Covid-19, the deadly and highly contagious disease caused by the novel coronavirus that was first reported late last year, has already tested our country’s healthcare delivery system, and it is almost certainly not even close to peaking yet as of this writing. Here at Fast Layne Solutions, we are, as always, focused on how to help small- to medium-sized independent medical practices, so this blog post outlines our response, including our advice and the steps we intend to take to help our clients and our country. It will be updated as events unfold and as we add more measures. 
 
Let’s start with social distancing. It is absolutely vital that we minimize human-to-human contact to stem the spread of the virus. For any medical procedure that does not require in-person consultation, we strongly recommend e-visits, aka telehealth. If your office is not already equipped to do telehealth visits, please contact us. For the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are waiving much of the implementation cost for our clients and, for qualifying practices, will amortize the rest over one year. We can get practices set up on telehealth extremely quickly and we have two versions: one is embedded into the patient portal that we provide with our EMRx and Revenue Cycle Management offering (see iClaim below), while the other is a standalone app that is Bluetooth-enabled and vendor/platform-agnostic and can be rolled out in a matter of days. In either case, with just a few clicks, you can be seeing a patient anywhere in a secure, HIPAA-compliant environment. (Because Apple will not sign a BAA, FaceTime, for example, is not compliant. Do not make that risky and potentially expensive mistake. Please see our statement on the HIPAA telehealth enforcement waivers for more information.) In the embedded version, in the same portal where you hold the telehealth session, your patients can make appointments and even pay for their visits, as well as message your office, review their records, and check lab results.
 
Another way your office can facilitate social distancing is to get rid of the old practice of having patients arrive early to fill out paperwork. Using our portal, patients fill in their paperwork online in advance, and your office staff see it as highlighted entries ready for them to check and confirm before making them permanent entries into the patients’ records. As noted above, that same portal can also minimize face-to-face interactions by facilitating online payments, scheduling, records and results retrievals, and messaging.
 
Now we need to discuss an unpleasant topic, doctors and practice administrators. The insurance companies have waived certain co-pays related directly to testing, but this will not impact any other costs to patients, including actual treatment. Independent doctors already struggle with denials, claim rejections, and outstanding patient debt even at the best of times. During this crisis, those problems will only grow. So let’s look at how we can use technology to minimize the impact on your practice so that you can continue serving your patients:

• iClaim. Claim-scrubbing technology is now more important than ever. Even in good times, the insurance companies look for any and every excuse they can find to reject your claims. That’s why on average a third have to be resubmitted at least once. As the insurance companies seek to cut costs and minimize their losses during this crisis, we project that figure will rise in 2020. It is therefore now more vital than ever that you have a system like iClaim in place to avoid giving them any excuse to reject your claims. Using our claim-scrubbing technology, our users have an average rejection rate of just 1.87%.

• Denial Defender. Aside from the standard claim-scrubbing technology included in iClaim, we also offer the Denial Defender feature in our software. This allows us to check claims against a massive claim edit engine based on Medicare claim payment rules (which most private insurers follow). This reduces the chance of rejection even further.

• Auto-Eligibility (automated eligibility verification). Your office staff will be hard pressed to find the time to do manual eligibility verifications by phone or insurance portal during this crisis, which means they will be pressured to skip this important step. That is going to lead to more claims being denied. We can completely automate this task for you to ensure that every patient’s eligibility is verified every single time, using our Auto-Eligibility feature. By ensuring that every single one of your patients who is covered by insurance has their claims properly submitted and paid by the insurance companies, you can not only survive but thrive in this challenging time.

 
Technology has an important role to play in this crisis, and we are ready to help you implement it quickly and efficiently to minimize negative outcomes for both you and your patients. And to help even more, we will be offering all the basic features of our standalone telehealth app free of charge until the pandemic is over or until September 13 2020, whichever comes first.
 
To further assist doctors and their patients at this difficult time, Fast Layne Solutions is also offering a monthly 5% rebate to any of our clients who are in a position to offer medical care to uninsured patients, in order to help them defray those costs. This offer remains in effect until the pandemic is declared over in the United States.
 
