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says. “If you cannot quickly and easily spot denial trends, your revenue results will never change. Whether you prefer a dashboard or a report, it must be robust and frequent.”
PATIENT RELATIONSHIPS
The information you collect at intake isn’t just for the claim you’re filing today, it‘s an opportunity to start a dialogue with the patient and learn how to build that relationship. The email addresses you collect could be the beginning of an email marketing campaign. Patient comments about information they lack can guide your choice of content for your website or email campaigns.
“With all the data centralized in one place, you have all this demographic information. You have the products that are being used. You can now actually do targeted marketing on that level of information,” Krishnan says. “I can target certain areas because they have heavier consumption of CPAPS and supplies.”
Knowing how patients want to interact should help you give them reasons to turn to you. You can send health tips and promote new prod- ucts or special offers in email campaigns; post things like support group links, healthy recipes and community resources on your website; take advantage of mobile contact apps that send medication and refill reminders.
Comprehensive software lets you monitor your in-stock inventory and distributor orders. If a patient calls to ask where their order is or when it will arrive, you have an answer at your fingertips. There are apps to send a photo of the delivery driver the customer should expect, for trust and security reasons.
“It might still be sitting with the primary payer. You are able to have a more educated conversa- tion with the patient and provide real-time of where the order is and the status of the billing,” Krishnan says. “Once the patient has had a great experience, hopefully that becomes a lifetime patient or one who will refer you to others.”
UPPING YOUR REFERRAL GAME
Some vendors have a specific niche, and their systems should work with whatever you’re already doing. PlayMaker Health started as a customer relationship product, but has evolved to be a DME sales force manager as well. PlayMaker offers a web- and mobile-based product that combines comprehensive DME claims data that can tell you what products are being sold and who the sellers and referrers are within a given area, right down to product codes and contact information.
A PlayMaker subscriber can call up a map that will show every referral for a specific product or category within an area the user defines — such as a 20-mile radius around the user’s business — and it will show what percentage of each referrer’s business is going to the user and to their indi- vidual competitors. That can help sales reps focus
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efforts on opportunities to sway more referrals, or show you an unfilled need in your area.
Within your business, PlayMaker has fields
for referrer information that includes not just contacts and appointments, but personal schmoozing details like their spouses’ and chil- dren’s names. There are fields for notes of inter-
actions. Since the platform is mobile as well as online, sales staff can call up details just minutes before a visit, then update them on the way out. Managers can then review and analyze that data.
HEADING OFF TROUBLE
A solid DME system keeps track of all your