Lionel White has a number in mind: 10X.

As Founder and CEO of Urgent Flex, the investment group he started with his college business partner, White is building a national hyperbaric oxygen therapy platform under the HYOX Medical Treatment Center brand. The plan is to grow the facility footprint tenfold over the next few years.

They have three locations across Florida and Georgia today with plans for a national platform. And underneath all of it, a credentialing operation that has to scale just as fast.

Here is how HYOX uses Accel Health to credential providers, centralize provider data, and prepare for payer rate negotiations as it grows, without putting a single in-house credentialing specialist on payroll.

Why Hyperbaric Medicine Runs on Credentialing

White chose hyperbaric medicine deliberately, and the mission is a large part of why. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy touches an unusually wide range of patients: radiation therapy patients healing damaged tissue, chronic wound and diabetic ulcer patients, diving accident cases, and sudden hearing loss cases.

Almost all of that volume arrives by referral. Wound care clinics, oncologists, ENTs, podiatrists, and primary care physicians send patients to HYOX for a course of treatment, then continue managing their care alongside it. That makes referring physicians the center of the business.

It also makes credentialing central to the business. A provider has to be enrolled and in network before a referral can convert into a treated patient. Insurance reimbursement is the heart of the model, and no provider can bill until the enrollment is done.

White's focus has already shifted from opening the next site to building the systems, SOPs, and infrastructure that will let the company scale rapidly and uniformly, with every location performing consistently. Credentialing was near the top of that list.

The Challenge: Provider Credentials Buried in an Inbox

Before Accel Health, HYOX relied on an independent credentialer. The work got done, but the arrangement left White without real ownership of his own data.

"Before Accel Health, our credentialing data lived in someone else's inbox. It's my information, but if I needed a document three months later, I was digging through emails trying to find it. That doesn't work when you're trying to scale."

Lionel White, Founder & CEO, Urgent Flex

As Urgent Flex prepared to grow, that model became untenable. Every new location and every new provider would multiply the paperwork. The company needed credentialing to be a system, not a scavenger hunt.

The Build-Versus-Buy Math Most Groups Get Wrong

The default move for a multi-site group at this stage is to hire. Bring credentialing in house, put a specialist on payroll, and get control of the process that way.

The problem is what that hire actually costs. A full-time credentialing specialist runs well over $70,000 a year (total compensation, including benefits and payroll taxes), before you add software and the management time it takes to keep the function running. And that is for one person: one set of payer relationships, one workload ceiling, one point of failure when someone takes PTO or leaves.

For a company planning to 10X its footprint, one specialist does not stay sufficient for long. Two locations become six. Six become twenty. Every jump means either another hire or a backlog of applications sitting between a new provider and their first billable patient.

HYOX skipped that entirely. For a fraction of the cost of a single full-time employee, the company gets the expertise of dozens of credentialing specialists, plus the platform that keeps all of it organized. There is no recruiting cycle, no ramp period, no coverage gap, and no fixed headcount cost that has to be absorbed before a new location is producing revenue. Capacity scales with the footprint instead of arriving in $70,000-plus salary increments.

Why Accel Health: The Platform Is the Difference

White is clear-eyed about what sets Accel Health apart. Skilled credentialers exist. A skilled credentialer with a purpose-built platform behind them is a different product entirely.

Accel Health combines the expertise of dozens of credentialing specialists with automation that primary-source verifies documents, tracks enrollment status in real time, and keeps every provider's information organized, monitored, and instantly retrievable in one place.

"Anyone can hire a great credentialer. What makes Accel Health unique is the platform. It's the single source of truth for all of our provider information."

Lionel White, Founder & CEO, Urgent Flex

For White's team, the difference shows up in everyday moments. Onboarding a new provider used to mean chasing paperwork. Now it is one email with a link. The provider uploads their documents, and Accel Health takes it from there.

White likes the platform enough that he is extending it beyond the credentialing team. He plans to give his HR team access so doctor information is available whenever they need it. He has also asked Accel Health to migrate provider records from a newly acquired facility into the platform, even though those providers do not currently need active credentialing work, purely so all provider data lives in one system with primary source verification and continuous monitoring running on autopilot.

From Repository to Leverage: Payer Rate Negotiations

For White, centralized provider data is not just about tidiness. It is negotiating power.

Every year, open enrollment gives the company a chance to push payers for better reimbursement rates. The deciding factor is often simply being organized enough to fight.

"Every year we have an opportunity to fight for higher reimbursement rates. When your data is scattered everywhere, just pulling it together takes away all the energy you need for the fight. With everything organized in Accel Health, we can walk into payer negotiations prepared to win."

Lionel White, Founder & CEO, Urgent Flex

With Accel Health, HYOX can view every provider by billing entity or practice location, with enrollment records and payer relationships organized in one dashboard. When rate renewal season arrives, the preparation is already done.

What's Next: 10X Growth With Accel Health

White can't wait to bring more providers onto the platform, and the roadmap gives him plenty of opportunity. As HYOX opens and acquires new locations on its path to 10X growth, Accel Health will add each new billing entity and location alongside the company, credentialing and stacking providers as the footprint grows.

"We're looking to 10X in the next two years, and I want partners who can scale with us. Accel Health is one of them."

Lionel White, Founder & CEO, Urgent Flex

As HYOX grows from three locations into a national platform, one thing is already settled. Accel Health is its credentialing platform of choice, and it will be there for every provider, every location, and every payer along the way.

"I don't just like the platform, I love it."

Lionel White, Founder & CEO, Urgent Flex

Accel Health is the credentialing platform for growing healthcare organizations: credentialing automation, primary source verification, and continuous monitoring, all off the spreadsheet and in one place. To see how it works for a multi-site group, take a look at the Accel Health platform or book a demo.

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