For the duration of the crisis, we will also be donating 5% of our clients’ monthly invoices to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Covid-19 Response Fund. We will also be earmarking 5% of all 2020 corporate profits for Covid-19 relief.
 
We want to close by thanking our tireless and brave healthcare workers who will be on the front line in the battle against Covid-19. You are our heroes and America’s best hope.

Last week, we talked about the challenges facing a fictional doctor, Dr. Janelle Smith, a young endocrinologist trying to serve the South Side of Chicago as an independent practitioner. When we left off, she was facing an impossible choice: stay in her private practice but barely scrape by, or join a large hospital and let go of her dream to serve her community. But it's a false choice, because all those problems we described actually have solutions.

Let’s take her EHR. Her total annual costs, including maintenance, updates, and training, for her current system exceed $25,000 for the practice. And that’s just what she pays to her provider. What she’s not capturing in that figure is the value of the time wasted by her and her PA due to how complicated and user-unfriendly her system is. So she sits down and runs the numbers: she and her PA are averaging 10 minutes per patient encounter and they see 40 patients a day. To her horror, she realizes that almost an entire headcount is dedicated just to charting. But a tablet-optimized, Cloud-based EHR like NextGen’s EMRx costs a fraction of that, and because it was designed by doctors, it’s intended to get doctors through the charting process as quickly as possible, in an average of just two minutes per encounter. Her first year savings alone are going to be almost $10,000 just for the software, and it leads to productivity gains equating to getting ⅔ of a new headcount for free. She almost has enough to add a second PA and expand her practice. And she’s just getting started.
 
Now let’s look at her overhead. She has a staff of five, including herself. Of those, three produce no revenue whatsoever and are not involved in providing care to her patients. They spend their days in purely administrative tasks, as noted above. But how much of that work is even necessary? Very little of it. With a full-feature practice and revenue cycle management suite, claims are generated automatically based on the integrated EHR, and reviewed by experts who handle claims for many offices, getting her practice out of the billing and claims business. (Any self-pay bills can be printed with a push of a button.) And because those claims are scrubbed by the advanced iClaim claims management system, the rejection rate is under 2%, and the payments hit Dr. Smith’s account within just a few days, thanks to the separate clearinghouse the system uses.
 
Patients can now fill out their paperwork in advance through the patient portal. They can also submit their medical records requests there, make appointments, and even pay their bills. And all benefits verifications are now automated and executed with the push of a single button when the patient checks in. And denials? A  thing of the past thanks to a rigorous and automated verification system.
 
So the work of three staff who had been working 45-50 hours a week can now be done by two staff members working 40 hours a week. Now Dr. Smith has a receptionist/admin working no overtime and a far less stressed-out office manager working a normal schedule. Including overhead, salaries, and overtime, she is saving over $50,000 a year. That’s the rest of the money she needs to add that second PA or a nurse practitioner!
 
She also implements ChoicePay, cutting her credit card transaction fees to 1.79%, saving her money, allowing her to take payments online, and giving her a fully HIPAA-compliant merchant services solution that is seamlessly integrated with her billing system.
 
Her overall financial situation starts to improve dramatically as her AR days fall and she all but eliminates write-offs and bad patient debt caused by denials. Cash flow is excellent, with payments coming in within days of service provision. She’s no longer worried about making payroll. Her staff of five is now three healthcare providers, all of whom are caring for patients and generating revenue. She’s thriving. She’s able to dedicate more hours to her free clinic. She’s no longer living month to month; on the contrary, she’s making bold plans to expand to a second location.
 
As you look back through this scenario and consider the impact on the South Side, you can see the obvious benefits in terms of keeping quality care in the area and helping a local practice thrive. But you might have one concern. What about that biller? Yes, the practice still employs five people, but that biller is out of a job, and that isn’t good for the community. That’s why Fast Layne Solutions is proud to announce an initiative to create jobs in the communities we serve by training and equipping claims handlers in those neighborhoods. For example, we are committed to adding one new job for every five providers we serve on the South Side of Chicago. Note we’re saying providers, not clients, here. So a single office with, say, three doctors, one physician’s assistant, and one nurse practitioner would lead to a new job on the South Side. We will provide the training and the equipment, and the claims handlers can not only work from home, but also set their own hours, since we require only that a certain number of claims be processed within a given week. Think about what that means for, say, a single mother. Single mothers in economically vulnerable neighborhoods often struggle to find sustainable employment because working outside the home simply doesn’t pay once you account for childcare. But if you have a job that can be done from anywhere and at any time of day, you have the flexibility to earn a good living while still caring for your children.
 
