue to dedicate significant resources to research and development to bolster our existing
applications and drive new opportunities for innovation on behalf of our clients.
Expanding
into new categories / specialties / markets. We are focused on always reassessing the market landscape, seeking new opportunities
to meet the needs of the clients in our addressable market with our products and services. This means developing new and exciting
technologies, launching new services, entering new specialties that can leverage our solutions and enable growth for our clients
or expanding into adjacent markets that we may not serve today.
Expanding
our client base. We believe the market for our expansive value proposition is underserved, and we will continue to make
investments to capture market share. We will invest in our sales and marketing activities, partners, and products to expand our
client footprint.
Extending
our relationships with existing clients. We intend to increase the number of SaaS subscription licenses and services purchased
by our current clients as they use our solutions. We are also focused on converting SaaS clients into higher revenue per client
offerings such as revenue cycle management and other business services. This expansion of services typically represents an
increase in overall revenue per client.
Strengthening
our client community. We realize that our success is tied directly to our clients’ success. Accordingly, a substantial
portion of our highly trained and educated workforce is devoted to client service.
Leveraging
significant cost advantages provided by our technology and global workforce. Our unique business model includes our web-based
software and a cost-effective offshore workforce located primarily in Pakistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (together, the “Pakistan
Offices”). We believe that this operating model provides us with significant cost advantages compared to other revenue cycle
management companies and it allows us to significantly reduce the operational costs of the companies we acquire.
Pursue
acquisitions. We intend to continue to pursue acquisitions over time. As with most of our acquisition transactions, our
goal is to retain the acquired clients over the long-term and migrate those clients to our platforms soon after closing and cross-sell
our products and services to this newly acquired client base.
Developing
our partner ecosystem. We offer an integrated partner ecosystem providing healthcare organizations access to a variety
of innovative solutions that complement our suite of products and services. Our partner ecosystem is a comprehensive collection
of apps, services, specialty solutions, and clinical connections. This is an integral part of our vision to be the premier cloud-based
platform for healthcare.
Additionally,
given the nature of our large data repository, which is ever-growing as each patient encounter is captured, we will begin utilizing
this data to provide clinical and other process insights that will drive improvements in day-to-day workflows of our clients.
We may build or partner for some or all of these solutions as we continue to broaden our product set. In the longer term, we also
envision how this will allow for frictionless flow of information, care-coordination capabilities between medical providers and
their patients supplanting what is today a very archaic paper, phone and fax-based infrastructure still deployed at scale in the
industry.
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Our
Offerings
Our
solutions are designed to systematically drive clinical quality and patient outcomes, while streamlining staff and provider workflows
and reimbursements, to support different settings of care and healthcare models. Our product and service strategy is simple: we
build products and deliver solutions that meet clients where their needs are.
Our
product and services portfolio is organized across four critical areas:
Core
Software Products - the core systems that power medical practices across clinical, financial and patient workflows, including
our Practice Management systems, Electronic Health Records solutions and our Patient Experience Management applications.
Tech-enabled
& Business Services - software-enabled revenue cycle management offerings and other business services, such as medical
coding, credentialing, authorization management and the like. These solutions are geared to drive patient and insurance collections
across the reimbursement life cycle.
Our
Apps and App Ecosystem Partners - additional proprietary software products, including our business intelligence platform,
robotic process automation bots, telemedicine applications, mobile apps and more of those applications that consume our APIs or
other interfaces built by the market at large.
On-demand
Workforce (MTBC Force) - leveraging our unique resources, and in turn selling this capacity at scale directly to partners
and clients at a reduced rate as compared to other competitors in the same space. These on-demand workforce capabilities include
offshore engineering capacity for development and offshore revenue cycle management operations personnel.
This
categorization approach allows us to be both methodical and nimble across medical specialties and market segments while providing
us a framework to create solution sets for the market today and, more importantly, for what our clients will need tomorrow.
We
believe that our fully integrated solutions uniquely address the challenges in the industry. Our solutions are designed to simplify
the complexities inherent in the claim reimbursement process and thereby deliver objectively superior results, such as reduced
claim denial rates, improved client days in accounts receivable, reduced patient no-shows, increased well visit encounters and
reimbursements.
