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Value doesn’t require complication

February 9, 2011 By Comments

Solutions do not have to be complicated to be valuable.  In fact, sometimes the simplest things provide the most value and complicated things can be confusing.  At Rock-Pond Solutions we do A LOT of reporting.  We’ve gotten very good at connecting various data tables in sophisticated ways to deliver powerful information.  So much so that at times we fall into the trap of thinking  we need to do complicated things in order to deliver value.  Not so.

A reimbursement manager was faced with a situation where certain insurance companies were denying for specific ICD-9 codes.  To be proactive during the reauthorization process she wanted to know what patients had these “troublesome” diagnosis codes to see if there was any alternative coding that could be clinically correct and meet the requirements of the insurance company.  Sounds easy.  Getting a list of patients grouped by primary diagnosis code was not so easy.

As a Rock-Pond Reports customer she turned to Rock-Pond Solutions and within a couple hours, she had exactly what she needed.  We didn’t have to do anything difficult, it didn’t take any time at all and yet there is extreme value.  It’s great to learn the lesson again that so often simple and easy is very good.

As this report was deployed out to the customer who requested it, it was also immediately available to every other user of the Rock-Pond Information Center.  The dream of every infusion company, regardless of the software they are using, working together to identify the information needed to be most productive and profitable and then sharing it through a common reporting format continues to gain momentum.

Filed Under: CPR+ & Mediware Customers, Featured Tagged With: , , ,

Reconnect, Restart and Rebrand – that’s our focus now

October 29, 2010 By Comments

Energy is high at Rock-Pond Solutions.  I don’t know if it was the coming of age from celebrating our ten years in business or whether it was time to say good-bye to the home office for a change of pace that started it but things are definitely changing around here.  My 6 year old daughter tells her friends, “my Dad works in a building” now.

Over the past 10 years we have learned so much and had the opportunity to work with the smartest people in the home infusion industy and serve some of the most progressive and innovative health care providers in the country.  Thanks to all of you who were part of this experience.  As we came together to look at the future we’ve come out with three words that will define our effort as we finish 2010 and sprint into 2011.

We are going to RECONNECT with our customers.  Rock-Pond has a small core of customers we provide a lot of service for, who depend on us as part of their core team.  These change over time but at any point in time there are 3-5.  We are very connected with these customers.  At the same time, there are over 500 people who use Rock-Pond Reports in the rest of our customer base that are in many respects, “on their own”.  They pay a very small monthly fee to use a broad and growing collection of reports to do daily and month end tasks like managing deliveries and biller productivity, renegotiate managed care contracts, negotiate with payers to get paid, submit drug utilization data to manufacturers, manage drug recalls, send patient statements, calculate sales commission, provide month end financials to accounting and many other important tasks.  We are going to RECONNECT with you.  You will be hearing from Liz who recently joined our team.

We are going to RESTART our marketing machine.  This year we developed a data analysis tool to support the NHIA Data Initiative and provided it as a FREE resource to home infusion providers.  As providers pulled data out of their CPR+, Fastrack, HomecareNet and Ascend data bases with a click of a mouse that would have taken them days to get otherwise, we heard things like “Unbelievable” and “Why have we not heard about Rock-Pond before”.  We apologize and promise to RESTART our marketing machine and do better.  You will be hearing from Jeanie and Daniel who recently joined our team.

We are going to REBRAND our company from the reporting company to the information company.  I never thought when I named the company Rock-Pond that it would become a synonym to the word data and reports at the NHIA conference.  We are definitely known as the data company.  When people need a report, they think of Rock-Pond.  In 2011 you’ll be seeing a lot more from Rock-Pond than just reports.  We just released the Rock-Pond Information Center and have a pipeline of other development projects on the way.  We are hiring developers who have the skills to build the products that will REBRAND Rock-Pond as an Information Company and beyond.

We don’t come to work everyday to feel good.  We come to win and to help our customers and partners win.  Because winning feels good.

Filed Under: Featured, Rock-Pond News

Rock-Pond Information Center Released

October 27, 2010 By Comments

Rock-Pond Solutions has released it’s first major application and next generation information delivery product on October 27, 2010.  The product is a result of over 10 years of reporting experience and 3 years of design and development.  The Information Center will replace DataLink  Viewer, the third party report viewer used by Rock-Pond Reports, to expand the reporting capabilities that our customers have been asking for.

This is an exciting time for our company, according to company President Pete Tanguay.  Having full control of the user experience through our own viewer application and being able to expand it to handle more data sources, provide more data security, increase the number of ways reports can be run and scheduled and many more possibilities, puts Rock-Pond Customers in a much better position to get the information they need, when they need it and in the format the need it in to meet their clinical and financial goals.

Click on the image below for an overview the Rock-Pond Information Center.

Filed Under: Featured, Rock-Pond News Tagged With: ,

What are my billers doing?

July 14, 2010 By Comments

All home infusion software systems have the ability to assign billers and collectors to payers, patients, invoices, at varying levels.  However, the day to day process of managing your billing department to measure and increase productivity requires the ability to report the revenue based on who actually created the claim versus who is assigned in the system to bill for the patient.  This will help you accurately measure who is creating revenue and measure the volume of claims and patients a billing clerk is working on.