The term “win/win” is thrown around a lot, but that’s truly what this is. We are giving practices the tools they need not just to survive but thrive in a challenging environment, while also creating new jobs in the community, jobs that involve highly valued, transferable skills.
 
Want to learn more? Email us today and let’s set up a free, no-obligation practice analysis. If we can’t prove that we’ll save you more than we will charge you, we just won’t ask for your business. It really is that simple.
 

What are the top challenges facing small- to medium-sized, independent physicians as they fight to maintain their independence and compete with the large, corporate providers? Over coming weeks, we are going to look at the top 10 challenges, so please join us for this informative series and tune back in every Tuesday!

First of all, why should independent physicians even try to maintain their freedom? Isn’t the corporate takeover of our healthcare system inevitable? In 2018, employed physicians outnumbered independent physicians for the first time ever, according to Medical Economics. Many independent physicians are despairing that selling out is just a question of when, not if. That’s especially true in the era of Obamacare and MACRA, when the increased rules and regulations are making it more and more challenging for physicians to operate confidently and profitably while complying with all the Byzantine rules.

But it’s a fight worth fighting! Studies show patients of small- to medium-sized independent physicians fare better. Medscape recently highlighted several studies that bear this out. Smaller practices have “ambulatory care-sensitive admission rates fully 33% lower” and lower overall costs for care for diabetes, for example. 

So we need to win this battle for our patients. But how? Let’s look at the biggest issues the independent doctors face.

1) High insurance claim rejection rates. On average, 34% of all insurance claims submitted to the insurance companies are initially rejected. Many are eventually paid out, but only after resubmitting, often multiple times. When you consider that each reworked claim adds an average of $25 in cost to the practice, you can see how this is one of the biggest burdens for small providers. But isn’t that just how the game is played? You submit, they reject, you resubmit? Many practices, even smaller ones, have entire headcounts dedicated to nothing but fighting this battle. But they don’t have to! In fact, it makes no sense to. Doing your own claims, especially if you are doing them manually, makes zero financial sense for providers with under 25 staff. The math simply doesn’t add up. Using a resource like Fast Layne Solutions solves this in two ways: it brings advanced Revenue Cycle Management technology to bear on the problem (thus slashing that rejection rate to under 2%) and brings economies of scale to bear to cut your claims management costs by on average 60%.

2) Slow reimbursements. Even when you do get paid, it is often taking far too long. The solution: use a provider that has an independent clearinghouse connected to all insurance companies and that gets your claims paid the first time. That’s why our doctors get paid in days, not months.

3) Clunky, user-unfriendly, slow, overpriced EMR/EHR systems. It is the shame of our industry. Talk to any doctor pretty much anywhere in the United States and they will tell you the same story: I HATE MY EMR! There is even a popular parody account on Twitter dedicated entirely to how awful the leading EHR system in the US is perceived to be by the doctors and other healthcare professionals forced to use it. And to add insult to injury, these systems are incredibly expensive. And on top of all that, most are PC- or laptop-based, which interferes with the doctor-patient interaction. And many are so complicated that even a smaller practice often has to have a full-time IT headcount to maintain their systems. The solution: EMRx, a Cloud-based (read “zero maintenance and no IT staff needed”), software-as-a-service EMR designed by doctors, for doctors, and currently used by thousands of doctors nationwide. EMRx is tablet-optimized, meaning you can maintain eye contact with the patient. It is so user-friendly that our average documentation time per patient encounter is just two minutes for general practitioners, somewhat greater for certain specialists. (And yes, everyone always thinks that’s a lie….right until they see the demo.) And because it is software-as-a-service, the start-up costs are far more reasonable, there is zero maintenance for you, you have access to award-winning support, and the ongoing costs are reasonable. Also, you aren’t stuck in multi-year contracts.

Tune in next week for challenges 4 to 7!

