With state and federal cuts to Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements looming large, creating operational efficiencies is becoming ever more important. One way to achieve these is by storing and transferring all documents electronically. Dealer/Provider spoke with Michael Schaer, PhD, president of Computers Unlimited (CU), Billings, Mont, about the cost and time savings a paperless office can offer.

Why is it important for home health care dealers to get rid of paperwork?
Today, news of Medicare reform is prevalent. It is obvious that the industry is going to be hit with revenue cutbacks. HME dealers will need to control costs in order to keep margins. This means getting rid of time-consuming paperwork. Filing, copying, and manual retrieval of documents can be avoided through the use of electronic document storage. Cost justification for this technology is as easy as calculating the time it takes employees to handle the paper.

What would you say to a home health care dealer who was wary of putting all order paperwork on a computer?
There is really nothing to worry about in switching to a “paperless” office because of today’s advanced technology. With Windows, data can be replicated onto multiple backup systems. Therefore, if something actually happened to your active, productive database, you can have a copy available immediately.

If dealers feel the need to keep the original document, they can have both the hard copy and access to it without ever filing it. The system would tell them which box it is in, and where it is located in the warehouse. This means they get all the efficient benefits of electronic storage with instant access, along with the security of having the original document stored in a secure place.

What sort of functionality changes will dealers see in their office when they convert to a paperless system?
There are many functions that will become easier with an imaging system. For instance, with CU’s TIMS Image®, once you have electronically indexed and stored the documents, they are instantly available to authorized personnel from a home office or a remote branch through their PCs.

Then, the documents can be printed out, emailed, or faxed right from the desktop, meaning valuable manpower would not be wasted on digging for the documents in a file cabinet. The system is secure, and multiple people can be working on the same patient information and simultaneously access the same document.

What makes CU’s product different?
With CU’s TIMS Image, faxes can come in electronically, be sorted electronically, and be electronically delivered to a service representative’s desk so the actual order can be put into the imaging system. Instead of having to print out a paper fax, deliver it to the appropriate person, and scan it to save it electronically, the whole process is minimized by doing it electronically. The benefits are: one, you don’t risk losing the document, and two, the person who is supposed to have the document receives it immediately.

Another key feature is that CU’s TIMS Image is integrated to our back-end billing system, meaning that documents can be indexed and validated electronically. This both saves time and assures that the document is tied to the correct patient account.