Even in tough times, there are ways to advance and innovate your HME business.
If you’re a business owner in the Home Medical Equipment (HME) industry, you know that resources are scarce due to reimbursement cuts. As a result, many HME companies have no choice but to reduce their workforce to make ends meet. This often leads to even more issues down the road, including overworked staff and backlogged orders. Fortunately, there are ways to bring innovation to your HME company and prevent these problems before they start.
3 Ways to Create a Culture of Innovation at Your HME Company
HME healthcare resources are vital for millions of people. If you fail to bring innovation to your company, you not only put your business at risk, but you also fail to provide vital services to patients around the country. So, let’s take a look at a few ways to bring innovation to your business:
Enhance Your Work Standards and Processes
Every business rests on its foundational processes. An HME company largely depends on a reliable, efficient billing system to process every HME order. While you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you do need to assess your current billing system and HME order process to ensure that they align with your overall goals. Once you find ways to improve and standardize your processes (billing or otherwise), you need to hire and train the right employees. Taking these steps will put you in the best position to transform your company.
That said, hiring and training the right employees is just the first step towards enhancing your work standards. Next, you must ensure that your employees are following the best practices to maximize the potential of your processes. So, here are a few actionable steps you can take to ensure maximum efficiency, improve HME customer service, and create high work standards:
- Convert standard work into job roles, thereby giving individuals or teams set responsibilities for every step of your process(es)
- Define competency levels in terms of job complexity and upskill whenever possible
- Create standardized training for each position
- Scale your organization by pairing interns and entry-level employees with senior staff
- Define the pay structure in advance to motivate career growth
- Provide prompt feedback to reward and teach employees
Encourage a Proactive Mindset at Your HME Company
Change doesn’t only come from senior staff at an HME company. To truly create a culture of innovation, you must also create an environment that encourages proactive problem-solving and critical thinking. This is especially important when it comes to your billing system.
Clean billing is crucial for any Home Medical Equipment business. In an industry with widespread denials, how can you create clean billing? You can do it by holding your team accountable.
You should specify the exact metrics for your team to work, track, and report every denial. Then, your team should manage these metrics on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Not only will this decrease your denial rate, but it will also encourage your teams to be more proactive about implementing preventative measures and evaluating their own performance.
Enhance Your Results with Better Technology
Technological tools help your team to manage metrics more effectively. Despite being useful and affordable, old school spreadsheets limit your control, increase the risk of human error, and open your business up to security threats. So, what’s the solution? Innovate your business with up-to-date HME cloud software and HME wireless processes.
We suggest turning to business intelligence tools, which can provide robust dashboards to track your processes and resources in real-time. Software robots, which work from your database to perform key tasks, are also efficient options. That said, it’s easy to invest in a lot of different upgrades at the same time, assuming that they will automatically improve your business.
However, blindly throwing new solutions into the mix will likely do more harm than good. The key is to find software and tech that provides specific benefits to your HME company. If it doesn’t make your HME order processes more efficient and less expensive, it probably isn’t worth implementing.
Is it time to change your HME Business? Contact us to learn about your outsourcing options with Prochant today. When we manage your revenue cycle, you have room to grow and innovate.
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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.