The following are some areas that cause difficulty in accurately measuring productivity:

  • Billing primary versus secondary claims
  • Assigning specific billers to a therapy across all payers (such as IVIG) is usually not supported by software systems.
  • The need to manually transfer the assigned payer when the invoice is transferred to the secondary payer or the patient is time consuming and often not done.
  • The difficulty of billing based on therapy and payer is not always the same across therapies and payers, thereby making it difficult to compare productivity across billers.
  • Employee changes and the need to temporarily or permanently adjust the billing workload makes the default assignments in the system ineffective.

The end result is that even though it appears that assigment and management of billing personnel is handled by existing software features, in other than the smallest home infusion providers, this is a very challenging area.  The first measurement to answer the question, “What are my billers doing” requires the ability to produce a report like the one below, that is based on the biller who created the claim rather than who was assigned to the claim.

Filed Under: CPR+ & Mediware Customers, Featured Tagged With: ,

Rock-Pond Signs Agreement with NHIA to support DATA Initiative

March 24, 2010 By Comments

Change in health care is happening rapidly.  Now, more than ever, the home infusion industry must come together to communicate the value of home infusion and lobby for it’s place in the future of health care in America.  The story simply can not be told or the case made with out data.  One of the top priorities of the National Home Infusion Association in 2010 is to establish a base data initiative that will provide the data needed to take the case for home infusion to Washington.  And this is just the beginning.  Data will be needed to support pay-for-performance initiatives when they are implemented in non-acute care settings and to support best clinical practices on an industy-wide basis.

Rock-Pond Solutions has signed a mutual agreement of understanding where Rock-Pond will provide FREE tools to any home infusion provider to mine their data source to extract and deliver the data requested to NHIA.  NHIA will promote this as the tool of choice to gather the data in a standardized and consistent manner.

Click here for more information.

Filed Under: CPR+ & Mediware Customers, Featured, Rock-Pond News

A/R Adjustments – made EASY

December 17, 2009 By Comments

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It’s bad enough that you have to adjust off accounts receivable. This is money that you have booked as revenue and counted on receiving. In most home infusion companies the adjustment process is a manual process of filling out an adjustment request form, getting it approved by a manager, re-looking up the invoice and applying this adjustment. The end result is a lot of errors, overstated A/R, wasted time by collectors calling on invoices that should have been adjusted, etc.

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Rock-Pond Solutions worked with one of our customers to create a report that streamlined the process whereby the collector or cash posting clerk would make the adjustment according to predefined procedures. The manager runs the Detailed Adjustments with Invoice Status report each day to review the adjustments from the prior day and either approve or reverse them with notes in the system to the collector. The results included time savings, improved accuracy, elimination of paper, improvement of audit trails in the system and a much better understanding of why A/R was being adjusted in the first place so it could be prevented. If you are using the CPR+ software and are not using this report – call us right now and we’ll show you what it looks like with YOUR DATA.  If you are using HomecareNET or Ascend, call us and we’ll write this report for your software.  No matter what you are using, you need this adjustment report and it doesn’t come with your software.

Filed Under: Featured, Rock-Pond News, Success Stories Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Extending the Value of your Home Infusion DATA

December 16, 2009 By Comments

Regardless of what home infusion software you are using, your staff spends countless hours entering data into the system and often comes up blank when looking for information they need to get their job done.  The more data you enter and the more feature rich your software becomes, the more potential there is to exploit the data to get critical information to meet your business goals.  That’s where Rock-Pond Solutions can help.  We will extend the value of your systems and give you the information you need from the data you’ve got.

Although we’d like to take the credit, the truth is that everything we have produced started with a request from someone working in a home infusion company who had an obstacle or an opportunity.  Welcome to Rock-Pond.com.  Here you’ll find an overview of who we are and what we do as well as regular posts about the things we are doing and problems we are solving.  If you use one of the top  3 home infusion software products (CPR+, Ascend or HomecareNET), the quickest and best way to get to know us is to let us show you some of the reports we’ve developed for other home infusion providers.  We’ll set up our viewer on your system in 15 minutes and show them to you with your data.  We’re looking forward to your call.

Filed Under: Featured, Rock-Pond Blog Tagged With: , ,

AWP Settlement Impact

December 9, 2009 By Comments

infusionpharmacistDo you update your average wholesale prices for drugs each month?  (Correct answer is Yes)  Do you get this information from Medispan or First DataBank?  (99% of home infusion providers will answer Yes)  Do you get a list of drugs whose AWP changed when you run the update?  (Correct answer is Yes)  Was the list of drugs changed on the September 26th update bigger than you’ve ever seen before?  (Probable answer is Oh My God!)

In the aftermath of a class-action lawsuit brought against First DataBank (FDB) and McKesson Corporation by a third-party payor class accusing the two companies of conspiring to inflate the average wholesale price (AWP) of hundreds of drugs, there was a reduction in f AWP values that is one one of the largest single drops in AWP prices on a given day ever.  As 2009 draws to a close, many home infusion providers have not been significantly impacted by this change since their average DSO (days sales outstanding in A/R) is 75-90 days.  However, the impact is coming like a dark cloud on the horizon.  The payers have reduced their AWP prices and any of the contracts that are based on AWP will see reduced reimbursement.   If bills sent in October are typically paid 75-90 days out, the impact is about to be felt most dramatically.

Rock-Pond Solutions is working with providers to analyze the impact based on their payer / therapy mix.  NHIA is working hard to stay ahead of the developments related to home infusion providers.  As a provider you must know the impact the reduction AWP pricing implemeted on September 26, 2009 will have on your company.  You may be in the calm before the storm.  The question is, will you be able to handle the storm when it hits?

Filed Under: Featured, Rock-Pond News Tagged With: , , ,