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Products & Technology
In the course of a day, an HME provider collects a trea- software company Brightree LLC (brightree.com). “Areas that we
sure trove of data: billing data, patient data, sales data, inventory data, etc. Extend that out a week, and the information collected becomes hard to imagine. Multiply that by a month or a year, and it becomes obvious that providers are sitting on a wealth of intelligence regard- ing their business that is almost beyond evaluation.
Fortunately, the software systems and services that HME providers use helps them track, monitor and apply that information. And over the years, those systems have grown more and more powerful and feature-rich in terms of helping them better understand their businesses and then use that business intelligence to improve operational efficiencies, deliver better care, drive new revenues, pursue new opportunities, and drive unnecessary costs from their budgets.
But the industry’s use of its data is an evolving story. At first, the big development was customizable reports, then the ability to track performance against aggregate industry benchmarks, then real-time performance dashboards.
WHERE THINGS STAND; WHERE THEY’RE GOING
Gail Turner, HME Sales Consultant for industry software supplier Computers Unlimited (www.cu.net), which makes TIMS software, has been with her company for three decades and has watched HME’s data monitoring evolution unfold.
“Fundamentally, data monitoring was really just measuring the performance of the past,” she says. “Then ... the concept of dashboard became very popular. And that provided at-a-glance, visual information, to help you see you were doing all right, doing great, or maybe had some problem areas on certain key metrics.”
“Basically, you need to understand your business, you need to understand your niche, and you need to make sure that you design reports that measure the right things so that you can understand how you’re performing.”
— Gail Turner, Computers Unlimited/TIMS Software
And those views weren’t just for c-level execs. Mid-level managers started using dashboards to see how their department or location was doing, and even staffers could start using data monitoring tools to prioritize their workloads.
“I think that the dashboards were designed to give you a more relevant, timely take on information,” Turner explains. “But data monitoring has changed; it definitely has. And in turn, we’re le- veraging data to organize work on a regular basis. So it’s kind of being used on a tactical level: ‘I’m coming to work, and what am I going to work on today?’”
So, if the industry’s past data monitoring has gone from look- ing at the past to the here and now, then the future of HME’s monitoring and use of its data is, well ... the future.
“As a whole, our industry does a great job at descriptive and diagnostic analytics – or explaining what and why something has happened,” says Fadi Haddad, director of analytics for HME
lag in are true predictive and prescriptive analytics. This is where Brightree is focusing its efforts today and is providing capabili- ties to predict what is likely to happen, when, and recommend actions.
“Think about the idea of an HME being able to predict areas of their business that are lagging or even performing well before it happens,” he adds.
And that means understanding the past activity of the busi- ness, the present activity, and being able to analyze the param- eters that will define the future of the business. Resupply makes for a good example, according to Turner.
“You can anticipate what your workload is going to be in
the future by analyzing the past,” she says. “With resupply, for example, if you have all that information that lives native in your software, or with an outside solution, you can kind of predict what you will need to fulfill. And you can also predict what you need, in terms of billing.
“So if the patients are going to, coming up against resupply windows that are provided by the payer once every six months or once every three months, your software system probably houses all the needed information,” Turner continues. “Are the patients eligible? Are there valid authorizations? Is there valid documen- tation to support this resupply? Are there valid payer require- ments? All of that can be done ahead of time and you can work it in advance so that there are no gaps in fulfilling and servicing your patient.”
And on the dollars and cents side of the business, the provider can then start to visualize how that might look in terms of opera- tional costs and projected revenues or reimbursement.
“You don’t know what’s going to actually happen, but you can at least forecast some potential,” Turner explains. “And, of course, over time, you can kind of measure that as well. This is what the potential was, this is what the results were and you can obviously translate that into some type of factor.”
LEVERAGING EXTERNAL DATA
Of course, monitoring a provider’s business, operational and billing data is critical, but it’s not the only data. Now the industry is seeing other data resources becoming available and those are being integrated with a company’s internal performance data to find even more efficiencies and opportunities.
Case example: HME sales. The industry is now seeing com- panies such as PlayMaker Health (www.playmakerhealth.com) provide specific, actionable data on providers’ local markets to
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“Data came on the marketplace specifically for us, for our business sector, and it’s really changed everything. Now we know what that doctor actually does, and we know how much he or
she does.”
— Ty Bello, Team@Work