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Business Solutions
help them develop more business with a wider array of referral sources. That’s positively revolutionary and will shape the “new normal” going forward for HME sales professionals, says Ty Bello, CEO of HME sales coaching and consulting firm Team@Work (teamatworkcoaching.com).
“Data came on the marketplace specifically for us, for our busi- ness sector, and it’s really changed everything,” he says.
This too has been an evolution. The collection and use of third-party data in healthcare sales has made its way to HME via somewhat of a trickle-down method. Claims and referral data based on specific codes and disease process has been collected and used in industries such as pharmaceuticals for 20 to 25 years. Now it’s made it to our corner of post-acute care and it’s grown all the more reliable.
Where HME sales professional once might have intuited how much business could be derived from a referral source, now they can actually know.
“This has become very advantageous for us to now have it,” Bello says. “And today we have an accuracy rate that is much bet- ter than it was before. We have a specific pool of data that are from multiple sources, and it’s also coming now more frequently than it ever has before. So the data is more up to date than it has been in the past. You’ve got clearing houses involved in this, as well.
“It’s a very, very rich opportunity to change that subjectivity to objectivity,” he continues. “Now we know what that doctor actually does, and we know how much he or she does, and we know who the competitors are that are currently getting that book of business.”
Already it’s helping sales reps do a better job of prospecting:
“Right now, data will absolutely help the individual sales profes- sional take a more specific, targeted approach than they’ve ever been able to before,” Bello says. “You can then prioritize the accounts that you should be calling on, and even not calling on be- cause their volume is significantly lower than you thought it was.”
And when you marry market intelligence with internal sales data, even stronger insights can be found.
“For example, in working with a company, we looked through all of the data and we discovered there were several doctors
that were on the lists that they were already getting referrals from,” Bello says. “Fantastic. But now the lightbulb goes off: they were getting significantly fewer referrals than they thought they were getting. The majority of the referrals were going to their competition.
“So now I’ve got the opportunity as a sales professional to work and to try to earn greater trust from that office because
now I know what the real number is, and I could use that to my advantage to grow that base referral source,” he explains.
GETTING STARTED
Of course, as the use of data continues to evolve in the industry, not every provider has kept pace with it. For providers looking to remain competitive in terms of using their data, it starts by asking a simple question, according to Brightree’s Haddad.
“Every HME should ask themselves what does a good day look like to me?” he says. “What are the supporting key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can track? And how are you leveraging your data to make sure your business is on track?”
In other words, the provider needs to start defining the pa- rameters of their success based on the metrics that apply best to how they run their business.
“Depending on what part of your business you are tracking, there could be different KPIs to monitor,” Haddad explains. “If you are looking at Revenue Cycle, you may want to track your AR, Outstanding Sales Orders and Denials. For a patient resupply program, tracking patient retention and attrition are key areas. Most importantly, you want to keep a pulse on your patient expe- rience as that is an area you can truly differentiate yourself from your peers.”
Other KPIs could be more operational, but still tied to bottom- line performance. These might include metrics around inventory, a major overhead element, according to Turner.
“You can look at your stock levels, you can look at inventory turns, you can look at rental asset utilization and efficiency,” she says. “Some providers don’t even consider inventory control as a part of their business. I mean, I think in general terms that ev- erybody does, but maybe you can influence that a little bit more than you’re doing today.
“And of course, you can also look other measurements, such as team performance, worker performance,” she adds.” Or, you can look at performance surrounding HCPC code.”
Of course, that also means a provider needs the right tools.
“I think it’s really important that you’re using a modern software platform, so that you are gathering, event logging and tracking actions or activities, workflows, work states — how-
ever your software system is designed,” Turner says. “And that information is being gathered and leveraged correctly. So if data on its own doesn’t provide an advantage, then data leveraged correctly can potentially provide an advantage.”
That said, while HME providers might be on individual jour- neys, there are some best practices providers can employ when monitoring and using their data.
“Establish a data-driven culture within your organization,” Haddad says. “If one already exists, ensure you have clear data and analytics objectives. Whether that is working towards a single source of truth or developing forward looking KPIs. The goal should be to learn how to leverage your data as an asset and make sure KPIs are universally accepted and adhered to throughout your organization.”
“Another thing, it’s important to benchmark,” Turner says. “Evaluate performance according to these benchmarks, and adjust the benchmarks if you need to. And continuously evalu- ate, identify where you can improve, you noticed that continuous process improvement.”
“As a whole, our
industry does a great
job at descriptive and diagnostic analytics – or explaining what and why something has happened. Areas that we lag in
are true predictive and
prescriptive analytics.”
— Fadi Haddad, Brightree LLC
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