Here is the final excerpt of "The 11.1% Survival Guide for SNFs: 5 Tips for Thriving When Times Are Tough."
Tip 5: Outmaneuver Your Competitors While They Stand Still
SNF organizations that will survive—or better yet, thrive—in tough times will invest in strategies and resources that build quality census and revenue. They will arm themselves with business intelligence to make smart, nimble decisions that promote performance. And they’ll need to do one more important thing: Whip their competition.
Current anxiety and uncertainty in the SNF industry open a tremendous opportunity for savvy providers. While other providers scale back staff and resources, lock down budgets and freeze new projects, smart SNFs can take advantage and gain a competitive edge.
Those top competing SNF providers will focus on improving several processes related to census and capacity management:
- Accelerating response times to referral sources
- Automating census and bed availability management
- Automating and expediting the steps of initiating, approving and tracking referrals, from initial receipt through admissions
- Assign and track completion of liaison activities in the field
- Empower all sales, marketing and admissions staff to act quickly and decisively to manage a referral, wherever they are
SNFs struggle mightily to make these processes more efficient. The core tools of referral and census management are often still fax machines, whiteboards, spreadsheets and phones. And paper. Lots and lots of paper.
Patient Placement Systems provides a solution unique to the industry. The Web-based Referral Management System automates and accelerates all of the steps of the referral-to-admissions process, provides tools to manage marketing activities, and lets providers comprehensively manage bed availability and capacity at all locations. And no other system delivers the performance results that our SNF partners have documented:
- Referral response times 70 percent to 80 percent faster
- 25 percent to 33 percent of all monthly admissions attributed to efficiencies of the Referral Management System
- Conversion rates up from 56 percent to 88 percent
- Conversion rates of e-referrals up to 40-plus percent from 15 percent to 18 percent
- Significant increase in overall referral volumes, driven by improved responsiveness to referral sources
The reporting, efficiency and operational automation tools of the Referral Management System discussed in tips 4 and 5 represent exactly the type of solution that gives SNFs the advantages they need to survive—and thrive—even in the “11.1 percent” era.
Click here to download the complete, free 11.1% Survival Guide for SNFs.
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