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Rock-Pond Announces A Night of Appreciation on April 24

March 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We want to show our customers just how much we appreciate them.  If you will be attending the 2012 NHIA Annual Conference and Exposition, join us for A Night of Appreciation at the Phoenix Art Museum on Tuesday, April 24 from 6:00-9:00 p.m.  Rock-Pond Solutions and Reimbursement Concepts have joined forces to give our customers, partners, and friends a night of fine art, fine wine, and fine friends.

Before going to dinner on Tuesday night, stop by for a few minutes to have a drink on us and view some of the most beautiful artwork in the United States.  We are thrilled to announce that the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition will be taking place during our Night of Appreciation.  Frank Lloyd Wright spent more than 70 years creating designs that revolutionized the art and architecture of the 20th century.  The exhibit, Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century, explores the tenets of Wright’s organic architecture and highlights many triumphs of his career.

Both companies will be exhibiting at the NHIA conference.  Reimbursement Concepts will be at booth #514 and Rock-Pond will be at booth #419.  Tickets for the event can be picked up at either of our booths.

If you want to feel appreciated, please click the event logo on this page to visit our official event page and RSVP to our Night of Appreciation.  Don’t forget to stop by our booth to receive your ticket for the evening.  We can’t wait to appreciate you in Phoenix!

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Synagis and your DSO

September 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It’s “Synagis Season” again for many home infusion companies.  As a clinician it’s “no fun” to see such sick kids and as parents there are financial challenges as well when their insurance coverage is inadequate or unavailable.  The cost and low profit margin on the drug requires that a home infusion company pay attention to this area of their business, during this season.

Consider the impact of a seasonal, high priced service such as providing Synagis on your DSO.  If you are not careful you’ll be caught off guard at the end of the season and here is why. 

Days sales outstanding (DSO) is a calculation used by a company to estimate their average collection period.  The formula to calculate it is your Accounts Receivable balance / average daily sales for a period, usually 90 days.  If your A/R is $1,000,000 and for the last 90 days you’ve generated $1,000,000 in revenue (or $11,111/day), your DSO is 90 days.  The lower your DSO, the faster you are collecting your money and the more bragging rights you have with other providers. 

High revenue seasonal services like Synagis can lower your DSO.  What’s wrong with this?  We want a lower DSO, right?  Absolutely, but you must be careful that you don’t take your eye of the non-Synagis portion of your business.  Let me explain. 

Any time you have a spike in revenue, especially when it is a service like Synagis that you can get paid for rather quickly if you are doing a good job in your billing area, you’ll see your DSO go down.  Why?  Because your sales are going up fast and the money from these sales is coming in quickly.  The reimbursement staff is excited because the company DSO has gone from 73 to 48.  This is great because it usually happens around the end of the year, about 3 months into Synagis season.  The bad news comes when Synagis season is over, the revenue stops and you are left with A/R that is old, A/R that you have not paid attention to as you should have and A/R that is harder to collect.  Spring is turning into summer and your DSO is 94. 

The best solution to this is to manage your DSO by payer, therapy and biller/collector to make sure you see the entire picture and can addresses issues quickly.  Carve out special business situations like Synagis season so you don’t lose focus of the rest of your business.  Use the A/R Analyzer, Revenue Analyzer and Profitability Analyzer reports in Rock-Pond Reports to make sure you see the entire picture and keep your business on course through change.

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Drug Recall Tool Pays off early

May 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

According to Ehow Health Topics, “The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) board is responsible for screening and approving foods and drugs sold at outlets across the United States. They must also inform pharmacies in the event of a product recall.”

Pharmacies have 3 responsibilities:

  1. Identify and remove the recalled drug from their stock.
  2. If the recall is a class 1 recall, notify potentially impacted patients and take the appropriate clinical action.
  3. Properly document their recall response.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  Well it’s not.  Sure, you can sign up to receive recalls from the FDA, you might receive them via email from your GPO and you can also get them directly from manufacturers or wholesalers.  The problem is, there are thousands of recall notices and only a small percentage apply to you. 

How do you filter through the emails and faxes to find the ones that matter? 
How do you quickly find the impacted patients? 
How do you find time to do this in the first place?
How do you keep from missing a critical recall and being responsible for an adverse event?

