3 Tips for Home Healthcare and Hospice Orgs to Connect the Dots Between Financial, Clinical Systems

Home healthcare and hospice organizations are scrutinizing their month-end reporting efforts to ensure payments are streamlined and accurate. However, disparate systems and processes hinder reporting initiatives now more than ever, especially in industries like healthcare with complicated payment models. 

Research conducted by Porter Research, in conjunction with Sage Intacct, shows that more than half (54%) are concerned with gaining visibility into operational and financial performance. However, only 25% reported confidence in their current system’s ability to support their future needs. 

That same Porter research shows 40% of survey respondents claim their current financial management systems do not integrate with their electronic health record (EHR) system, paving the way for “spreadsheet gymnastics” and massive data warehouses. 

Disconnects between the finance management system and the EHR leads to more manual data sharing — which, in turn, leads to more headaches. Finance teams at home health and hospice companies end up wasting additional time and effort on reporting initiatives while increasing the possibility of being prone to human error. 

Here are three tips we share regularly with home health and hospice professionals to begin mitigating any risks with their disparate financial and clinical systems. 

1. Fully Understand Your Compliance Requirements

Completely understanding your compliance requirements from the start is vital to understanding exactly what your business needs to do to succeed obedient to industry regulations. This is crucial because it affects everything you do.  

We suggest that teams have a dedicated, educated overseer — or a partner like BrainSell — that will be tasked with ensuring all those compliances are being met. Here are a few questions to ask yourself: 

• Do you have someone on your team that knows the compliance requirements? 
• Do they have everything they need to comply? 
• Do you need third-party audits? 

2. Blueprint Your Financial Reporting Initiatives

The act of blueprinting your business initiatives, especially your financial reporting efforts, is often overlooked or knowingly skipped by most businesses. However, it is important to identify any potential roadblocks and understand how information flows throughout your tech ecosystem.  

For example, one thing that can come from a blueprinting exercise is the awareness that you have multiple records in multiple systems. This is dangerous in a highly regulated industry since duplicate and incorrect data can make or break compliance and obscure financial visibility.  

Therefore, it might be in your best interest to create a unique internal ID system based on the main system these records all pass through. This is to prevent accidental duplicate IDs in different systems. Medical records from ‘System A’ and medical records from ‘System B’ with the same ID leads to mixed-up data.  

A blueprinting exercise lays the entire financial reporting process on the table, allowing you to see where improvements need to be made and actions need to be taken. 

3. Find the Tech That Works Best for You 

Tech should never be the first order of business when positioning your organization for growth. But when the time comes, you may uncover tasks, roadblocks, and other challenges that can be easily addressed through the power of technology. 

Having a financial system that can integrate with an EHR — like Sage Intacct — eliminates that headache and, in turn, provides the visibility home health and hospice companies need to effectively help patients.

Want to learn more? Check out this eBook to see how other home healthcare and hospice professionals are tackling the issues!