Page 7 - DME Pharmacy, December 2019

patient, plus nine hours of training that will be offered in a group setting unless one of the following exceptions applies:
• No DSMT group class is available for two months or longer from the date on the referral.
• The referring provider indicates on the referral that the beneficiary has one or more barriers to group learning; such as reduced vision, hear- ing or cognition; a language barrier; or the patient is non-ambulatory.
• The referring provider indicates on the referral that the beneficiary needs additional insulin training.
Patients who complete the first 12-month period may qualify for up to two hours of follow-up training each calendar year after that. To qualify for reimbursement, the patients’ physicians must certify that they have diabetes (a pre-diabetes diagnosis is not eligible), write a prescription
for the classes, and you have to be accredited as a DSMT provider. You will have to bring on a dietician, nutritionist or diabetes educator to do training; that can be a staff member or a contractor, as long as it meets the legal requirements and your patients’ needs. That trainer will need 15 hours of specialized continuing education.
You may want to enlarge your consultation space or add new features. Instead of a hard-edged cubicle, you may want a room with comfy chairs and soothing music. You may even want to carve out a dedicated space for classes, counseling and just to let patients decompress from the overload of managing a chronic condition — especially if they are newly diagnosed.
“Their business needs to feel like a medical community center, a space
where they can take a newly diagnosed patient and explain to them how to test and how to do a shot,” Anderson says.
You may also need to do some community networking. While you probably won’t be providing exercise or cooking classes, you will be expected to point patients to resources that will. Those might include everything from Internal or external group meetings, locally or online; ongoing medication management; continuing education; physical activity programs; weight loss support; smoking cessation options; public facili- ties like swimming pools or Parcourse trails; diabetes magazines, websites or apps; and even grocery stores.
STICKING TO THE SCRIPT
You’ll have to develop a care plan for each patient, but it’s likely many will have common elements. Setting personal goals helps patients keep their eyes on the prize and stick to their plans. Instead of aiming for marks on meters and scales, help patients set goals such as, “‘I want to be healthy enough to play with my grandson,’ or ‘I want to not be winded or so overweight that I can’t go up a flight of stairs,’” Canally says. “In all of our programs, we set patient goals about what matters most to them.”
It may come as a surprise, but not everybody can cook. Your younger diabetes patients may have grown up eating fast food, microwaved pizza and swilling soda (see “What’s For Lunch?”on page Rx8) Bringing in a nutritionist to do a class on healthy food choices is an example of group training, while learning to cook healthy could be an individual goal.
“make sure the patient care they provide doesn’t stop af- ter the initial order,” Dopplick says. “The solution should be one that promotes the patient being adherent to their therapy, and assures that they are getting consistent receipt of the necessary supplies.”
As Universal’s Anderson puts it, with a good resupply program “They are not going to go somewhere else. Rounding out that resupply technology wraps your arms around the patient in a hug.”
You’ve probably looked to your distributors for drop- shipping and private label service for a while, but you may not know about new features they offer. Universal also partners with McKesson to offer its VerbalCare resupply app.
“We see those big companies developing in these patient care areas,” Anderson says. “McKesson has recently developed VerbalCare. It’s an app with three buttons. It gives you reminders about your diabetes, when you are eligible for new supplies and things like that. It streamlines the process in a way that feels very accessible.” It also lets providers send educational materials, surveys and troubleshooting videos.
“Providers that adopt a resupply program should see benefits in efficiency. Especially if they are supporting multiple product lines, being able to put all their resupply in the same workflow is truly a big benefit,” Dopplick says. A resupply program can help reduce staff labor and error rates while creating a record that helps the provider keep track.
Brightree ReSupply started in the sleep space, but was recently expanded to support product lines for dia- betic, enteral and incontinence products. It has robust
patient contact features as well as back-end analytics that can help you manage staff and revenue, spot trends and set benchmarks for your business.
The suite includes features including a brandable, web-based patient portal that lets patients place resup- ply orders anytime, anywhere; live patient outreach including the ability to create sales orders with Bright- ree agents; advanced voice recognition (VR) technology for automated, no-touch resupply orders; a scheduled order feature that lets patients to request and receive orders on a regular cycle; email; and a “guided calling assistant” that helps you manage outbound contacts and call-in or walk-in patients, using payer-compliant scripts to generate orders based on patient responses. A recent addition is the PatientHub app, a mobile extension of ReSupply. “Patient Hub gives us the ability to reach out to the patient in a mobile environment,” Dopplick says.
“There is an integration piece that lets the patient see what they are ordering, when they are ordering it, updating the dates when they are eligible and doing
the whole app can see that happen,” she says.
“There’s also the validation piece, where it’s going through and confirming things like insurance eligibility, confirming what products, doing those things behind the scenes that traditionally the provider would have
to handle manually.”
For providers new to the mobile space, Universal of- fers a “sandbox” area to let clients try out new apps and features in a safe environment. “It fills in the gaps of some of the grey areas.” Anderson says. “A salesperson can tell you all the features but this lets clients try things out.”
Both software providers offer support to integrate new features into your office software, train your staff to use them and support new regulations and payer requirements as they come up.
hme-business.com
DME Pharmacy | December 2019 7
To learn more about expanding re-supply revenues into other areas such as diabe- tes care, check out episode 007 of the HME Business Podcast, “Expanding Resupply Revenues Beyond Sleep Therapy.” You can listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and any other major podcast app, or at hmebusinesspodcast.libsyn.com.
“A really good
resupply pro-
gram should
create for a pro-
vider a depend-
able, recurring,
low-touch rev-
enue stream that allows them to maximize any revenue gains that are available.”
— Morgan Dopplick, Brightree