These are the questions that prompted Rock-Pond to find an alternative.  In partnership with Managed Health Care Associates (MHA). Rock-Pond developed the MHA Business Solutions Center.  Among other things, this product filters through the drug recalls to automatically identify drugs that are in the inventory file of the provider/member and notifies them.  In addition, the patients impacted are also available at the click of the mouse.  Finally, a permanent record is maintained of all recall actions taken and documented.

On the second installation of the product, a large home infusion provider was surprised to find they had recalled drug on their shelves.  They had manual processes in place, they were monitoring the emails and faxes, but this one slipped by.

Learn more about this exciting solution from Rock-Pond and MHA.

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Timely Filing – Submitting the claim is not enough

May 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Working in the home infusion industry since 1987, I’ve seen a lot of things that were hard to believe.  One day I watched a billing clerk sit and write off claim after claim with absolutely no emotion.  I asked her why she was writing them off instead of billing them and she said, “because I can’t bill them.  I don’t have an authorization and the time limit to submit the claim has passed.”  Within 6 months this hospital based home infusion was closed and sold to a national home infusion company.

Years later we wrote a report for a very progressive company that had a zero tolerance for timely filing denials.  Their process was to validate that every claim was not only submitted, but also received prior to the filing deadline.  Most people think of timely filing as the number of days a provider has to submit the claim to get it paid.  I learned from this customer that when a claim has been submitted, but not verified as received, the claim was still at risk for a timely filing denial.  To meet a zero tolerance objective on timely filing denials, you must have a process in place to identify claims that have been sent but may not have been received and contact the insurance company or resubmit the claim.

The following is a proven process, utilizing Rock-Pond Reports to give you the information you need.

  1. Establish a zero-tolerance policy for timely filing denials.
  2. Run the Rock-Pond A/R adjustments for the last year by payer within adjustment reason and review all of the claims denied because the timely filing deadline had past.  This will tell you the extent of your problem.
  3. Identify the most common timely filing deadline for your insurance companies, most likely 90 or 120 days.
  4. Identify all insurance companies whose timely filing requirements are less than or greater than this number of days.  Load the timely filing deadline for these companies in your insurance tables.
  5. Using the Rock-Pond Unbilled Report for claims within our X days of timely filing, work the claims to make sure they are submitted, even if they will be denied for some reason.  You can resubmit a claim denied for lack of authorization but you can not submit a claim you didn’t file in time.
  6. Once claims are submitted, follow up to see that they are confirmed as received and record a billing note with the receipt validation.  This can be through an electronic claim response file or talking to someone on the phone.
  7. Using the Rock-Pond Claims in A/R that are within X days of timely filing, work these claims by calling to verify receipt or resubmit the claim.  The report will show all claims that are within the timely filing limit and have not had a payment, adjustment or note posted.
  8. Enforce your no-tolerance policy for timely filing denials.

One of the main problems with standard procedures used to manage timely filing collections is people typically assume if you sent out the bill you will not get a timely filing denial.  Adding the management of sent claims to your timely filing process will help you identify claims you think you have sent but have not been received and get you closer to your zero-timely filings.

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2011 Rock-Pond reSOLUTIONS

January 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

2010 was a turning point year for Rock-Pond SOLUTIONS.  It seems like everything doubled; our office space, the number of offices, the number of people on our team, our revenue and our vision for the future.  We began our year as a company primarily focused on creating reports that extended the reporting capabilities of the CPR+, Ascend, HomecareNet and Fastrack software products.

Our RESOLUTION in 2010 was to deliver an application that provided much more than a report viewer, a product we could build upon in the years to come.  With the release of the Rock-Pond Information Center, the Customer Resource Center and other new information products in development, we have made the transition from a pure service company to a service / product company.  This means better value and more SOLUTIONS for our customers and some real momentum for us as we turn the corner into 2011.

In 2011, our reSOLUTIONS are simple.  We reSOLVE to develop and release more powerful information applications, establish more industry partners, expand the number of providers who benefit from these SOLUTIONS and put in place the infrastructure necessary to provide the highest quality of support to our customers as we make this exciting transition.

If you are a Rock-Pond customer today, we appreciate you and are committed to your success.  If you are not a Rock-Pond customer, we look forward to the opportunity to meeting you in 2011.