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Our
fully integrated suite of technology and business service solutions is designed to enable healthcare practices to thrive in the
midst of a rapidly changing environment in which managing reimbursements, clinical workflows and day-to-day administrative tasks
is becoming increasingly complex, costly and time-consuming. Moreover, in most cases the standard fee for our complete, integrated,
end-to-end solution is based upon a percentage of a practice’s healthcare-related revenues, with a monthly minimum fee,
plus a nominal one-time setup fee, and is competitively priced.
Additional
Business Services
Group
Purchasing Organization. MTBC’s group purchasing organization (GPO) is a trusted partner to more than 4,000 physician
and mid-level provider members. Our GPO includes our negotiation of discounts with pharmaceutical manufacturers, along with other
products and services that can benefit a medical practice.
Research
and Development
Our
research and development focus is on enhancing and expanding our service offerings while ensuring all offerings meet regulatory
compliance standards. We continually update our software and technology infrastructures, regularly execute releases of new software
enhancements and adapt our offerings to better serve our medical group and health system clients confronting rapid changes in
the healthcare market space.
Our
agile software development life cycle methodology is designed to ensure that each software release is properly designed, built,
tested, and released. Our product, engineering, quality assurance and DevOps teams are located both onshore and offshore. We complement
our internal efforts with services from third-party technology providers for infrastructure, healthcare ecosystem connectivity
needs such as labs and prescriptions, or specific application requirements.
We
also employ product management, user experience and product marketing personnel who work continually on improvements to our products
and services design.
Clients
We
estimate that as of December 31, 2020, we provided services to approximately 40,000 providers (which we define as physicians,
nurses, nurse practitioners, therapists, physician assistants and other clinicians that render bills for their services) practicing
in approximately 2,600 independent medical practices and hospitals, representing 80 specialties and subspecialties in 50 states.
In
addition, we served approximately 200 clients that are not medical practices, but are primarily service organizations who serve
the healthcare community. The foregoing numbers include clients leveraging any of our products or services, and are based in part
upon estimates where the precise number of practices or providers is unknown.
We
service clients ranging from small practices to large groups and health systems. Our clients span from the single doctor independent
medical practice to a large 2,200 provider of physical, occupational and speech therapy services organization located across multiple
states, and a large major academic medical institution with a service area covering millions of patients.
Sales
and Marketing
We
have developed sales and marketing capabilities aimed at driving growth in our client base, including small medical practices,
large groups, and health systems. We expect to expand by selling our complete suite of services to new clients and up-selling
additional services into our existing client base. We have a direct sales force, which we augment through our MTBC Force deals
and partner initiatives and marketing campaigns.
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Our
Growth Levers
We
believe that we are in a great position to grow by executing across several growth vectors:
●
Organic
Sales
●
Partnerships
●
Acquisitions
Organic
Growth and Direct Sales.
We
have organized our sales force into different segments for sales of all of our products and services in order to best address
our clients’ needs and our markets. With this design, our sales team can address a client’s specific needs, whether
a new client is seeking our products or services for the first time, or a current client in need of additional solutions.
Our
marketing team operates in support of our sales force and provides specialized demand generation capabilities for product marketing
and sales efforts. Our sales approach is consultative in nature for most of our offerings, which generally includes needs analysis
for prospective clients, crafting service proposals, and negotiating contracts that culminates in the commencement of services.
Partnerships.
In addition to our direct sales force, we maintain business relationships with third parties that utilize, promote or
support our sales or services within specific industries or geographic regions. Some of these partners are customers through MTBC
Force and others are more traditional channel partners who help promote our solutions. We believe we can further accelerate organic
growth through industry participants, whereby we utilize them as channel partners to offer integrated solutions to their clients.
We have entered into such arrangements with industry participants, and from which we began to derive revenue from them starting
in mid-2014. We have developed application interfaces with numerous EHR systems, together with device and lab integration to support
these relationships.
Acquisitions.
The Healthcare IT service industry is highly fragmented, with many local and regional RCM companies serving small medical
practices and hospitals. We believe that the industry is ripe for consolidation and that we can achieve significant growth through
acquisitions. We further believe that it is becoming increasingly difficult for traditional RCM companies, together with a variety
of other healthcare industry vendors and healthcare IT companies, to meet the growing technology and business service needs of
healthcare providers without a significant investment in an information technology infrastructure and the utilization of a talented,
cost-efficient global team. Since the Company went public in July 2014, we have completed 16 transactions, acquiring complementary
assets to grow our business. We typically leverage our technology and our cost-effective offshore team to quickly deliver additional
value to the newly acquired customer base, while reducing costs. Often, we will incur initial costs associated with the integration
of the acquired business with our existing operations, but this early investment is designed to increase customer satisfaction
and retention, while laying the foundation for long-term accretion.
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Competition
The
market for practice management, EHR and RCM solutions and related services is highly competitive, and we expect competition to
increase in the future. We face competition from other providers of both integrated and stand-alone practice management, EHR and
RCM solutions, including competitors who utilize a web-based platform and providers of locally installed software systems.
Many
of our competitors have longer operating histories, greater brand recognition and greater financial, marketing. We also compete
with various regional RCM companies, some of which may continue to consolidate and expand into broader markets. We expect that
competition will continue to increase as a result of incentives provided by various governmental initiatives, and consolidation
in both the information technology and healthcare industries. In addition, our competitive edge could be diminished or completely
lost if our competition develops similar offshore operations in Pakistan or other countries, such as India and the Philippines,
where labor costs are lower than those in the U.S. (although higher than in Pakistan). Pricing pressures could negatively impact
our margins, growth rate and market share.
We
believe we have a competitive advantage, as we are able to deliver our industry-leading solutions at competitive prices because
we leverage a combination of our proprietary software, which automates our workflows and increases efficiency, together with a
global team that includes more than 600 experienced health industry experts onshore. These experts are supported by our highly
educated and specialized offshore workforce of approximately 3,100 team members at labor costs that we believe are approximately
one-tenth the cost of comparable U.S. employees.
Our
unique business model has allowed us to become a leading consolidator in our industry sector, gaining us a reputation for acquiring
and positively transforming distressed competitors into profitable operations of MTBC.
Employees
Including
the employees of our subsidiaries, as of December 2020, the Company employed approximately 3,700 people worldwide on a full-time
basis. We also utilize the services of a small number of part time employees. In addition, all officers of the Company work on
a full-time basis. Over the next twelve months, we anticipate increasing our total number of employees only if our revenues increase,
our operating requirements warrant such hiring, or we are hiring for specific functions where we place additional emphasis, such
as marketing and sales.
Voting
Rights of Our Directors, Executive Officers, and Principal Stockholders
As
of December 31, 2020, approximately 40% of both the shares of our common stock and voting power of our common stock are held by
our directors and executive officers. Therefore, they have the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders
for approval, including the election of our directors, as well as the overall management and direction of our Company.
Corporate
Information
We
were incorporated in Delaware on September 28, 2001 under the name Medical Transcription Billing, Corp., and legally changed our
name to MTBC, Inc. on February 6, 2019. Our principal executive offices are located at 7 Clyde Road, Somerset, New Jersey 08873,
and our telephone number is (732) 873-5133. Our website address is www.mtbc.com. Information contained on, or that can be accessed
through, our website is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and you should not consider information
on our website to be part of this document.
MTBC,
MTBC.com, A Unique Healthcare IT Company, CareCloud and other trademarks and service marks of MTBC appearing in this Annual Report
on Form 10-K are the property of MTBC. Trade names, trademarks and service marks of other companies appearing in this Annual Report
on Form 10-K are the property of their respective holders.
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We
were an emerging growth company as defined in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act until December
31, 2019. As a smaller reporting company and a non-accelerated filer, we may take advantage of specified reduced reporting requirements
and are relieved of certain other significant requirements that are otherwise generally applicable to public companies, including
not being required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, as amended,
reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our Annual Report, periodic reports and proxy statements and
providing only two years of audited financial statements in our Annual Report and our periodic reports.
Where
You Can Find More Information
Our
website, which we use to communicate important business information, can be accessed at: www.mtbc.com. We make our Annual Reports
on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and all amendments to those reports available free of
charge on or through our website as soon as reasonably practicable after such material is electronically filed with or furnished
to the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Materials we file with or furnish to the SEC may also be read and
copied at the SEC’s Public Reference Room at 100 F Street, NE, Washington, D.C. 20549. Information on the operation of the
Public Reference Room may be obtained by calling the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330. Also, the SEC Internet website (www.sec.gov) contains
reports, proxy and information statements, and other information that we file electronically with the SEC.
Text extracted from the filing as submitted to EDGAR. Formatting, tables and exhibits are simplified for reading; the original document is authoritative for anything you rely on.