Page 14 - HME Business, April 2020

capabilities they need,” Gelbard says. “That’s how I would evaluate e-prescribing software, is what is going to give the greatest experience to my ordering providers that will enable them to convert to digital. I think it should really be supplier driven.”
Some of the platforms integrate with other software you may already be running, while oth- ers are entirely stand-alone. “Parachute works with most of the billing systems that exist in the DME market,” Gelbard says. “When a referral sends an e-prescribe from Parachute’s ordering platform to our intake platform, that order gets transferred to the billing system whether it is \\\\\\\[the DME’s\\\\\\\] own system or a third-party system. The order should flow right into that billing sys- tem to avoid conflicting data.”
YOUR MARKET IS THE KEY
The cost makes the path to the benefits a bit steeper, but not necessarily a dead end. De- pending on your situation and which platform you choose, digitizing your prescription system can help reduce labor and errors, speed up your payments, manage inventory and build your business. The benefits depend a lot on where you are now, and where your market is – proba- bly the most critical part of your decision about if, or when, to implement e-prescribing, and which platform to choose.
“The opportunity to move forward with elec- tronic prescriptions is this year. The first thing
to do to participate is to become educated.
And the second thing is to go to the referrers,” Knowlton says. Are the bulk of your referrals coming from individual physicians? Hospitals? Facilities or home care managers? How many of your referrers are already using EHR and DME e-prescription systems? Which ones are they using?
“A lot of \\\\\\\[DMEs\\\\\\\] are going out in the mar- ketplace and finding out the referral source has already made a selection and is using one plat- form or another,” Knowlton says. “For some of
the providers out there, their EHRs actually have the capability to e-prescribe for home medical equipment as part of their core functionality. If you work in the user interfaces for those EHRs, ordering home medical equipment is right next to ordering medications or lab tests or radiol- ogy studies, in that physician’s native workflow.”
A big promise of e-prescribing is the possibil- ity of picking up business you are missing be- cause those referrers prefer e-prescribing. “If you have 100 orders coming into your operation, 20 are will be from a hospital. Who can be interop- erable with the hospital to get those orders done efficiently? Then you have a number of scattered doctor offices. How do you get e-prescribing into that order workflow?” says Gelbard.
That’s why it’s also important to look outside your existing referral base. Look at your whole market: are there referrers out there that send business elsewhere because you don’t use
an e-prescription system? Are there facilities in your area that could become your custom- ers if you could accept e-prescriptons? What system(s) do they use? If e-prescribing opens a significant book of new, institutional business for you, it could be worthwhile.
“We see \\\\\\\[e-prescribing\\\\\\\] a lot with larger health systems. They have a motivation to make sure that those patients are discharged in the most expedient manner to get them home
after treatment and at the same time they must ensure that the patient has what is necessary to be successful at home, be it reserved Medicare skilled nursing or home medical equipment, to make that transition,” Knowlton says. “For HME, we are still early as an industry in our journey. Less than 10 percent of possible orders are transmitted electronically.”
The systems are designed “to solve more than just knowing that patient’s going to be
cared for,” Knowlton says. “It can mobilize the equipment for home use faster and it can also present to the referral sources the documenta- tion that needs to be executed for that equip- ment to be reimbursed.”
WORKING TOWARD TYPE O
If running parallel platforms is too cumbersome for your business, there’s still hope – at least for Brightree customers.
GoScripts came under the ResMed umbrella in a 2015 acquisition, and Brightree has been building e-prescriptions capabilities ever since. Brightree has a universal interface that lets Brightree users receive e-prescriptions via most of the major vendors, including Stratice Health, Parachute Health, GoScripts and “to some ex- tent, DMEHub,” Knowlton says. “We are involved from the Brightree perspective in pushing this out into the industry. Facilities, home care, there is a lot of large HME organizations switching. A lot of stakeholders now are actively helping refer- ral sources to move forward vs. two years ago.”
Stratice Health’s eOrdersPlus is one of the systems that works with Brightree. The integra- tion enables prescriber and referral sources to e-prescribe orders and send supporting docu- mentation directly into Brightree order intake and documentation management, and billing and claims management functions.
For non-Brightree customers, eOrdersPlus is offered on a standalone basis via its web portal. The range of users spans retailers and pharma- cies and prescribers and referrers including post-acute care settings such as medical prac- tices, hospital systems, home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities and others, Farmer says.
NOT ALL SUNSHINE AND ROSES
Documentation with e-prescribe systems is
a sticky wicket: it may help your business run more smoothly, but nobody is really sure if it’s sufficient to support a DME response in the event of an audit. “Some systems do create documentation and some suppliers are using it, others are not. The question is does it meet the documentation coverage criteria? That
has never been truly answered,” Brummett says. “We have been advocating for these e-prescribing platforms to be recognized as an extension of the medical record and therefore be sure they qualify.”
That’s partly because of the more rigorous documentation requirements for DME than for medications. “The level of paperwork required, it is not something that e-prescribing for meds have to deal with as much as we do in the HME world. One of the key powers of an e-prescribe
“People should
be evaluating
multiple
platforms and
from there, get
a sense of what
makes the
most sense for them.”
— David Gelbard, Parachute
Health
6
April 2020 | DME Pharmacy
hme-business.com
“The
opportunity to
move forward
with electronic
prescriptions is
this year. The
first thing to
do to participate is to become educated. And the second thing is to go to the referrers,” — Nick Knowlton, Brightree