“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I had fun Googling the source of this well-worn business truism. Fun-fact: The quote’s inverse, “If you can measure it, you can manage it,” has been copyrighted! According to Google Answers, the original quote has been attributed to W. Edwards Deming, Robert Kaplan, Gordon Baskerville, George Webster, Andrew Grove, T. Travers Waltrip, Peter Drucker, and “Floyd.” Just Floyd? Apparently my Management 2000 class details are escaping me, but the only Floyd that comes to mind is Pink, and I doubt they originated the term.

To paraphrase: if you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know how you’re doing. One key source of information for measuring your business has been in CPR+ since the very beginning - the Executive Summary Report. It's a summary, so it doesn't do any analysis; but it does give you a bird's eye view of business activity. For a day, a month or a year (or any time frame you choose) you can quickly see revenue, prescriptions, deliveries, and unbilled revenue, in a single report.

(Click here to view an example Executive Summary Report.)

David Lea, the Director of Operations for Home Parenteral Services, has used CPR+ to measure business performance for several years. Some of his key performance indicators, such as employee turnover, average number of miles driven per delivery, and results of key questions from patient satisfaction surveys, come from other data sources, such as driver mileage logs. But most of the indicators, such as cost of goods percentage, days needed to close and adverse outcomes occurrences, are either built right in to CPR+ or extracted from CPR+ data with Crystal Reports or the Foxfire! Report Writer for CPR+. As contributing subscribers to the CPR+ Report Library Service, some of these reports have been submitted to the CPR+ Report Library.

Lea says, “Home Parenteral Services department managers use CPR+ information extensively to measure departmental and individual productivity.” The CPR+ Audit Reports provide user-level detail about the work that your people are doing, including prescriptions filled, claims created, checks posted, delivery tickets created, and patients added. (Next week’s Report of the Every Other Week article will explain how this works). Dozens of reports in the CPR+ Report Library are also available to help you measure individual performance. Many of these reports can help you examine the overall productivity of your department: payment volume, prescriptions dispensed, deliveries made.

(Click here to view a list of Report Library reports that can help you measure productivity.)

Jacinda Tuley, Clinical Systems Analyst for Home Parenteral Services, has written reports to measure the turn-around time between patient home visits and completed documentation. “We also measured the percentage of assessments that were hand-written compared to system entered,” Tuley says. “All of our nurses have laptops, so we phased out use of hand-written assessments. We’ve been able to stop reporting on that measurement because the percentage has been zero for several months.”

With CPR+, you can also identify expensive exceptions activities – problems that you may not be “seeing” in the normal scope of business that are costing you time and money. What items are sitting in your unconfirmed ticket file? What tickets don’t have drivers assigned? What documents in the Document Manager need managing? How much A/R hasn’t been touched in over 90 days?

The two main challenges to measuring how your business is doing with CPR+ are first, deciding what measures to use, and second, retrieving the data. Answering the first challenge is by far the more difficult of the two. What do you want to know? What will help you evaluate your business’s health? Once you make these key business decisions, CPR+ can help you answer the second challenge for many of the measures you decide to use.

Contact Kim Carlsen to schedule time with a trainer to discuss ways CPR+ can help you measure your business. Contact Erika Salvato to subscribe to the CPR+ Report Library.

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Emdeon Vision™ for Claim Management
(Just like shipment tracking, but for claims)

Definitive Homecare Solutions and Emdeon have partnered to offer you a free claim tracking tool. Emdeon Vision for Claim Management is a new, free, self-service tool available to you today. It offers simple, end-to-end tracking for your claims from point-of-submission through payment. Easy-to-use search and view features give you the same claim views as your vendor and as Emdeon payors, so you'll save time and money through improved efficiencies.

• Fifteen months of your historical claim data available immediately
• Claim updates available several times throughout the day
• Flexible search options
• Most search results returned in less than 5 seconds!

To register, simply visit the Emdeon Vision registration website at www.emdeon.com/signup and enter some information about your practice. Within two business days, you will be contacted by an Emdeon Vision representative to receive your login credentials and some quick training on using Vision. Don’t delay – register today.

Want more information? Attend an introductory webinar:

Every Monday at 11am EDT/10am CDT/8am PDT
Every Thursday at 4pm EDT/3pm CDT/1pm PDT

Web access: www.emdeon.com/vision-webinar
Audio access: 1.800.508.7891 meeting number: *7467662*.

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