Page 29 - HME Business, April 2020

PART OF A LARGER TREND
Over the past few years, providers have begun to truly study their businesses from a strategic standpoint. That’s not a surprise given that they are constantly chasing a broader range
of funding sources and having to deal with constantly changing market, funding and regula- tory dynamics.
At the same time, providers have really worked to ramp up their revenue cycle management game. Now, instead of simply making sure their billing operations are efficient, providers are using technology to manage and maximize each patient relationships’ potential revenue.
As a business practice and as a technology implementation, we’ve seen revenue cycle management “trickle down” from the larger scale healthcare organizations — hospitals, health groups, insurance carriers — into the realm of HME.
Similarly, we are now seeing the analytics tools and the practice of using analytics to study busi- ness performance and RCM performance, start to move from the larger facilities-based health- care world into the HME world.
“The larger groups, the hospitals, the health systems are kind of the early adopters,” says Jason Dillon, national sales manager for
HME and infusion at PlayMaker Health, which providers CRM and sales management tools
for provides. “I think healthcare, in general, has always been that way. ... And now I certainly feel like there is a shift in momentum at some of those mid-tier and smaller-tier \\\\\\\[providers\\\\\\\] at this point. ... Gone are the days of just being able to maintain a business from a spreadsheet.”
Why? There’s a strategic imperative for providers to better understand their businesses.
“At this point, even the Ma and Pa organiza- tions want to better understand what’s going on in their businesses; what’s coming in; what’s going out,” Dillon adds. “From day one, it’s really difficult to survive in a landscape that’s as competitive as the one we have at this point without knowing all of the intricate details of your business and what’s going on with it.”
EASY ACCESS TO INFORMATION
Perhaps the best phrase to define the impact of analytics in the business place is “strategic responsiveness.” HME providers collect lots of data using their billing and business manage- ment software, and they often have reporting tools, and of course, they can output data and analyze it using other software, but when a provider needs to understand and address a strategic business problem right away, analytics software tools can serve that information up faster than a drive-through burger joint.
“There are many different ways that you can track your business metrics,” says Fadi Haddad,
the director of Business Analytics for HME software company Brightree LLC. Haddad notes that Brightree has built-in reports and gives its users an ad hoc reporting tool that lets them download the data that they need to study, and providers can use Excel reports to analyze that data and distribute that internally. The question is, is that process easy and responsive?
“I guess it depends on your definition of easy,” he explains. “Anybody can pull data into Excel; but, when it comes down to really modifying it and applying the appropriate logic to do it, that’s where I think some of the confusion or difficulty comes in. You really run into this scenario where you may pull something yourself, like maybe
one person goes in and pulls a report on those outstanding sales order days, right? ‘I really, really want to know where do I stand here. How long has it taken me?; And then another person goes in, and they run the exact same type of report with the same metrics, but they use a slightly different logic, or they put an additional filter in there and come up to a totally different number — but yet it’s for the same key performance indicators.
“Now, as an organization, as a DME, the busi- ness is left wondering, ‘Well, which one is the right one for us to use?’” Haddad continues. “That’s where having an actual analytics platform comes in and can be used as a single source of truth. When somebody logs in within the DME, they can go in, and they can see, “Where are my outstanding sales order days? Where do they stand? Where are my aging accounts receivable? What’s going on with my denials?”
And, he explains that getting to the data doesn’t stop with knowing a high-level number. A provider will want to dive into the data behind that number.
“You need the ability to slice it down to the payer level, slice it down to the location level, even the user,” Haddad notes. “You want to make sure you’re always able to track and monitor each detail of your business and as deep as you want to go or as high as you want to go. And that’s really where that Advanced Analytics platform comes in.”
ANALYTICS IN ACTION:
WECARE MEDICAL
Megan Brown is president of Ashland, Ky.-head- quartered HME provider WeCare Medical LLC,
which has 12 storefront locations that serve a broad range of patients in more than 100 coun- ties across Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. WeCare was founded in 2004 and has seen considerable growth and expansion from the Ashland location since then.
Brown came on board as a Respiratory Therapist in 2011, working with patients
served by WeCare’s Ashland, Portsmouth, and Charleston locations and gained a real stem-to- stern understanding of the business as it shot along its quick growth trajectory. Eventually, she was promoted to President and has since been working to identify and resolve issues around accounts receivable, outstanding sales orders, expiring CMNs. And in that under- taking, Analytics has played a considerable role, she says.
“About a year ago, I was helping the revenue cycle team,” Brown recalls. “I’d identified that we were having issues with our held AR. Our held AR, for those who are not as familiar, is basically anything that’s holding up revenue from coming in our doors. This could be CMNs, authoriza- tion, manual holds, from all the business that are reoccurring rentals. So I noticed that number was starting to increase.”
As WeCare did more business, the number continued to grow. So Brown reached out to its Brightree rep to see what could be done beyond the things she’d already tried to identify the problem within the organization that was causing the escalating held AR and then address it.
“Our rep told me that Brightree was working
on a new program, and she’d referenced their analytics,” Brown says. “At the time, it wasn’t ready to be presented, but she reached out once it was ready. And you know, I’m just super thankful that we went that direction because we were able to take our held AR down by 57 percent.”
So, starting last June, WeCare started using analytics to analyze its departments and the responsibilities on each individual employee and assigned different workloads more evenly to where they could be successful in executing. Then it started using analytics to track its CMNs, which impacts its held Accounts Receivable.
“There’s a feature inside of our analytics
that lets you review the CMNs that will expire soon,” Brown says. “They’re broken down in buckets. So you’ve got CMNs that are going to
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
hme-business.com | April 2020 | HMEBusiness 13
“At this point, even the Ma and Pa organizations want to better understand what’s going on in their businesses; what’s coming in; what’s going out.”
— Jason Dillon, PlayMaker Health