HME & pharmacy providers often struggle with staffing — here's how to resolve this issue.
Most HME and pharmacy providers pursue their careers out of a desire to provide quality, post-acute healthcare to patients. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to focus on the most important aspects of your healthcare business when staffing shortages come into play. More than three-quarters of providers have to deal with staffing issues on a daily basis, pulling them away from the needs of their patients and referral sources. For this reason, many providers consider some form of outsourcing to help improve their operations.
Fortunately, strategic process outsourcing offers a way for HME providers to drive down costs, improve the quality of care, deliver consistent results, and overcome staffing issues.
What is Strategic Process Outsourcing?
Strategic process outsourcing (SPO) isn’t specific to any one business model or industry, but is very effective at addressing the most pressing needs of HME and pharmacy providers. Unlike tactical outsourcing, which is driven by a short-term strategy and used as a gap-fill measure, SPO engages an experienced outsourcing partner to manage one (or many) routine business functions. The partner-provider relationship can serve as a long-term staffing solution. When providers decide not to hire, train, or retain a full team, their trusted business process outsourcing company handles these important functions on their behalf.
So, what does strategic process outsourcing look like in practice? Although SPO can help ensure the success of a wide range of tasks and functions, it is most suitable for the following:
- Compliance Monitoring — CM is most applicable to PAP compliance, but it can also extend to other product lines like ventilators and blood glucose monitors. This area ensures that patients are compliant with their prescribed therapy or treatment.
- Inbound & Outbound Calls — Call centers can be used for multiple purposes, including phone queues, statement calls, patient updates, referral calls, and more.
- Daily Deposits — Daily deposits (lockboxes) refer to post-office boxes that banks monitor on a daily basis. Here, checks are deposited automatically, while other types of correspondence are scanned or forwarded to providers’ offices.
- Deliveries — Dropship options include working with vendors directly or outsourcing orders to local couriers. Although most providers currently work with vendors, more and more are turning to couriers for certain types of orders.
- Professional Employer Outsourcing — Professional employer outsourcing allows HME and pharmacy providers to contract out their HR and benefits functions. In doing so, they are grouped with hundreds of companies, opening them to preferential benefits like health insurance.
- Managed IT & Printer Services — These services offer alternatives to hiring full IT teams. Many providers work with a third-party service or supplement a small, in-house team with a vendor to handle network admin and other advanced aspects of IT.
- Executive Positions — Executive positions are key, high-end hires, but for this reason, they are not always affordable. For example, many small businesses cannot hire (and do not need) a full-time CFO. Yet, bringing on fractional or part-time executives can benefit the company as a whole.
Solve Your Staffing Issues with Prochant
The benefits of outsourcing are especially crucial to HME and pharmacy providers today. At Prochant, more than 80% of the providers we speak to are struggling to hire, train, retain, and manage their reimbursement staff successfully. And while SPO is an excellent solution, it’s important to remember that strategic process outsourcing is not an all-or-nothing proposal. Providers can outsource specific payers, products, and/or branches of their business to target specific pain points.
When a payer or payer group is difficult, providers might assign them to a trusted outsourcing partner, while their in-house team works on the rest. The key is finding where your staff struggles most — or where you struggle to hire the right staff. What processes are the most time-consuming? Where can you free up resources for these processes? These are the questions that Prochant can help you answer.
Contact us today to learn more about strategic process outsourcing and solving your staffing issues.
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Prochant is the leading reimbursement firm with a dedicated focus on HME and pharmacy. We have a proven track record of helping HME and pharmacy providers meet their financial goals. Our scalable solutions, years of experience, and advanced technology provide best-in-class results to the healthcare community. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, our client base includes national HME and pharmacy providers and health systems.