By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—Complying with an increasing burden of compliance requirements and credentials from vendors, some organizations, particularly hospitals and their vendors, are turning to Atlanta-based Vendormate to automate the process.
It’s no wonder. A hospital and its vendors have to deal with an entire set of unique government regulations, including the Stark Law anti-kickback statute, the OIG Medicare/Medicaid fraud sanction list, the FDA/USDA recall management list, and pandemic/epidemic readiness. Whew!
Failure to capture and monitor these thousands of documents from hundreds of representatives puts the hospital at risk of failing internal/external audits that can jeopardize Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements and threaten the solvency of a health system.
Vendormate, which graduates from the Atlanta Technology Development Center May 15, started to “help companies better understand who they’re doing business with,” says Andy Monin, president, CEO and founder.
Monin founded the company in early 2005 with initial funding from angel investors. It raised two rounds of capital totaling under $5 million. Monin had previously founded Atlanta-based Broadsource.
“We provide a Web-based application that let’s stakeholders and vendors to register their information, from name and federal I.D. number, Dunn & Bradstreet number, to its business code of conduct, various types of policies required to do business with it, and so on. We take that data and rate them based on a customer’s criteria for risk.
“We’re buying all types of verification data, financial, sanction lists, watch lists. So we can give our customer a better idea of the risk involved in doing business with that company.”
Vendors buy the service, he explains. “It’s much like you submitting credentials when you go to college. Vendors are expected to present their credentials to their customers. They pay a registration fee, which offsets the cost of buying data. So it’s a vendor-funded model.”
The company’s product captures over 150 fields of self-reported data about the vendor business and its representatives. It access more than 1.7 billion public and private records, credentialing financial health, legal status, certificate and licensing and regulatory compliance. Then, it continuously monitors vendor status and alerts buyers of any non-compliance.
The company originally saw a number of verticals as good target markets, including financial, construction and others. However, hospitals, with their set of unique compliance requirements in addition to those every business lives with, proved to be its major market. It has more than 250 hospital customers for its product.
The 45-employee company is hiring constantly, says Monin. He says they have needs on the operations team, account managers, on the support side, the business development side, and a graphic interface developer. “We’re looking to hire a host of people right now,” he says.
The company is close to an agreement on new offices in the Buckhead area of Atlanta when it leaves the ATDC incubator.
Monin speaks highly of the company’s ATDC experience. “It’s been a huge benefit to me and to every person who’s worked here,” he says. “At least 15 percent of our workforce came through some affiliation with ATDC. It also offers you a savings on equity—we didn’t have to raise so much money early on because we had so much here. Not long ago, Jeffrey Hoffman, founder of Priceline.com came in on a Wednesday and talked about he started the company. You don’t get that in a cubicle in a downtown high-rise.”
On the Web: www.vendormate.com
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