Home Health Costs Will Go Up, While Medicare Payments Come Down...Part Two
Posted by HEALTHCAREfirst Blogger on Mon, Aug 16, 2010 @ 08:30 AM
by Bobby Robertson
Last week I discussed the effect that inflation can have on your home health or hospice agency. Now, I would like to share with you a few ways to prepare:
1. Automate people processes.
I am not advocating reductions in your staff now. I think that if you can invest in technologies that will make your agency more efficient now, you may be able to absorb the responsibilities of an employee that leaves your agency (that salary is how you get money back on your investment to automate). The most obvious example of this is to implement point of care documentation. If you go this route, make sure the home health software you choose is:
- Easy to use
- Affordable to implement
- Contains automatic checks and validations
- Provides alerts to catch tasks that are coming or are past due
2. Centralize tasks.
The most common opportunity I see for this is centralizing the billing and/or coding functions for multiple locations. If your systems are connected via the web, this can be done very easily and can improve consistency and controls.
3. Outsource scalable tasks.
The most common form of outsourcing in our industry is billing and coding. The main reasons this has proven successful:
- Economies of scale – at HEALTHCAREfirst, we know that each individual billing professional can successfully manage billing for well over 1,000 patients. Most agencies don’t have 1,000 patients, so that one HEALTHCAREfirst billing professional may be billing for 5 or 6 agencies at a fraction of the cost that each individual agency would pay doing this in-house.
- Quality and Controls – a professional home health or hospice billing company will have billing reps that are typically better trained and less distracted than an individual company could possibly provide on their own.
Additionally, a professional billing service will have multiple layers of management and oversight within their organization to make certain your claims are billed daily, accurately, and completely (they should provide you visibility into this via reports, etc). Home health coders that work for a professional coding company are “full time & regularly trained and tested” coders and not a nurse that got a certificate from a weekend, or week long, seminar. You’ll typically find coding by outsourced companies raises your revenue per episode because they are coding correctly and not missing your hard earned dollars. The one role I would never consider outsourcing is nursing and the care of your patients.
There are many other things you can do to prepare in addition to the few things I’ve listed above. A good place to start is to call up your home health software company. They may not be able to provide every product or service you need, but the better companies should be able to help with most of the things I’ve listed above and more. If they don’t provide a specific product or service you think you want to explore, they will be happy to point you to reputable professionals that can.
Those of us that have been around the home care industry for many years know that the only thing we know for certain is that things will change. In looking back over the last 15+ years of my work with home health and hospice agencies, my customers that always seem to come out on top during times of change (glad to report that’s 95%+ of my customers…they’re great), have always kept their patients at the forefront of all of their decisions.
I’d be very excited to hear other ideas that you have regarding cost containment or efficiencies. Please share.
Bobby Robertson is the President and Chief Executive Officer of HEALTHCAREfirst, Inc., a company that provides the nations’ most complete set of software and service solutions to the home health and hospice industry, and the recipient of the 2008 Frost & Sullivan Healthcare Innovation Award for Emerging Technologies. Over 1200 home health and hospice companies use HEALTHCAREfirst software and services daily. Bobby was one of the first industry leaders in homecare to recognize the industry’s need for high quality software applications accessible over the worldwide web and has 15 years of healthcare performance improvement and business process experience. Bobby also serves on the Board of Directors for Continuity Health, a company that develops technology associated with remote patient monitoring via the web.