Family Home Care and Care at Home, two not-for-profit agencies in Brooklyn, New York, have a 40-year history of serving the New York Metropolitan area. While Family Home Care supports the managed care side of the business, Care at Home services private pay contracts—each providing services to individuals in the home.
After experiencing a managerial crisis, it became apparent that billing was not getting out the door in a timely manner, and as a result, they had an extreme shortage of cash flow. To find out what happened and to rebuild billing, the agencies engaged Sandata Revenue Cycle Management (RCM).
“When I came onboard some time later, one of the things on my list to examine was whether or not to set up a new internal billing department. I carefully did a cost analysis of setting up a department, and then looked at the numbers we were getting from Sandata RCM,” Jeffrey Maynard, Family Home Care and Care at Home Chief Financial Officer said. “Typically, when you set up a billing department, you’re going to lose 1-2% of your billing due to all sorts of issues. It was apparent that Sandata RCM had a very high collection rate, and it was clear it would be more efficient to stay with them.”
Maynard added, “Sandata RCM has been very responsive and works aggressively to collect unpaid claims. We benefited from this most recently when we did a migration from one agency management system to another, and when faced with typical migration issues, Sandata RCM’s team guided us through new reporting and provided support without interrupting business flow.”
After almost nine years of working with Sandata RCM, Maynard expects the flexibility and profitability to continue unabated. “If we get a new payer, we just put in a new payer and RCM deals with it. If we get a new contract, we send a copy over, and they update on their end. It’s a smooth process, especially when we don’t have to migrate our entire system to work with Sandata RCM. We have full access to reports, whereas previously we only had what was provided to us. Now we can access real-time data ourselves without requesting and waiting for a response.”
Family Home Care and Care at Home have been able to adapt to their new system with oversight from RCM —if anything needs attention, Sandata RCM is the first to know. By working in the same system as the agencies, Sandata RCM is bridging the gap between unpaid claims and maximized revenue and collections performance.
