[Webinar On-Demand] Four Ways to Nurture Your Managed Care Revenue

By Prime Care Tech Marketing on Thu, Mar 22, 2018 @ 05:50 PM

If you missed it, or wish to review, our Four Ways to Nurture Your Managed Care Revenue webinar offers best practices and key focus areas from Susie Mix, founder and CEO of Mix Solutions. Attention to these areas can advance your organization into a more profitable managed care practice and you'll see them in action in our Managed Care MASTER application. 

  • Learn the language of contracts
  • Secure managed care expertise
  • Bring case management online
  • Regularly measure revenue impact

 

Topics: best practices managed care reimbursement case management for managed care managed care revenue
3 min read

Business Intelligence – Why Do-It-Yourself is Not For Everyone

By Prime Care Tech Marketing on Wed, Dec 09, 2015 @ 01:29 PM

Business IntelligenceRecognizing the value of Business Intelligence to monitor and manage your business is one thing. Doing something about it is another? What is the next step? Do you build it or buy it? Admitting we are biased towards “Buy it,” we will identify what appears to be “best practice” for most SMBs.

Build it?

While several larger provider organizations have elected to invest the time, resources, and money to build their own data warehouse and reporting systems, such an investment is far out of the financial reach and expertise for most SMBs. Here are some of the key reasons why not to build is the better decision:

Those who have their own IT departments think they can do it themselves – It’s just a matter of directing the IT manager to create reports, isn’t it? Actually, it’s not that simple. Because they think they know how, we have discovered that some well-intentioned companies will start by hiring a programmer to write reports. However, business intelligence is interactive and displays critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) not only as tables, but as graphs and charts as well, involving higher levels of reporting. The distinction is that BI dashboards provide greater versatility than a report generator. It uses a warehouse to aggregate data, no matter the source, and normalizes the data so that the data is interoperable – where data comes from disparate sources, yet must work together. In this way, trending information becomes easier. Business intelligence also enables the users to roll up and or drill down to critical information depending on their needs and permissions. What we have observed is that the one programmer becomes multiple programmers as the project falls further behind and the requirements expand.

Beyond the danger of scope creep and its unforeseen impact on the budget, there is the development time to consider. Programmers have to learn the various databases that serve as the data generators and repositories. This requires expertise in data warehouse technologies and best practices. Without going too deep, another complication is retrieving the data on a scheduled basis and combining it into useful information. And, in our observations, all of this can take up to eight months on average and, in some cases, years. Then there is the situation where the nature of an application’s database may change, requiring understanding and a working knowledge of the new database.

Assuming the developers have BI up and running, it doesn’t stop there. As competitive, regulatory, reimbursement, and new legislative pressures evolve, so must Business Intelligence. That means that the BI project never ends. Building and maintaining it requires retaining in-house specialists or engaging outside resources – an expensive proposition.

There are other non-development issues to consider, such as the actual go-live, the initial user training, and on-going support. Since LTC does experience high turnover even among members of the management and executive teams, training is a recurring issue and, more importantly, so is support.

Then there is the power of the aggregation of understanding what providers across the country need and want to view, what information is important to them, and how to turn their data into actionable information. That uniquely is found with those who have developed and maintained dashboards for years for providers across the country at affordable economies of scale.

Buy it

Let’s assume that if you were tempted to create your BI tool or you have started it and found it to be a big black hole that seems to suck in more time and funds that your worst fears anticipated, pause. It’s never too late to cut your losses and investigate what is already available. But, though we consider this to be the right direction, we recommend you do your homework before you buy. Beyond the usual promotional materials and even the demonstration, consider the following:

  • Outsourcing BI can be less expensive in the short and long term. Investigate the monthly subscription fees and any one-off fees. Know what you are getting yourself into financially.
  • Get an estimate of the time it takes to get the system up and running. In our experience, assuming we have the necessary information needed to create connections to the various data sources, we have been able to get customers fully up and running in a matter of weeks.
  • How long has the vendor been developing and satisfactorily meeting the needs of its customers? Our primeVIEW has been evolving with long term care providers for years which brings up another issue. Is the BI vendor responsive to customer requests for new features in a timely manner? Responsiveness is critical to providers who must be prepared to deal with changing challenges and opportunities quickly.

Summary

We highly recommend that you seriously consider looking into procuring a BI system developed by specialists who understand LTPAC and BI technologies. It’s cost-effective, scalable, and they can offer suggestions, based on what other providers have done. LTPAC specialists, like primeVIEW, also listen to customer suggestions to further enhance business intelligence’s capabilities and anticipate providers’ information needs. Our customers acknowledge that such a strategy is affordable and highly effective in controlling costs, ensuring compliance, improving service quality, and improving cash flow without the distractions inherent in “do-it-yourself” BI development.

Business Intelligence

Topics: best practices business intelligence BI BI dashboards reports smbs programmer scope creep
2 min read

Long Term Care and IT

By Prime Care Tech Marketing on Mon, Mar 05, 2012 @ 04:54 PM

A Major Health Care IT Paradigm Shift

“Best Practices” in the old days – paper pushing.
Historically, health care in general and long term care specifically, has been intensively paper based - forms, spindles, chart tables, racks, and binders. Documentation was (and still is) the name of the game and pushing paper was the only way. Even regulatory enforcement surveys were based on paper compliance with bedside visits to verify the documentation. Paper-based documentation consumed a lot of trees and filled a lot of storage files and storage units.



On the upside, a paper-based system never froze up, crashed, or hung. The staff never had to worry about connectivity, rebooting the computer, unplugging and plugging a cable, or finding a wireless access point and rebooting it. They just needed to make sure they had a pen with the right color.

LTC and IT, EHR, tablet PC“Best Practices” today – Getting past the paper paradigm
Only recently has long term care demonstrated a grudging willingness to adopt IT as the way to communicate and document. Narrow margins, suspect IT promises, and resistance to change have contributed to this lethargy. Further, what technology has done to society it has done many-fold to LTC. Staffers have discovered that the promises of “increased productivity” have in reality resulted in increased demands.

However, the outside pressures of increased competition, a shrinking skilled labor pool, a younger, more computer-savvy cadre of care givers, more restrictive regulations and reimbursement, and opportunities posed by HIEs and ACOs have become the incentives for a more rapid LTC IT adoption. Providers across the country have begun to realize tangible benefits to their operations through IT. For example, with the advent of real-time reporting and Business Intelligence, such as PCT’s primeVIEW digital dashboard, health care executives are able to identify and respond to problems and opportunities quickly. This results in real savings, expanded market penetrations, improved bottom lines, increased efficiencies, and better resident care.

Consider this, a recent LTC provider’s initiative capitalized on the flexibility and accessibility of its company Intranet and focused on assessing and improving weekly weight and skin condition assessments. Recording their assessments electronically yielded a significant reduction in staff documentation time; this means more time face-to-face time working with residents and less time pushing a pen.

What’s the impact that IT can have on the facilities and their residents?
It means an improvement in the quality of life and care for residents. For providers it means, among many benefits, a healthier bottom line, reduced DSO through automated claims management, reduced procurement spend through procurement automation, a stronger competitive edge over those facilities which are IT resistant, and being well situated when working with other providers along the continuum of care.

Questions:
  • How has IT helped your operation?
  • If you have embraced IT, how has it benefitted your operation and the services you deliver?

 

Topics: dashboards long term care IT continuum of care best practices DSO

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