Page 24 - HME Business, Jan/Feb 2019

Keeping Pace with HME’s KPIs
provider see overall how many of their claims
are being denied and set an objective for either maintaining a healthy claim denial percentage or decreasing an unhealthy one.
These are neither all the KPIs available to HME providers, nor the only ones to which they should pay attention, but they represent a good starting place. Providers should choose KPIs based on what’s relevant to them and apply KPIs in areas of the business where they can affect change. Moreover, many HME software solutions let providers customize their KPIs to help them zero in on what’s important to their individual business.
USING SOFTWARE STRATEGICALLY
Keeping track of all of these KPIs can be overwhelming. Fortunately, HME software solu- tions can help providers better streamline and interpret their data into useful information. CU’s
24 HMEBusiness | January/February 2019 | hme-business.com
Harrison notes that “while a generic system
may include some general financial tools, an HME-specific software solution is more likely to help a provider monitor and respond to the KPIs that are most impactful to its strategic goals.”
For example, many providers are looking to develop strategies to reduce delivery costs, according to Harrison.
“Many of them are seeing significant oppor- tunities to attack KPIs in that area with advanced routing and load optimization, and payment at the point of delivery — and it takes a very robust integrated system to accommodate and monitor those things,” she notes.
John Griscavage, CEO of software firm Playmaker, lays out three areas of data collection that HME software can monitor to help providers effectively create as successful a sale’s program as possible:
First, Griscavage says “there’s the market data, which is the intelligence of what referral trends look like in the community.” This helps providers figure out whom to target and how to think stra- tegically about how to do it.
The second area of provider data that Griscavage recommends providers watch is referral management data, which shows them the activity of their reps and sales managers in the field.
The last source of data, Griscavage says is the “patient management system [the electronic medical record system], and pulling that informa- tion in, integrating it into our applications, you can see it all in one place. ... It’s the interplay
of those three things that allow you to have the most effective sales program that you can.”
For Julian Ramos, regional sales manager for Albuquerque provider HME Specialists LLC, market data, and referral data in particular, help him measure his business’s position in
his local market — a qualitative factor that the software turns into quantifiable and actionable information.
“My sales reps can document what happens
in each sales call. Whether it be a fantastic sales call or maybe there’s an issue that we need to resolve, my sales reps can document that,” he explains. “With me having visibility to docu- ments, we’re able to see where we stand in each territory and where we need to improve or where we’re doing great.”
THE VALUE OF A
GOOD DASHBOARD
Most HME software providers make this infor- mation customizable and quickly accessible with
a dashboard, a user interface that displays the provider’s data in real-time, including KPIs that impact cash flow and financial and operational metrics. The purpose of the dashboard, Brightree’s Krishnan says, is to allow “visibility into the lifecycle of a claim in a clear and concise manner.”
With a smart, detailed dashboard, providers can see beyond big-picture metrics such as market and referral data, and drill-down to more granular KPIs that can help drive results.
“At a holistic level, you want to track certain KPIs, and in order to do so, you need to under- stand the variables driving that metric and how metrics impact each other,” Krishnan explains.
For example, inventory turn times feeds directly into cash flow since expensive items sitting on the shelf ties up cash flow. Because these two KPIs are closely connected, they should be monitored concurrently, and dashboards can help providers do that.
Krishnan says when a KPI registers a ‘warning signal’ that “a smart dashboard would then help you effectively drill down the subsection that is causing the impact and lead you to the subset of claims
or resources that need to be corrected. This is an effective top-down approach rather than sifting through claims and hoping to identify issues.”
An important attribute of a dashboard is its ability to quickly furnish and refresh detailed information. As opposed to running a report, a dashboard serves up several key measurements much faster, Universal’s Golen says.
“Reports are still valuable, but running a report does take time and can interfere with other daily duties that are important when you have to stop to take time to run reports just to analyze them,” he explains, adding that to get all the finer details that a dashboard can provide, “you’d have to keep running the report over and over in different ways. But with a dashboard, you have the capa- bility of drilling into it and seeing where the data came from very visibly and very easily.”
With the speedy delivery of key data, providers can make smarter decisions to affect outcomes as the information becomes available to them. Instead of scrambling to meet goals as the deadlines approach, you can consistently monitor progress and make adjustments as needed, before it’s too late to affect results. As Golen says, “More information to make better decisions
“We’re able to see where we stand in each territory and where we need to improve or where we’re doing great.”
— Julian Ramos,
HME Specialists LLC
is at your fingertips.” n
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