Four Ways Technology Will Make Home Healthcare Penalty-Proof

Obtaining thorough, accurate and timely documentation, filing RAPs in fewer than five days, controlling for LUPAs, and tightly managing orders from sent-to-signed:  these functions are only achievable with the right technology to back your people and processes.  In a recent webinar on how to be penalty proof with no-pay RAPs, Forcura’s Director of Relationship Management, Ty King, notes four specific areas where technology will empower your home healthcare business to function at its peak: 

1. Centralized referrals management – With margins shrinking and the penalty-clock ticking with each patient, there is no time for duplicated efforts or guesswork when onboarding your patients. Here, use technology that allows your business to collaborate across teams with consistent workflows. You should be able to track the status of a referral in real-time and note what still needs to be gathered.  
   
   
2. Communication tools that integrate into your workflows – If you do have missing patient documentation, your technology should equip your back-office staff to communicate with your marketing or clinical teams at the start of patient care. You will also want technology to enable you to easily follow-up with your signing physicians and ensure orders are signed and received within the patient episode. 
   
   
3. Tools for bulk actions – make your team’s outreach to physicians coordinated, impactful and efficient with tools that enable them to conduct bulk actions such as auto-fax resends and physician follow-up tracking. These efficiencies provide your team time to focus their efforts on outliers who require more customized attention.  
   
   
4. Analytics for data-driven action – you can’t solve bottlenecks or training gaps that you can’t see. Count on analytics to do some of that heavy lifting to keep your business on track: 

1. Monitor staff performance with real-time reports – use this for the internal audits referenced on page xx. Remember to reward your best performing teams or create incentives or competitions to coax better results from everyone else. 
   
2. Analytics can help you proactively connect with referral sources who consistently send incomplete referral packets, improving your relationships and future patient onboarding times.  
3. Do the same with your orders management, using analytics to identify physicians who hold the most or oldest unsigned volumes.  

Want to ensure the greatest return on your technology investment? It gets back to aligning your people and processes – with comprehensive, standardized training for all users of your tech systems. Revisit your teams throughout the adoption period and target areas where they seem weaker, leveraging your technology partner to manage against your implementation goals and timelines. With your people, processes and technology aligned, your business is primed to deliver outstanding results. 

Want to learn more about how your home health business can be penalty-proof in the no-pay RAP environment? Access our Zero-Pay RAP toolkit today!