Celebrating with Cotton

Cotton Rohrscheib is a critical part of the Rock-Pond Solutions team.  He is the “man behind the curtain” that has brought our web presence to life and who has inspired many of the corporate branding changes that have come to life here over the past 2 years since he joined the Pond.  Beyond this, he and his wife Donna are personal friends that are the kind of people that everyone needs in their life.  You can count on them for a smile, helping hand or an encouraging word when you need it most.  Whether Cotton is working out some WordPress bug in the middle of the night, helping someone who is homeless get a coat to stay warm or brightening up the office when he walks in with a smile, it’s always good.

He and Donna were made to be parents.  To be a kid in their home would be a dream come true.  And today, that dream is coming true.  After what seems like an eternity for them, they are on their way to bring their adopted baby home.  Their story is incredible and you can read all about it (as well as get the full flavor of Cotton’s perspective and craziness) on Cotton’s blog.  Or you can just celebrate with Lynn and I and the entire Rock-Pond team as someone who is so dear to us is closing a chapter with much uncertainty and pain and starting a new journey in their life.  May the hope and belief that got you here, also get you there, wherever that might be.

Cotton and Donna – we are celebrating with you today.

Running with 2000 women – giving back

At Rock-Pond we enjoy what we do.  On the weekends you’ll find us out having fun and giving back to the communities we live in.  Like this weekend when Pete Tanguay organized 10 “runner escorts” for the Women Run Arkansas 5k, a race in it’s 15th year helping women from all over the state accomplish a goal many thought was unattainable.  Running with 2,000 ladies isn’t a bad way to start your weekend and is a great opportunity to get out the red Star Trek dress and Paris marathon head rag.

Rock-Pond Reports reach Critical Mass

In the “old days” businesses didn’t have good intelligence on what their customers were doing.  This is no longer true.  Amazon.com’s business is based on the “people who bought this bought that” and Facebook is taking over the world because they know who is connected and that “people who like this like that“.

In 2010, Rock-Pond Solutions committed to know this about our customers.  If we are going to truly be able to serve the needs of our customers, we must know what their needs are.  If we are going to say we answer tough questions, we must know our customer’s tough questions.  More importantly we must be answering them.  We took a lesson from Amazon, Facebook and Google and built our “cloud based computing” architecture that we call ‘The Pond‘.  To find out how to improve service to our customers, we simply need to look in the Pond.

I just ran this report to see what our customers did in the first quarter of 2012.  You can see the detail for 13 of our customers and the total for all of them above. Honestly, I am happily surprised to know that they have run almost 14,000 reports.  With 150% growth in utilization from January to March and sales for the first quarter up over 200% over the first quarter of 2011, we have reached critical mass.  Not only do we know how many reports people are running, but we know that people who run this run that.  We can reach out to customers who are not running a report and let them know about it.  Recently we launched a report that did the calculations for Competitive Bidding.  We know who ran this report.

It doesn’t stop here.  Our customers need to know who in their organization is running reports, what parameters they are using when they run them and to be able to restrict who can run specific reports.  Internal and external auditors demand this information and a company’s DATA is not guaranteed to be secure without it.  In October 2011, Rock-Pond Solutions launched the Rock-Pond Developers Studio so all of our customers will have access to this information.  The first question from a security or compliance officer is, “How do I know someone has not tampered with the INFORMATION access logs?”  The answer is simple.  “They can’t.  The DATA is in the Pond.  And the Pond is secure“.

And it won’t stop there.  We have plans to connect our customers by allowing them to find out who is running a report they are running.  Our customers want to know who has the same tough question they do and how are they answering it.  Using the DATA in the Pond to connect them to the right people, our customers will be able to get the INFORMATION they need at a whole new level.  It’s like an intelligent listserv (outdated way to connect people) or a DATA driven Facebook.  Who knows, we might even connect it to Facebook.

A recent customer whose pharmacy has been in business for over 100 years, says it best of all:

“We have only had Rock-Pond for ten days.  If you take it away from me now, I don’t know what I will do!”

