Reduce Admin Burden in Skilled Nursing, Assisted Living Facilities to Drive Productive, Profitable, Patient-Centric Care

It’s time to address the elephant in the room. 

There’s one big thing that stands in the way of truly productive, profitable, patient-centric care in senior living and skilled nursing facilities, and it’s not the care team. It’s the administrative burden.

Countless labor-intensive and hard-paper manual processes impede rehab workflow and do little to optimize care and connection for senior adults.

Now, imagine a world where the care team could say goodbye to snail mail, return postage and endless administrative tasks … for good. 

Do you know that your Net Health Therapy for Skilled Nursing EHR software can also be used within the Senior Living/ALF environment? Read our whitepaper to learn more.

Achieving this is possible when you follow these tips for reducing administrative burden and improving efficiency within both the assisted living (ALF) and skilled nursing (SNF) spaces.  

1. Streamline Intake Across the Continuum of Care 

Many skilled nursing and assisted living facility rehab therapy providers rely on manual procedures to onboard patients, certify benefits and verify prior authorizations. Fortunately, a great deal of administrative burden can be alleviated simply by streamlining the intake process.

Rather than rely on paper charts and clipboards or phone calls and snail mail to track down consenting parties, it’s time to centralize — and digitize — intake efforts through the EHR.

The use of onsite tablets connected to the central patient database enables therapists to quickly complete forms and collect information for the rehab director to have at their fingertips, which can be forwarded to the revenue cycle management team. 

Moreover, a centralized intake workflow empowers therapy providers to create one patient record across the continuum of care to minimize administrative burden for aligned services like SNF short stays. Senior patients can then be brought onto the outpatient direct bill caseload after discharge.

2. Eliminate Inefficient Cross-Functional Communication

Four hours per week. That’s how much time is lost due to inefficient toggling between systems and communications within the average care team. 

Between scattered Post-it notes, scribbled messages on the team whiteboard, and word-of-mouth reminders, a great deal of administrative burden could be alleviated with the use of a unified system.

Designate one platform within the shared EMR to organize in-process administrative tasks, questions from the central team, and intradepartmental communication. Initiate time stamps on each item to maintain task status, accelerate the time for completion, and improve productivity. 

3. Digitize the Benefit Verification Process 

Therapists are not insurance experts, but you couldn’t tell based on the level of effort that goes into benefit verification, prior authorizations and gaining consent for therapy services. 

A major step toward improving efficiency and profitability in patient care is to remove delays in services (and the delivery of non-reimbursable services) through a digital benefit verification process.

Replace dozens of faxes to payers and messages to external powers of attorney (POAs) with a template-based benefit verification process that automatically inputs patient and payer information, forwards details to central revenue cycle management teams and reduces the burden on therapists.

4. Simplify Outstanding Patient Balances

Another tip to boost profitability and drive more productive patient-centric care is to simplify the hard-paper processes for outstanding patient balances and, eventually, phase out paper invoices over time.

Reduce the administrative burden on revenue management teams with electronic invoices powered through your EHR. 

To take this a step further, utilize technology that can automatically double-check the physical address of the financially consenting party and notify the central team to update your billing system should the address change. 

In this way, invoices are always sent to the right addresses for faster, more efficient payments. 

Optimize Patient Care with Net Health^® Therapy for Senior Living + Alinea

When it comes to reducing the administrative burden on care teams, centralized revenue cycle management teams and external POAs, one solution continuously rises to the top: investing in the best and most powerful EHR solution – one that works on both the skilled nursing and senior living environments.

Administrators can now expand facility productivity and profitability with the Net Health Therapy for Senior Living exclusive integration with Alinea. This comprehensive partnership enables SNFs and ALFs to abandon labor-intensive and hard-paper processes all through one centralized EMR. 

Alinea is the champion of everything that needs to be done in rehab therapy to onboard patients from start to finish. It is the quarterback of taking multiple systems and streamlining them into a user-friendly process for providers as well as patients and family members. 

To learn more about how the integration between Alinea and Net Health Therapy for Senior Living can benefit your care team and enable your facility to focus on profitable patient-centric care, contact us or schedule a demo.