MONTGOMERY: Health care promotion takes flight

By Lauren Otis, Staff Writer
   MONTGOMERY — Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … a health-care services promotion.
   That airplane circling overhead with the purple decoration scheme is the newest corporate asset of Somerset-based MTBC, a health-care IT company.
   ”This is part of our creative marketing efforts to promote ourselves,” said Michael Menche, MTBC vice president, sales & marketing, as he gazed upon the company’s seven-seat twin-engine Aero Commander that sat parked in a hanger at Princeton Airport last Friday.
   But the plane isn’t just for show, Mr. Menche said. With clients in 40 states, from Hawaii to the East Coast, “we need to be meeting them on a moment’s notice,” he said. The plane “is very efficient for us from a practical standpoint,” he said.
   Founded in 1999, MTBC is a medical billing company that will help doctors manage and maximize collections electronically, working with both insurance companies and patients, Mr. Menche said. The company improves and speeds up billing and payment, freeing up the doctor’s staff from this time-consuming responsibility, he said.
   MTBC also will set up and maintain Web sites for doctors, enabling patients to make appointments, receive paperless prescriptions and conduct other business online, Mr. Menche said. “We bring Web-based functionality to doctors offices and hospitals,” he said.
   The company is “innovating at a real basic level,” Mr. Menche said, adding “Central New Jersey is in many ways a cradle of health care innovation and we are a new player in that.”
   As it flies around the country, the MTBC plane is “outfitted to be a promotional vehicle,” Mr. Menche said. MTBC already has an ambulance and a car decked out similarly, he said.
   MTBC’s corporate colors and descriptions of its services, i.e. “Medical Billing,” cover the plane. The decoration isn’t painted on, but is the result of a laminate wrap, Mr. Menche pointed out. “Why do we wrap this plane? We market dynamically to match our IT dynamism,” Mr. Menche said.
   In an economy when corporate planes don’t necessarily drum up associations company executives want to communicate to the public, Mr. Menche insisted MTBC’s company plane was different. For one, it is a propeller plane not a jet.
   ”One is a luxury toy, ours is not,” he said.