Product Spotlight

A Map in a Sea of Change

Brightree's new Spring 2013 release offers a blend of services, software enhancements.

• By David Kopf
• May 01, 2013

Providers find themselves sailing in extremely difficult waters these days. From competitive bidding to pre- and post-payment Medicare audits, their regulatory compliance requirements have become much higher while their funding has becoming much lower. As a result, saving money, ensuring solid claims and driving efficiency have become the name of the game. Tricky seas indeed.

Because of this, providers have become more dependant than ever on HME software systems to help them fine tune their business performance. And now that the Round Two bid rates are here, it’s become clear that providers need to depend on those systems all the more. This is why software maker Brightree LLC (Atlanta) has debuted its latest seasonal release, Brightree Spring 2013.

“This is one of the biggest releases ever for Brightree,” says Chris Watson, chief marketing officer for the software company.

Over the last 12 months, the software company has doubled its development organization’s resources, and this is the first release since that expansion. This has resulted Brightree’s Spring 2013 Release, which is now generally available.

But the release isn’t just about beefed-up software, it’s also about services. The goal is to provide a package that can help providers navigate the changes they are facing in today’s difficult reimbursement environment.

From a services standpoint, one of the first key offerings in the new release is a “best practices” services to help providers determine how they can design workflows for maximum efficiency.

“We have the luxury of working with more than 2,000 providers to see the right ways of doing things and the wrong ways of doing things,” Watson says. “So we have documented that and are deploying consulting services to help providers review their current business processes and find new ways to either better use the technology that they have, and to optimize those businesses processes.”

To accomplish that, Brightree representatives visit a provider’s site and review how it works over the course of two or three days. The provider’s current processes are mapped against a large set of nest practices Brightree’s consulting team has built. This comparison is used to help the provider fine tune its performance over time.

“This doesn’t happen overnight, but we identify the highest impact areas that can give providers the highest gains in efficiency,” Watson says, adding that because it has worked with thousands of providers over the past 10 years, it’s been able to identify the best ways of accomplishing various elements of the HME workflow.

The new version’s software meshes with these new service offerings. Brightree Spring 2013 incorporates a Business Rules Engine that offers providers the ability to define and implement customized payor- and product-specific business rules related to sales orders and documents.

With these rules, providers can prevent unnecessary claims denials by stopping sales order confirmation and delivery or warn staff to take action based on criteria they set.

Other features include enhancements to the system’s Brightree Connect patient interaction platform, including intelligent campaign routing to help providers know when resupply patients change insurance so they can be reassigned to different campaigns, as well as tools to more easily add assist walk-in or call-in patients in automated outreach campaigns.

Also, the system supports OSA therapy compliance through integration with the U-Sleep Universal CPAP compliance monitoring solution, powered by Umbian Inc. (Halifax, Nova Scotia). The feature brings therapy compliance data into the Brightree interface so that providers can proactively streamline the compliance workflow, improve patient outcomes, and get paid faster. U-Sleep connects to all leading CPAP devices to help providers define and apply compliance rules, coach patients, and analyze results.

Brightree Spring 2013 Release
Brightree LLC
www.brightree.com
(888) 598 - 7797, ext. 5

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of HME Business.