How to Create the Perfect HME Back-Office Dashboard

The health of your revenue cycle is essentially the sum of your combined processes. Dashboards are excellent tools for exposing issues that are causing delays in cash posting. A recap of Prochant’s webinar on creating a back-office dashboard most suitable to your team is below for HME providers.

HME dashboards are analytic-based software tools that enable healthcare professionals to manufacture real-time, data-driven decisions by gathering information from multiple sources onto a single screen. The dashboard provides a central location for finding information regarding your overall efficiency. It’s also a useful tool for breaking your processes up into more digestible sections so you can quickly decide the best course of action while moving forward. 

Cash Posting

There are key indicators and process functions that should be a part of all providers’ standard operating procedures to ensure they’re staying on top of cash posting. The goal of this webinar (full video below) is to demonstrate how the relationship between cash posting and accounts receivable (AR) leads to back-office optimization. 

Providers want to make sure they have control over their cash posting environment. That way, you’re not spending unnecessary time searching for funds you’ve already received. From a “Month to Date” perspective, finding out what happened during the end of the month is too late. Set benchmarks to help you monitor your collections throughout the month.

Keep a Closer Eye

• Benchmarks help you decipher if you’re on track with your expected collections, payment percent, payment rates, and net collection rates. Therefore, if you're current with your cash, but you're not on track, at least you know cash posting isn’t impacting your views or expectations.
• Check boxes or tasking tools are excellent “Year to Date” resources that keep your team on top of functions that get cash posted. They are also valuable tools for figuring out what’s causing posting delays.
• Other things that can influence the results of your cash posting are areas such as your allowables causing payments not to be paid in full or allowables changing with your payers, resulting in a new fee schedule.
• You always want to know how quickly you’re collecting, however, figures can be skewed during time periods where you have excessive write-offs or adjustments. Two other important related components are understanding your payment ratio and net collection ratio.
  
  Payment ratio or debt-to-income ratio compares how much money you make each month to the amount you earn. Net collection ratio is your payments divided by your AR, plus payments, plus bad debt adjustments.

When set up correctly, dashboards help providers measure how effective their processes are collectively. Learn everything you need to know about dashboard optimization by watching our webinar below: