Page 6 - DME Pharmacy, December 2019
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The Compliance Team, Inc., is getting ready to do DSMT accreditation. “We are the first provider-accreditor to be approved,” Canally says. “I look for revenue streams for both The Compliance Team and our custom- ers. We already accredit pharmacies and DMEs. This is an add-on to what we already offer.”
Canally is expecting CMS to approve the company’s Medicare Dia- betes Education Provider (MDEP) accreditation program early next year. That gives clients some time to set the stage before raising the curtain on your new act. It may be a major undertaking so Canally recommends getting your Rockettes in a row as soon as you can. “It typically would take that long to get...their policies in place and get patients enrolled in
WHAT DOES IT TAKE?
You should be ready to become the patient’s bridge between the care provider and real life. Busy care providers may explain the disease to the patient, tell them what they need to do, write a script and send them out the door. Imagine being that patient: you just found out you have a dis- ease, the consequences of not changing your behavior are terrifying, and you have no idea who to ask for help.
“It can be very overwhelming. You’re pushed through a lot of appoint- ments with your doctor and then you go home,” says Lisa Anderson, Education & Outreach coordinator at Universal Software Solutions, Inc. “Patients are looking for someone to tell them how to do it; things their doctors are not telling them.”
Being a diabetes hub will mean your business will have to develop a more intimate relationship with diabetes patients. It involves individual goal-setting, practical education, advising about diet and exercise, out- reach, cheerleading and measuring progress. You’ll be helping patients with things like weight management and risk factors like obesity and smok- ing. In short, trying to replace unhealthy habits with healthy ones — and that’s in addition to providing products designed to address their needs.
The benefit lets you offer training and services up to 10 hours per pa- tient in the first year, which translates to $350 to $450 per patient, Canally says. The training consists of one hour of one-on-one counseling with the
classes and so forth“ to be ready for accreditation.
“If they’re just doing strips and
meters, they need to think seriously about adding diabetic shoes, the
insulin pumps, the other DME
items. Before they can bill for those items they need to be accredited for those as well.”
— Sandra Canally, RN, The Compliance Team
THE PERSONAL TOUCH
New technology can bring you closer to your patients and reduce staff labor and eBrror rates at the same time
ack in the day, you contacted all your patients by phone or when they came into the store and sent bills by mail. That’s still fine for some customers, but the changing demographics of
diabetes patients mean it’s not enough.
“There’s people who like face-to-face interaction,
they want a phone call or to come in so they really feel cared for. We see that changing now. While we still see those people who want to come in and get their informa- tion, we see a lot of younger people who don’t want to return five voicemails,” says Lisa Anderson, Education & Outreach coordinator at Universal Software Solutions, Inc. “It’s no longer ‘all your clients are elderly.’”
Serving a large population of young diabetes patients may mean adopting some enemy tactics (See What’s For Lunch? on page Rx8) to win the battle. Patients from babies to boomers are glued to their digital technology. They’re spoiled to instant response, used to communi- cating by text, watching video screens, and expecting overnight home delivery. You think that’s competition you can’t crack? Wrong. There’s an app for that.
“It’s a misperception of small companies is that they would need a programmer to create these tools,” An- derson says. That’s Universal’s niche in the market. The company started with billing software, but expanded into workflow and data management with the Health-
care Data Management System (HDMS). Now Universal aggressively pursues partners for add-ons that it can scale to any size business. The company’s products are designed to integrate with your business software, to give you a cafeteria of digital options to help you reach your target patients with cutting-edge technology.
“I can’t tell you how many people say, ‘we really struggle with this’ and I can tell them we already have a solution for that,” Anderson says. “You don’t have to be a big hospital to take advantage of those tools...You can have all the integration and all of the tech that your larger competitors have, and we will tell you how to use it, in simple terms.”
Phone calls may still fit the preferences of some customers, but clients who are (or whom you want to encourage to be) more active want their contacts and services on the go. Your outreach arsenal needs to include email, text and fast home resupply. “It has to be easy and transparent,” Anderson says.
One example is Play-It Health, which is actually a Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) app that a doctor designed to help physicians track their patients. It gives both the patient and doctor a window to track how the patient is doing as well as giving patients medication and appointment reminders and letting care providers send encouraging messages, nutritional plans and education- al items with reward-based quizzes. It can also link to connected devices from CPAP devices to scales to track and access that information, and let patients ask the pro- vider questions about symptoms or other issues.
“When they log in or use the app, they can get tips, read articles and get recipes. It gives you points for
adherence,” Anderson says. “Ultimately, what that does is it crates healthier people, less trips to the hospital. They’re connected to a community and providers.”
If your system isn’t built to hold a lot of new digital content, Universal can do that for you in Stowpoint,
a storage offering that lets you keep video, audio and other digital files in the cloud. That gives you space to stash documents and photos of patient insurance cards as well as offer your patients training and reminders they can access any time, anywhere.
Offering a resupply program can harness patient con- venience to make your job easier, which can help your small business compete on Amazon turf. The tools your software providers offer can make it painless for you, meet patients on their own terms and create a record that can hold up to audit. Even better, soon you won’t be limited to an in-store experience, because the upcoming round of competitive bidding removes the national mail- order restriction.
“A really good resupply program should create for
a provider a dependable, recurring, low-touch revenue stream that allows them to maximize any revenue gains that are available,” says Morgan Dopplick, Brightree’s director of Connect Operations.
According to Brightree research, 60 percent of patients have never been offered a resupply program, and 61 percent of those say they’d like to give it a try. That’s an opportunity for you, because nearly as many patients who opt in to a resupply program are still with it 20 months later. By Brightree’s calculation, that adds an average of $224 a year per patient in revenue.
A resupply system also helps pharmacists and DMEs
6 December 2019 | DME Pharmacy
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