     Welcome to the new Fast Layne Solutions blog! Tune in here for regular updates on a variety of topics, from updates about the company and valuable promotions to topics of interest to professionals in the field of healthcare. We'll also be welcoming some wonderful guest bloggers, so stay tuned! To make sure you don’t miss any updates, please sign up for our newsletter and also follow us on Twitter. (We use safe unsubscribe, so you can unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time.)

     To kick off our blog, we’d like to tell you about Fast Layne’s missions and history. Fast Layne Solutions started as an idea in our CEO’s head back in 2016: bring together all the best industry solutions under one roof to create an affordable, one-stop shopping experience for small- to medium-sized, independent physicians’ practices who need cutting-edge tools and services to maintain their independence, stay profitable, and compete with the large corporate providers and hospital systems. And we accomplished that mission! From the industry’s best revenue cycle management solution (iClaim) to a user-friendly, MD-designed EMR (EMRx) to affordable merchant services that enable online payments (ChoicePay) to a patient debt management system (QuickCollect) to HIPAA and coding compliance services to practice marketing to credentialing assistance, we have all your needs covered! And best of all, it’s all 100% à la carte: we customize our solutions specifically to your needs.
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     But we have more than just a business mission here at Fast Layne. We also have a mission to give back to the communities we serve. That started with a commitment to earmark 5% of our net, post-tax profits to St. Jude Children’s Hospital for pediatric oncology research. We also work with local non-profits to help create new revenue streams by tying successful referrals to ongoing revenue-sharing with them. We’re even kicking off a project to create great jobs in economically distressed areas. (If you run or do fundraising for a non-profit, email us at info@fastlaynesolutions.com for more information and to see if we can work with you to help your organization.)
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     We also work with individuals in the healthcare sector to identify doctors’ practices that need our services, and in exchange we pay referral fees up to $3000. So if you know a doctor with any of these issues (see below), send an email to promos@fastlaynesolutions.com, and if we sign that doctor’s office, we will pay you a referral fee! Ask for the details and “fine print” when you provide the referral and we will give you all the terms and conditions in our response. (Don’t worry! We keep the fine print to a minimum!)

Problems we solve:

-High insurance claim rejection rates. If over 2% of a practice’s claims are being initially rejected by commercial insurers (e.g. Blue Cross/Blue Shield, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, etc.), Medicaid, and/or Medicare, we can help transform their bottom line! Even if those claims are eventually getting paid after resubmissions, it’s hurting the practice: consider that each reworked claim adds an average of $25 in cost to the practice.

-Slow reimbursements. Do you know a practice that is taking weeks or even months on average to get paid by the insurance companies? We can help! We get our doctors paid in days, not months.

-Clunky, user-unfriendly, slow, overpriced EMR/EHR systems. Do you know a doctor who spends too many nights and weekends catching up on charting? Or who is just paying way too much for such a system? (Many systems average tens of thousands of dollars PER DOCTOR PER YEAR!) Then talk to us! Our MD-designed, cloud-based, tablet-optimized subscription EMR is so efficient that doctors spend an average of only  two minutes per patient encounter to finish charting. And it’s actually affordable!

-High merchant services costs. Many doctors pay well over 3% on credit card transactions and can’t even take online payments. We change all that! By leveraging the buying power of thousands of doctors, we get rates as low as 1.79% on merchant services for Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. And we can help doctors accept payments online and even offer a free, full-service patient portal!

-Scheduling nightmares? We offer a system that not only allows for online scheduling, but even helps doctors optimize their patients’ waiting room experience and reduces patient dissatisfaction by minimizing waiting room times.

-Struggling with HIPAA and coding compliance? We can help doctors get and stay HIPAA compliant and we also do coding audits to ensure they aren’t overcoding (dangerous!) or undercoding (costly!).

-Trouble with patient outreach? We offer AutoCard, a mailer marketing service to help doctors stay in touch with their patient base and even market to prospective patients. In an age when it seems that most emails are ignored and/or go to the spam folder, physical mailers are the new email!

     So if you know a doctor who is struggling with any of these issues, drop us a line!

     Thanks for tuning in to our first blog. Come back and visit us often and follow us on our mission to help independent doctors stay independent and to help them be doctors again, paper-pushers.