Hope Healthcare and Hospice needed a solution to streamline documentation, support billing and ease the burden on staff, which had experienced first-hand the frustration of using technology that wasn’t designed for the needs of hospice care.
What used to take a full day of work for each staff person — processing orders, putting clinicians on the schedule and ensuring the right frequency of care was being met — now only takes a few minutes with the Optima Hospice solution.”
Beryl Dore, Administrator of Hope Healthcare and HospiceThe Challenge
February 2018, Hope Healthcare and Hospice opened its doors in Lafayette, Louisiana, and began accepting new hospice patients. From the start, its founders knew that providing quality care and a positive work environment meant learning from the past. They had used homecare software in their previous hospice agency and experiencedfirst-hand the frustration of using technology that wasn’t designed for the needs of hospice care.
“We knew what we didn’t want from the software,” said Beryl Dore, administrator at Hope Healthcare and Hospice. “It used to take each staff person a full day of work and many extra steps in our previous system to process orders, put clinicians on the schedule and ensure the right frequency of care was being met.”
This time-consuming work didn’t end there. Clinicians in the field were forced to spend valuable time clicking through multiple screens and dealing with unrelated home health questions, such as wound care progress. It meant less time with patients and, more often than not, bringing work home to complete.
It wasn’t unusual for clinicians to spend three or four hours of their personal time at night charting patients.
With Optima Hospice, we’re spending more time interacting with patients and their families.”
Beryl Dore, Administrator of Hope Healthcare and HospiceThe Solution
Hope Healthcare and Hospice needed a system that could streamline documentation and ease the burden on staff. After talking to Optima and seeing what its hospice software could do, they knew they had found the right partner.
With Optima Hospice, we’re spending more time interacting with patients and their families,” added Dore. “We’ve also improved compliance with better oversight of patient care, and there are no unhappy clinicians taking work home at night. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”
Hope Healthcare and Hospice also needed help with billing. “None of our staff had done billing in the past, so when Optima offered us its RCM service, we knew it was the right choice for us,” said Dore.
Optima’s Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) service is an outsourced billing service that handles everything from claims preparation and submission through management and reporting. This has allowed staff to focus on running the agency, leaving the billing to Optima.
“We didn’t want to spend our time trying to stay on top of regulatory requirements and billing issues. Optima’s RCM service handles everything, so we don’t have to,” added Dore.
The Results
With Optima’s customer support team, both clinicians in the field and back-office staff have the confidence to handle any billing, clinical or regulatory issue. “No matter what comes up, Optima makes us a priority,” said Dore. “Their billing experts and support staff give us the peace of mind we need focus on serving our patients and the community.”
100% elimination
up to 4 hours of after-hours charting
99% work reduction
for office staff to verify orders, reducing a day’s work in minutes
75% reduction
in time to document a routine visit, from 20 minutes to 5 minutes
78% redudction
for time to visit an initial visit, from 4 hours to under an hour