We are humbled by these kinds of comments.  We can’t take much credit for what we have because it is the result of the innovative customers we serve who share their tough questions with us and give us the opportunity to provide them answers they can use.

Rock-Pond Solutions has reached critical mass now and great things are happening in the Pond.  We are committed to know the needs of our customers and to help them get the INFORMATION they need from the DATA they’ve got.  We are also committed to get the INFORMATION we need from the DATA we’ve got so we can go to the next level with our customers.


If you are one of our customers or partners who is attending the 2012 NHIA conference in Phoenix,
please allow us to show you how much we appreciate you
by joining us at the Phoenix Art Museum for a Night of Appreciation.

 

 

Running with Elvis

From time to time our work lives cross into our personal lives and it’s fun when this happens.  Life is too short to keep everything separate.

I ran the Little Rock marathon this past weekend and although you might think that is Elvis, it isn’t.  This is Jeff Brillhart, the Vice President of Finance for HomeChoice Partners, a Rock-Pond customer.  I’m sorry to report that he lost his lead for good shortly after this picture was taken.  But for these few seconds all I have to say is “Way to go Jeff”.

The other connection my “work life” had to this event was I had the opportunity to raise money and awareness for Neurofibromatosis during the race.  I run as a part of the NF Endurance Team and as the team captain for Little Rock, I raised over $5,000 and our NF Team raised over $20,000, enough to fund a new research grant.  If you take a minute to read my race report you’ll see how meaningful this is to me.  I mention it here because most of my financial support came from friends I’ve made working in the home infusion and specialty pharmacy industries over the past 20 years.

The 2012 Little Rock marathon was a great combination of personal and professional friends coming together to achieve something worthwhile.  It doesn’t get much better than that!!

Pete Tanguay

Do you have a report ….?

Do you have a report that will give me … or what report can I run to get … or …?  These are two of the most common questions asked when someone calls Rock-Pond Solutions.  The answer often lies not only in the report but in the way in which it was run.  Sometimes you need to run a report more than once to get to the information you need.  As you get the information you need, your questions change as you refine your information search.  Questions may progress like this:

  • What physicians are trending down in number of referrals?
  • Hmm, what kinds of referrals were they giving us?
  • Who is their sales rep?
  • Who are the other physicians for this sales rep?
  • What physicians are we currently working with that can make up for these losses?
  • How are the other physicians in this practice trending?

There are two powerful features of the Rock-Pond Information Center that are right in front of you that you may not know about.

The first one is the question mark inside the parenthesis icon.  This allows you to quickly change one or more parameters to rerun the report.  If you just ran a summary report by physician and want to see the breakdown by payer within physician you simply click on this icon and add the second grouping.  If you found out which payer was causing a particular problem for a physician, you can quickly change the order of the groupings to show the report by physician within payer to see the other physicians that are referring patients who are covered by this insurance company.  You can also rerun the report as a new report and have two copies of the same report open on separate screens if you need to compare them side by side.

The second feature is the FIND feature that allows you to find something in the report.  We received a call today from someone who asked if there was a way to find a delivery ticket based on a ticket number.  In CPR+ this is easy to do if the ticket has not been billed but it isn’t easy after it has been billed.  Although Rock-Pond does not have report that you can specify a delivery ticket number as a parameter, we have many reports that have the delivery ticket number on them.  Regardless of what report you are running, you can search the report on the screen to quickly find an invoice number, ticket number, name, check number, etc.  The time savings are tremendous.

As is the case with almost every application you use, whether it is on your computer, iPad, phone or in your car, there are always more options available than we are aware of and know how to use.  These are two great features of the Rock-Pond Information Center that will gain you efficiencies and make you look much better when someone asks you for information that you don’t have.

