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.

Are you tired of running reports on multiple reporting platforms?  Do you wish that the report in your existing home infusion or HME software had a new function?  Is there formatting issues with the report you’d like to resolve?  If you have ever asked yourself one of these questions, more than likely you have wished that a report you use in another program was accessible in the Rock-Pond Information Center.  Reports are our specialty and we would be glad to create an enhanced version of an existing report for you. And you won’t have to wait for the next release of your software system to have it available to use.

A home infusion provider and Rock-Pond customer recently called regarding the Physical Inventory Report they planned to use for year-end inventory counts.  The report they used in CPR+ had formatting issues that would not be resolved until the next software release at the earliest.  They were on a tight year end schedule and this would increase the time and labor it would take to complete the physical inventory count.  They turned to Rock-Pond for the immediate solution and within 24 hours, Rock-Pond added an enhanced Physical Inventory Report to the Rock-Pond Information Center for them to use.  The new report had the same information as the CPR+ report, but due to some minor formatting changes, the report was an impressive 60 pages shorter for one location and fit their inventory count process perfectly!

With Rock-Pond, you are free of the inefficiencies of running reports on multiple platforms.  You can get a report exactly how you want it without having to invest in report writer resources within your company.  It is no only okay to want a Rock-Pond Report instead of the report you already have in your existing software, it makes good business sense.  We understand how sometimes the smallest change can make the biggest difference to an organization.

Contact us today if you use a report in your home infusion or HME software and you wish it was a Rock-Pond Report!

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.

Questions are rolling in from providers about how to get the material needed for bid submissions. Rock-Pond wants you all to know that the competitive bidding process does not have to be a nightmare! We have it covered. Rock-Pond Solutions is actively working with The MedGroup and MHA to fully understand the impact of competitive bidding on the home infusion and HME industries. Rock-Pond Reports customers and MHA members with the MHA Business Solution Center have a powerful report to give them the information they need to complete Form B in the CMS Competitive Bid process.

“The Rock-Pond Competitive Bidding report went beyond providing my revenue by zip code. It already had the competitive bidding areas (CBA) defined so I could easily manage my Medicare and non-Medicare revenue grouped by these CBA’s. This saved me a tremendous amount of time in completing Form B in the bidding process. “ Hospital Based Home Infusion Provider

Our reports utilize the data in your CPR+ or Mediware software to produce the powerful and accurate information necessary for these submissions. To view the Rock-Pond Report for your system, click below:

• CPR+
• HomecareNet
• Ascend – not available at this time. Email us if you are interested in this report and we will get this done for you.

Do YOU have tough questions about Competitive Bidding Round 2? Contact us and we will help you find the answers to these questions. We will provide you with the Competitive Bidding information you need from the data you’ve got!  For more information about questions to ask before and after you bid, review this post from September 2010.

One of the challenges of traditional software reporting is running a report literally locks up your system.

Have you ever been viewing a report and someone asked you to look something up for them?  Let’s say you are analyzing claim denials and a patient calls with a question about their account.  To answer their question you have to close your report, look up the information for them and then rerun the report and try to remember what page you were on.

The Rock-Pond Information Center solves this problem.  Each time you run a report it opens a new instance on your task bar allowing you to run as many reports as you want, run one report as many different ways as you want and use any other program you want, including CPR+, HomecareNet or Ascend, without closing your report or losing your place. When you think about it, this design feature alone might improve the productivity of your staff and pay for your investment in Rock-Pond Reports.  The hundreds of reports that give you powerful information you are not able to get from your system will be a bonus!

At Rock-Pond, we are dependent on the Rock-Pond Information Center to get the information we need from many different data sources.  I noticed how many reports I had open on my desktop and realized how much I relied on this feature.  If your system can’t do this, you are missing out.

Competitive Bidding Round 2 is in full swing.  Providers in the affected areas of the country are in the bidder registration process if they are going to submit a bid.  Rock-Pond Solutions recently gathered with a group of home care providers at the Mediware Conference to discuss the impact on their organizations and offer some strategies for working through this process.  Rock-Pond has assisted providers in Round 1 with CMS reporting requirements and has expanded our reporting offering to assist in the round 2 process as the number of services covered has expanded.

The following are some questions to ask during the process.  Our Rock-Pond Reports product has the reports you’ll need to get the answers to these questions.   As always, you’ll be able to pull these answers directly from the data in your CPR+, HomecareNet, Ascend or Caretinuum software.

Pre-Bid questions

• Should I register to submit a bid?
• What is the financial impact if I do not get the bid?
• What price should I bid
• What is my mix of Medicare patients in the CBA’s I service for the services covered by Competitive bidding?
• What other services (non-competitive bidding) are these patients being provided?
• What referral sources will be impacted

Post-Bid questions

• Changes to the intake processes
• Changes in the pricing and billing processes
• Reporting requirements to CMS
• Ongoing business analysis on the impact of competitive bidding

We’ve always thought of our company as the DATA company.  Our customers and others in the home infusion industry often refer to Rock-Pond Solutions as the REPORT company.  Our customers use Mediware and CPR+ software and we help them get the information they need out of the data they’ve got.  That’s what we do best and it’s what separates us from the rest.

As we’ve put together a new marketing plan we’ve come to realize that more than writing reports and delivering the INFORMATION YOU NEED from the DATA YOU’VE GOT, Rock-Pond is a company that helps people solve tough problems.  We looked at the history of our company and the tough problems our industry has faced during this time.  It’s the tough problems these reports have helped to solve that has brought us to where we are.  Rock-Pond Reports, delivered through the Rock-Pond Information Center delivers exponential power (The Power of 2) when used in conjunction with your pharmacy dispensing system. 

Over the next few months, we’ll be putting together some case studies and information about how Rock-Pond can help you solve the tough problems you face.  For now, here’s a brief history of where we’ve come from in the context of the timeline above. 

Brief History of Rock-Pond

In the early 1980’s the movement know today as the home infusion industry began.  Over the past 30 years medical and technology advances have enabled this industry to become what we have today.  Rock-Pond, in a sense, has been there since 1987 when Pete Tanguay (I) started the development of the first comprehensive home infusion software product for I Care of Arkansas, Dr. Gene Graves’ company.  Dr. Graves was the founding president of the National Home Infusion Association (NHIA) and in 2005 he was the first recipient of the Gene Graves Lifetime Achievement award to honor individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the home infusion therapy community.

MBI was sold to Option Care in 1996 and in 2000, Pete Tanguay left to start Rock-Pond Solutions.  Through this time, the industry has faced many challenges and changes as we do today. 

Over the years, the home infusion industry has gone through a lot of change.  Many of you remember these changes and the challenges they posed.  Through all of these changes, companies who had the information they needed had a tremendous advantage. 

Rock-Pond Solutions is well positioned to leverage our experience and the information tools we’ve developed to help you get where you need to go no matter what obstacles or opportunities you face.