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What are my billers doing?

Pete Tanguay — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:39:36 +0000

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 are 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.

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Rock-Pond Signs Agreement with NHIA to support DATA Initiative

Pete Tanguay — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:16:02 +0000

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.

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A/R Adjustments – made EASY

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:00:16 +0000

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.

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.

Rock-Pond Connect Released!

Pete Tanguay — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:09:11 +0000

After 9 years in business, Rock-Pond Solutions has released its first internally developed application. And we are giving it away for FREE to all of our customers. Rock-Pond Connect is a server based application that allows us to automatically transfer files to our customers as soon as they are available.Customers install and schedule the application to update based on a desired schedule and they never have to worry about having out of date report templates or other important files they need from Rock-Pond Solutions.

In addition to the obvious time saving advantages this provides to our customers today, Rock-Pond Connect establishes some important infrastructure for some exciting products to be released by Rock-Pond in 2010.

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Extending the Value of your Home Infusion DATA

Pete Tanguay — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:01:46 +0000

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 the 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.

AWP Settlement Impact

Pete Tanguay — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:39:17 +0000

Do 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?

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