Wait 15 minutes and try it again

Sometimes we need to step back, regroup and then try again when something is not working.  Sometimes when you can’t figure something out if you’ll give it some time and try it again you’ll have success.  At Rock-Pond Solutions, we are constantly telling our customers to “wait 15 minutes and try it again”.  In our case, however, there is a different meaning.  It means that the new report or report modification you’ve requested is complete and will be available to you soon.  This immediate connection to our customers in 35 states and Puerto Rico is made possible by a powerful tool we’ve developed called Rock-Pond Connect.

Under the leadership of Brandon Carpenter, Rock-Pond has a team of 4 developers who spend their days creating reports for home infusion, specialty pharmacy and HME providers (Click here to Meet our Team).  Everything we do is based on a request from a customer.  Our customer reporting service has come a long way in the last 10 years and has become a very efficient machine to get the precise information out of our customers data to solve a business need.

A few solutions that we have recently provided or are in the process of solving include:

  • Helping providers prepare for submitting a bid in Round 2 of Competitive Bidding; (Learn more)
  • Analyzing data to find billing errors, such as drugs being billed twice on different invoices for the same dates of service;
  • Discovering errors in insurance contracts that cause pricing problems;
  • Creating a Pfizer (Axitinib) data extract report to support specialty pharmacy contracts with pharmaceutical manufacturers;
  • Customizing Patient Statements with added detail
  • Much, much more.

So the next time you find yourself keying data from multiple reports into a spreadsheet for analysis, searching through your system to find issues or faced with a business challenge or opportunity and need information to make your decision, let us know how we can help you.  The good news is we have a team of developers who know right where the data is and how to get it out and into the format that you need.  The better news is we can usually turn requests around in a few days.  The best news is once we are complete there is nothing to install, no “IT work” that has to be done and no waiting for the next update of your software.  When your report is ready you’ll be notified along with the message to “wait 15 minutes and try it again”.  That’s the beauty of Rock-Pond Connect and the Rock-Pond custom reporting services working together to give you the INFORMATION you need from the DATA you’ve got.

Do you want to be immediately connected with the information you need?  Rock-Pond would love to get you connected.  Email us or call (501) 232-4360 to learn the VALUE of the Rock-Pond Enterprise Reporting Platform.  If you are already connected with Rock-Pond, our team of developers are here to help with all of your reporting needs.  Contact brandon@rock-pond.com to receive solutions today.

Focus on therapy / payer mix for profitability

From a financial and profitability perspective, all patients are not equal.  The two primary drivers of profitability in a home infusion business are therapy and payer.  In order to manage your business to drive profitability, you must understand which payer / therapy combinations are “good” business and which ones are not.

As a general rule there will be 6-8 focus therapies that if you do well with those, you’ll do well as a company.  These are therapies like TPN, IVIG, etc.  These may be unique to your specific business focus.  There are other therapies like hydration and catheter care that you will do but are supplemental to the focus therapies.

Not to mention any names, there are some payers that are typically good and others that pay poorly and late in almost all cases.  However, there are many cases where a specific payer / therapy combination is an exception to the quality of the payer.  Often, for example, providers dismiss Medicaid as a poor payer.  This is not always the case.  There may be therapies that your state Medicaid payer recognizes for the value they provide and will pay for them comparable to private insurance.

Rock-Pond Solutions wrote a custom report for a large provider who had identified their focus therapies and wanted to provide their sales team with feedback regarding the quality of the business their referral sources were referring to the company.  Instead of Good / Bad business, they opted for Good Revenue and Low Revenue as the two categories.  The report has the option to run based for new patients (patients where the start of care date and dates of service are in the same month) or all patients.  Providing this feedback to the sales team on a weekly basis gave them immediate feedback on the value of the referrals they were receiving from the physicians and referral sources they were meeting with.  In turn they were able to direct their sales and marketing efforts to drive more Good Revenue in to the business.

Not only did the sales team improve, but the profitability of the business overall improved significantly.  Simply focusing on key therapies, payers who paid poorly on these key therapies and the source of these referrals was the start.  Providing this information to the sales and clinical team so everyone knew the difference between Good Revenue and Low Revenue was the key to improving profitability.

