Leadership

Daniel Catalano, M.D., FACOG
Founding Partner & Physician Consultant

Dr. Daniel Catalano has over 30 years of experience as a physician, physician executive and consultant. In the past 7 years, he has directed the implementation of more than 31 Clinical Documentation Improvement programs. He has developed specific expertise in CDI Programs at children's hospitals in the past several years and has implemented programs at several of the top children's hospitals in the United States. Dr. Catalano has done more Pediatric-specific programs than any other educator in the country. His appreciation of the unique nature of Pediatric medicine as a set of subspecialties in Pediatrics rather than a specialty of Adult Medicine has served well to engage the providers at every facility he has served. He has spoken at both National and State level conferences, including the Children's Hospital Association, regarding clinical documentation integrity for physicians.

Dr. Catalano's experience has a physician executive has helped him bridge the gap between administration and medical staff regarding the need for more accurate and specific documentation. He served as Medical Director and VPMA/ Chief Medical Officer within two hospital systems, developing and managing the Clinical Documentation Improvement Program within one of these systems. In addition, he has extensive experience in electronic medical record implementation for providers and has been a physician team leader in multiple electronic health record installations. This has been a great help in assisting facilities in their transition to capturing ICD-10 specific documentation within their EMR.

A graduate of Loma Linda University School of Medicine, he performed his internship and residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology. After serving in the United States Air Force, Dr. Catalano was in private practice for 13 years, holding various medical staff leadership positions during this time, and developing expertise in pelvic reconstruction and minimally invasive surgery. He left practice to take an administrative position where he felt he could help physicians and administrators deal with the challenges of change in medicine.

Dr. Catalano believes that it is the provider's responsibility to accurately and specifically document in the medical record, but that most have not had any formal education regarding this need. His desire is to help them understand why it should be important to them to excel in documentation as well as in their practice of medicine.

Shane Catalano, BSN, RN
Founding Partner & Nurse Consultant

Shane Catalano has worked in the field of Documentation Improvement since 2008 as a consultant in both pediatric and adult facilities. Developing relationships with providers to help them better understand why they are being asked to clarify their documentation and know what is expected is important to Shane. She enjoys teaching the pathophysiology of disease that adds to the understanding of the interplay of various diagnoses that are encountered in a complex patient.

Shane Catalano obtained her RN in 1976 and proceeded to practice in Pediatric Intensive Care, ER/ Trauma, OR/ RR, GI Lab, Organ Procurement and several other areas of nursing in staff and management positions, primarily in tertiary care centers. While working for a large multispecialty group, she developed a program for Tertiary Case Management, initiated and implemented a Utilization Management program and formed a Quality Management department bringing the group to full delegation in the managed care arena. For several years she was a clinical analyst at a major university medical center performing development and management of a cost effective practice system, assisting physicians and administration in decision processes, inpatient practice protocols and practice efficiency. Most recently, Shane has provided expertise to the development of Pediatric CDI programs including many of the top 10 children's hospitals in the United States.

Ashley Ezell, MBA, BSN, RN, CCDS
Nurse Consultant

Ashley Ezell has over 24 years of nursing experience as a registered nurse in the areas of emergency medicine, pediatrics and primary care. In addition, twelve of those years have been spent as a clinical documentation specialist and consultant. She has been a principal team member involved with implementation of more than 20 CDI programs at medical centers of various size, including five of the nation's leading pediatric hospitals. She has also had the opportunity to continue working as a clinical documentation specialist to provide additional documentation support and expertise to the physicians and CDI staff in several of the pediatric hospitals after program implementation.

She provides expertise in implementation of clinical documentation integrity programs in pediatric, acute care, and long term acute care (LTACH) facilities; denial management in private physicians' offices and hospitals; Value Based Purchasing consulting, creating and implementing a Pre-bill Compliance Audit Program, auditing for physician Evaluation and Management and an Inpatient Rehabilitative Medicine corporation that was under a Corporate Integrity Agreement.

Ms. Ezell earned her BSN from the University of Alabama and her MBA from University of Phoenix.

John P. Glatthorn
Project Director

John P. Glatthorn is a project director handling all contracting, revenue cycle and project management aspects of our consulting engagements. In addition to managing internal operations, Mr. Glatthorn has consulting specialties in the long term analysis of ICD-10 on the revenue cycle, diagnosis specificity education and surgical documentation enhancement. John has direct experience optimizing pediatric surgical documentation and leads our EHR/Billing System enhancement team. Previous to joining SMRT Doc he was the contracted program manager for the health system wide transition to ICD-10 at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Mr. Glatthorn has over has over 10 years' experience as both a project manager and program manager in both the private practice and enterprise health system fields. John is also the former COO of a physician group practice where he was responsible for all revenue cycle operations and compliance. Mr. Glatthorn has managed both domestic and international engagements with autonomous budgets of two million dollars or greater and is also a principal contributor to the Unicode Health Prohibited Code List project.

He holds a BSBA cum laude from Drexel University and is a graduate of the executive education for healthcare professionals program at Cornell. He is a contributing member of the Elsevier Revenue Cycle Advisory Board and has regularly lectured on healthcare topics over the last 8 years including appearances at HIMSS, AHIMA, ACDIS and PMI. John was also voted 2011 HIMSS New England Speaker of the Year.