Best Wishes and a Happy New Year,

The Rock-Pond SOLUTIONS Team

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Mediware User Conference

September 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Attending the Healthcare Automation User Conference in Rhode Island is always a highlight of our year and this year was no exception.  It got better this year since we were able to connect with both our HomecareNet and Ascend customers as a result of Mediware’s acquisition of both of these companies.  One on one time with the HomecareNet engineers, reconnecting with customers and friends, meeting new people and of course, Karaoke and the New England Clam Bake all added up to make this a great couple of days.

Rock-Pond unveiled our new product, the Rock-Pond Information Center and announced our partnership with MHA to bring exciting new information tools to the home infusion industry.  More information on these two announcements will appear on our website very soon.  It is an exciting time to be in the home infusion industry and we look forward to taking the excitement and energy from the user conference back to the office.

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A/R Adjustments – made EASY

December 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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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.

AdjustmentReportSmall

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.

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Extending the Value of your Home Infusion DATA

December 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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.

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Managing Billers and Collectors

December 15, 2009 By 1 Comment

CPR+ Collector Reports

One of the features of the CPR+ system is you can assign a default biller and collector to each insurance company.  The flexibility allows you to override this at the patient, delivery ticket and invoice level.  This can be a very powerful feature if you need to override the collector responsible for a specific patient or invoice.  However, if you are not careful, you can end up with an unmanageable mess if your biller / collector assignments don’t easily fit into the CPR+ rules, you have significant turnover in your reimbursement department or your payer mix requires that you adjust collectors for workload balancing.

Rock-Pond recognizes this and provides powerful reports you can use to manage collectors based on the default insurance collector or the collector currently assigned to the invoice.  In addition, audit reports are available to alert you when the default collector is not the same as the collector assigned to the invoice.  This is critical because you have to manually reassign the collector when you transfer the balance to another payer or to the patient if the collector who will rework the remaining balance is different than the one for the payer the invoice was transferred from.

Bottom line, in order to effectively use the biller and collector fields in CPR+, you’ll likely need some additional reporting to manage your data quality based on your current collector assignments and you may need additional reporting to produce reports for your collection manager and collector to effectively do their job.  If you have cases where you have payers that are divided based on the first letter of the last name of the patient, you’ll need some custom reporting unless you are going to have a process to manually assign these at intake.

If there is one thing an infusion company must do it is manage their A/R and determine how to get the most productivity out of the billing and collection staff.  It’s not always easy, but the effort is worth it.

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CPR+ gets a LIFE

December 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

cpr+_logoEach year CPR+ delivers one major upgrade that is announced and demonstrated at their Fall user conference.  2009 is no exception and this year the buzz is that CPR+ is releasing LIFE (Line Item Financials).  Simply put, this breaks out each invoice into multiple claims.  Gone is the limitation that you can only have money due from one payer at a time.  If you want to collect a co-pay up front from the patient prior to billing the insurance company, with LIFE you can do this without putting the money in unapplied cash.  There are many other reasons that this is a very good and needed upgrade.

However, it will not come without some serious consequences.  Consider this:

  1. Line item financials will require a data conversion from your current data formats to the new data formats and there is no turning back.
  2. The process changes required in your business are so significant that customers who wish to “get a LIFE” are required to go through training.
  3. The 3 tables in the database that hold all of the invoice data will be expanded to 9 tables.  All custom reports you have written against these three tables will have to be reviewed, rewritten and retested as part of the implementation process.
  4. The changes are so major that CPR+ is allowing customers to upgrade to 8.3 without “getting a life”.

There are more consequences, but these are enough to indicate that this is a serious upgrade.   When you ask for major change from your software vendor, what do you get?  Major change.  This is not like the interim updates and program fixes that are received throughout the year.  Read the release notes, listen to CPR+, pay attention, invest the time in testing and training and most of all, make sure you “need a LIFE” before you “get a life”.

Rock-Pond Solutions is working hard to stay on top of the changes at the data level.  We are identifying all of our reports that need to be changed and offering new versions (no cost) to our customers who need reports that support the new structures.  Our advice?  Be sure and call us before you “get a LIFE”.  You’ll be glad that you did.

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