Speedy Meetings

Setting up a new Google calendar, I was in the setup and noticed this setting.  How often do I get a meeting request for an hour that is for a subject that could be covered in 30 minutes or less?  At Rock-Pond Solutions we strive to be efficient and to produce efficiencies for our customers.  This was an ah-hah moment for me.  Not really anything new, but a great reminder of how inefficient meetings are and how important it is to cut them short when we can. The next time you schedule a meeting, consider these questions:

  1. Who is coming that we don’t need in the meeting to accomplish the goal?
  2. Could we cover the same material in half the time?
  3. Can we do this over the phone?
  4. Do we even need this meeting at all?

You get the idea.

Competitive Bidding – know your software

The three primary reasons your software vendor charges you a maintenance fee every month are to add new features to support your business, take advantage of changes in technology and to keep up with regulatory changes.  One of the best ways to get the most for your money and to leverage your software investment is to upgrade to new releases and more importantly to integrate the features into your business.

I was reminded of this when I saw the information about the CPR+ Competitive bidding webinars provided as part of their free monthly training.

Rock-Pond Solutions has joined forces with the Med Group to help HME and Infusion providers get ready for competitive bidding.  We have delivered reporting solutions that provide the information providers need to determine whether to submit a bid, how to price their bid and analyze the impact on their business if they are awarded (or not awarded) the bid for a specific category.

This is just the beginning.  You must also commit to learn how your software will help you during the new patient, order entry, delivery and billing process.  You need to understand how your software enables you to set up your competitive bidding categories, manage the patient intake and billing process for Medicare patients based on type of service and zip code.  This will improve your efficiencies and insure your claims are priced accurately.

You will find this information in the release notes published by your software vendor as well as through vendor training.  For example, last year CPR+ added competitive bidding features that automatically identifies patients receiving service in competitive bidding areas, determines when competitive bid single payment amount is used, and prevents customer service representatives from inadvertently supplying items for which the provider will not be reimbursed.  CPR+ provides monthly training for free that will help you know how to integrate features like these into your business.  One of the sessions in January will help you learn how to use these features.

With Mediware HME solutions you can also seamlessly bill according to Medicare’s new Competitive Bidding requirements. The system comes pre-loaded with the designated Competitive Bidding Areas, the additional product categories, and all of the Medicare pricing to make order entry and billing simple and efficient.

Regardless of what software you use and how well they stay up to date with change in the industry, technology and regulations, it won’t matter unless you make a commitment to KNOW your software and INTEGRATE its features into your process.

Getting the data in correctly and most efficiently is the first step to efficient operations.  When you do this you can count on Rock-Pond Solutions to help you turn all of this data into the information you need when you need it.  We are also committed to keeping up with the industry, technology and regulatory changes.

PromptCare Adds Rock-Pond

Rock-Pond is proud to announce a new client relationship with PromptCare Home Infusion. Founded in 1985, PromptCare has grown to become a leading regional provider of home healthcare products and services for patients ranging from newborns to geriatrics. Headquartered in Clark, New Jersey, PromptCare houses a state-of-the-art specialty pharmacy as well as a centralized intake center, with regional centers across the Northeast.

“When we began using OUR data with the Rock-Pond Reports,” said Denise May, VP Reimbursement, “our CFO went nuts!  Every day we’re discovering new revenue and efficiency opportunities. It’s a beautiful thing.”

But it is the Rock-Pond value that she is most excited about.

Time. Sweet time,” says Denise. My whole department is raving, and we’ve only just begun. No more excel and data manipulation. Going from spreadsheet, to spreadsheet brings in the element of human error and overall accuracy risk. With Rock-Pond, I’m easily getting back 15 hours a week! And that’s just the beginning. I couldn’t be happier to be part of The Pond.”


PromptCare’s Favorite Reports:

“I have about 13 key reports, but my ‘must haves’ are: