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V O L . X X I I N O. X X I S E P T E M B E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 6 24 D r. Dan Mingle knew he was onto something when he founded Mingle Analytics in 2011. Health care costs were spiraling up, and national reimbursers like Medicare were starting to look at the quality of care they were getting for their money. Mingle's timing for his new company couldn't have been better. After closing his Oxford Hills- area physician practice in 1998 and then moving into information technology jobs, including as director of clinical informatics at MaineGeneral Medical Center, he founded Mingle Analytics in South Paris to help health care providers complete complicated Medicare reimbursement submission forms. e company off ers fee-based consulting and software services. e forms, in turn, determine how much Medicare will reimburse the provider, with deduc- tions made for incorrect or lacking information. Mingle, who is president and CEO, says his revenue has already topped $5 million. In the fi rst half of this year alone, the company raised close to $1.75 million via investors and Maine Technology Institute loans to adapt its current software to changes Medicare is making to hone its reimburse- ment system. Medicare will add incentives for good health care outcomes by health care providers. With the new Medicare Merit-based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS, requirements going into eff ect Jan. 1, 2017, Mingle fi gures there will be big demand for his services. He expects revenues to grow 10-fold within fi ve years and current employee ranks of 56 to triple or quadruple. e Medicare submission is like a tax return but it gives Medicare Part B health care quality information, Mingle says. Part B applies to medical practitioner services. ose who don't submit the form or who submit it incorrectly get a lower reim- bursement, so there's an incentive for practitioners to adhere to Medicare's requirements, which is where Mingle's company comes in. ere are about 300 diff erent practice manage- ment systems and about 600 diff erent medical records systems from which the information to sub- mit to Medicare is pulled. Mingle Analytics' software assures that information from those systems con- forms to Medicare's requirements. A simple example that could cause a hiccup, he says, is having an extra space between a patient's fi rst and last name. Another example is referring to the same medical test in dif- ferent ways, for example, a hemoglobin analysis test instead of an A1C test for diabetics. Constraint or growth? Only three years ago, Mingle had entered the Top Gun program at the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development to fi gure out whether to go forward with constrained growth or to take on outside investors to meet the quickly growing demand for his services. With a national market in mind, he decided on the outside money, while still maintaining control of the company. "We expected to have to relocate to Portland within our fi rst two years, and then move farther south," Mingle says. "But we decided why not let people work from home?" About three-quarters of his employees work in Maine, one-quarter in the South Paris headquarters, one-quarter within commuting distance, another quarter working remotely in the rest of Maine and the others in 11 other states, he says. One of his investors, Maine Venture Fund, lauds the distributed employee model, especially for a high-tech, rural Maine company. " ey have great growth potential, and I like the fact that they have successfully deployed a distributed employee model. at's great for rural Maine," says John Burns, managing director of the Maine Venture Fund. "He's got big visions and big plans for this company. ere's always going to be a signifi cant consulting and signifi cant technology development piece around the business, so it's great for economic development [in the state]." Burns consulted with Mingle about taking out- side investment money to grow. He says Mingle had his eye on going national from the get-go. "Mingle sought a lot of counsel on the question of outside money, including me. He saw this is a P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Bringing high-quality jobs to rural Maine Mingle Analytics sees success with distributed employee model B y L o r i V a l i g r a F O C U S Mingle Analytics 24B Market Square, South Paris President/CEO: Dan Mingle, MD Founded: 2011 Employees: 56 Revenue: $5–10 million Product / service: Medicare consulting and software for health care providers Contact: 866-359-4458 info@mingleanalytics.com Dan Mingle, president and CEO of Mingle Analytics, has run a successful high-tech company from rural South Paris by spreading his employees around the state and elsewhere.

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