When you’re right, you’re right.
In the early months of the Covid pandemic, we caught up with three industry experts who interpret market trends in the home health sector and then help their clients strategize their next moves. Turns out Jeff Aaronson of McBee Associates, Samantha Soulas of BlackTree Healthcare Consulting and Cindy Campbell of WellSky made some amazingly accurate calls, especially with the actionable advice they shared on optimizing the relationships your home health business has with its signing physicians. The good news? Your industry peers have implemented these tactics and seen significant ROI, proving the advice works. The bad news... your industry peers could soon become the home health provider of choice in your market.
Here are five ways to stay ahead with your provider relationships and improve your bottom line.
1. Go paperless everywhere in your workflows
If you’re expecting your staff to increase productivity as referral volumes increase - especially with sicker patients - then Jeff with McBee warns the days of a paper-based environment are gone. Jeff declares in our webinar that “everything needs to be at your fingertips and in a virtual work environment.” He adds an “easy prediction” that “innovators” who fully pivot to the new normal with a dynamic business model that capitalizes on virtual visits, can deliver excellent care and tightly manage productivity - will come out on top.
2. It’s time to look at your intake team in a whole new way
Cindy with WellSky reminded our audience that intake is “the front door to your company,” and the team should be scripted, trained and coached to manage provider relationships similar to how a sales team is expected to perform. Focus on the soft skills for these employees as much as you do technical expertise, and you’ll be rewarded with better relationships with provider staff. For maximum results, Cindy recommends that setting expectations for what your back office teams should be doing, how they should do it, and how they’ll be evaluated are all essential.
3. Want great physician relationships? Don’t do this
Doctors don’t like getting bombarded with calls, especially for patients they’ve not treated for months. With tighter margins, few agencies can afford such workflow inefficiencies either. Right this glaring wrong with an end-to-end process redrawn for the PDGM age: train your teams to capture all necessary data upfront. Be intentional about staff follow-up with clear protocols on how and when to engage the physician, and ensure your technology facilitates this outreach and can provide insights into your operational and staff performance, advises Sam. Jeff adds home health agencies should strive to decrease the number of orders written late in the 30-day billing cycle. If you capture the right data at the start of care, not only will treatment plans be more comprehensive and accurate, your teams will be more productive not having to chase after late-cycle orders. The bonus: your revenues will increase.
4. Technology should be the Robin to your Batman
The right technology - and tech vendor - is crucial to your success and will empower your end-to-end process. Not only should your tech and corresponding functions be cloud-based (see #1 above), Sam states it should automate lower-function tasks and help your teams do more with less. Your technology vendor should be able to articulate not just the value of their solution in real-world settings, says Cindy, but also ensure the end-user has a clear understanding of how to use the technology to its fullest potential (and isn’t relying on spreadsheets or other workarounds). To paraphrase Cindy, the last thing you want to do is buy the 767 and fly it like a Cessna.
5. Target these benchmarks for the win
In addition to reducing those late-cycle orders (see Jeff’s point in #3), our experts recommend five must-do metrics for best-in-class performance. Download the one-sheet guide and share it with your team today.
Ready for a deeper dive on the above? Download the white paper, “Today's Best Practices For Provider Relationship Management,” that featured these same three experts.
In the year since this discussion, Forcura has been hard at work developing even smarter technology that will help your home health business breakthrough as the provider of choice in your market. If we can be the Robin to your Batman and help make your provider relationships more dynamic and rewarding, I urge you to connect with us today!
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