Tip 4: Capture Business Intelligence to Support Smarter—And Bolder—Strategies
So far we’ve given you some sage advice. “Keep investing in growth when times are tough.” “Grow your census.” “Optimize your payer mix.” We’ll forgive you at this point if you’re saying, “Well, yeah, of course we’d like to do those things. But how?”
These last two survival tips focus on the “how.” How do you make the business case for maintaining and investing in strategic programs? How do you start building and managing the highest quality census? Your most valuable starting asset is knowledge.
If you’re going to champion a business case that your SNFs should invest in tools and processes for improved sales and capacity management, you’re going to need the data to back it up. At a minimum, your SNFs need to produce accurate, timely reporting and analysis of the following:
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Referrals and admissions by referring physician
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Win/loss analysis and conversion rates
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Referral response times and velocity analysis
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Referrals volumes and admissions by payer mix
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Reasons and sub-reasons for lost business and declined referrals
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Payer trends for lost and declined referrals
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Marketer/liaison activities and effectiveness
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Discharges and reasons for discharge
This information, if reliable, current and comprehensive, tells SNFs what they are doing well—and where they must improve to increase census and manage capacity effectively. Executive managers need this information to keep facilities accountable for performance, and to adapt and improve marketing strategies and admissions processes to meet census objectives.
Our clients, using our Web-based Referral Management System to enter, track and manage all patient referrals, are able to view live reports and dashboards with accurate census and marketing trends and analyses. They translate that knowledge into action, with significant census and revenue performance results:
- Greystone Healthcare Management (27 SNFs) applied knowledge learned from referral source trend and payer mix reports to significantly increase volumes of quality referrals, and improve overall Medicare census by 25 percent.
- Berkshire Health Systems (17 SNFs) has been able to assess reasons for declined and lost referrals, and make adjustments to prevent those opportunities from getting away, focusing on relationships with case managers that need attention and providing high-demand clinical services for patients they previously had to decline. The results: Overall admissions increased by 25 percent (70 new admissions per month), and overall referral volumes increased by 7.4 percent.
- Meadow Green Nursing and Rehab shares monthly reports with referring case managers documenting length of stay and patient outcomes—extremely valuable post-discharge patient information that helps strengthen relationships with case managers from top referral sources. One of the results: Payer trend reports show that Meadow Green has seen a 40 percent increase in highly desired commercial payer rehab patients.
We encourage providers to think about outputs—what executive dashboards, performance and analysis reports, and information are critical to understanding and continuously improving operations and performance. Most often we encounter providers that scramble and struggle to collect this information from individual facilities, frequently in manually compiled reports and spreadsheets of dubious completeness and accuracy. The more completely you can automate and apply the collection and reporting of critical business trends and information, the greater the returns your SNFs will see in improved census, payer mix and revenue.
Click here to download the complete, free 11.1% Survival Guide for SNFs.
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