Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Home Health Revealed, where we share real stories from industry leaders about home health, palliative and hospice care brought to you by Velocity. Grow your home health or hospice agency with the power of Velocity. Velocity's easy to read coding and revenue cycle dashboards let you grab your cup of coffee and quickly see the health of your organization.
All right, welcome to Home Health Revealed. Here we are at the Alliance 2025 annual conference. It is amazing to be here. We are in New Orleans. It is surreal. We are surro by all the really cool things and stuff. And as a plus, our Health Rev team was able to get here and be together, which is always really cool when you see each other in two dimensions and then you show up and you're really in 3D. We have our RCM VP here with us today as well as one of our RCM team managers. And I'm just going to throw out the RCM acronym. I realize that not everybody speaks rcm. So revenue cycle management and really in this case, we're talking about the billing and collections portion of home health, hospice and palliative care. With me, I have Chai Lynn Mack. She is our team manager. And then I have Ashley Waller, she is our VP of rcm. Ashley, why don't you start and tell us a little bit about you and who you are. Yeah.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: So I am Ashley Waller from West Virginia. You know, I've been with Health Rev. I started out as the director of Customer success and Now I'm the VP of RCM. I've been in this industry about 15 years. You know, I love it. This is my passion. I love this job.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Yes. And we love you here. I know you sound like cornbread, but I love that too. Forgive that.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Forgive me.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Shailene, tell us about you.
[00:01:41] Speaker C: Hi. Yes. So we are here in Louisiana where I am born and raised. Actually, I'm from Lafayette, which is two hours away, but I stay in Winfield. So it's good to see you all here.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Yes. She drove down, she made the four hour trek to see us so we could give her a squeeze. Yes.
[00:01:56] Speaker C: Hit the highway.
So I've been in revenue cycle for nine years. It's been great. It's definitely been great. And I just love diving into the claims and finding every avenue to get those claims paid. And now I have to love. Well, I do love what I do as far as directing the staff and just teaching and coaching on how to deep dive into getting those claims.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: And you were good at it. Yes.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: We're so grateful for you.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Thank you so I want to dive in and talk a little bit about outsourcing. And your revenue is really what drives your growth within home health and hospice. It is very understandable that that piece feels very. We feel very protective about that. As home health leaders or hospice leaders, it is tough to feel like you're confident in handing that over. If you were looking at outsourcing, what is it that you feel like is the biggest benefit to utilizing a company like Health Revolution?
[00:02:50] Speaker B: To me, I think that it is the partnership just being there and being a good partner with the people, being able to work together. And it's about the relationship more so than the processes and the policies, but just that relationship building.
[00:03:04] Speaker C: Absolutely. Absolutely, yes. And getting that trust and that morale going is a huge, huge plus.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: We get clients who want to hand you this tangled ball of yarn because there's something that causes them to reach out to an expert if they've got it in house or they're utilizing another outsource partner. And there are great ones. Health Rev is one of many incredible, incredible partners. And so I don't want to minimize, you know, the people in our space. They're competitors to us, but at the end of the day, we're all on the same page. When people come to us, they're looking for a solution. They're looking for a partnership, that relationship, somebody they can trust and depend on to get their money in the door. And so they come to you, the tangled ball of yarn, and they say, help, I need a sweater. Back in 30 days.
And so we kind of start taking these things apart and looking, looking at these processes, the EMR setup, the different items and things that go into making that revenue cycle cyclical, actually working when you're looking at that partnership. Yeah, Ashley, I think you hit the nail on the head. It's the friend in the business that you can call that you can reach out to, to say, hey, this is, you know, we're adding on a payer. Right, right. You want to talk about that a little bit? I feel like we've had a lot of that lately.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Oh, we have. That is the biggest thing, I think, with the agencies. They need help with those payers. They need help with putting it in the emr. They need help with looking at their contract just into it. And that's okay because that's what we're here for. We're here to help and just untangle that ball of yarn.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: What other things do you think, think people think about outsourcing?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Definitely being able to see what's going on in their agency. Anytime you want, we can offer that. We have Velocity. It is an agnostic platform that we use for follow up. We use it for coding. It just gives the agency a huge view of what's going on with that. Every day they can log in, drink their coffee, see what's going on, see how much they've collected, see how much is billed out. You know, you don't have to worry about it.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: Each individual claim, like if I'm an agency and I have this one claim that's been a pain in my tail for days, weeks, sometimes months, knowing that I can find that particular claim and see who called about that last, who logged into a portal last, who checked on something to see how quickly that's going to be turned around, what's hanging it up, what, what I can do to help the partner. I think that's huge. Coming from the world of education. I always like to say, no claim left behind.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Yes, no. And I think too looking at the payers, you might find a trend like the questions that they're having with the payers. You look, you log in, you filter that payer, you see all that and it's like, oh, well, all of those are denying for this specific code. So now we know it's a payer trend. Agencies can look at that and they know what's going on.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: I do really love that. Let me ask you this other question. When you're looking to add somebody to your team, we have an awesome team of billers, and I hate to even call them billers. We always use the term revenue cycle specialist or RCM specialist because you really have to have anybody can bill. You're just sending out a claim. Right, right. But we look for particular people. What do you look for when you're interviewing somebody?
[00:06:09] Speaker B: I want someone that is willing to dig in and go the extra mile. I want someone that is personable with the clients. That's why we're here. That's what we're doing is servicing these clients. You need to be client focused.
[00:06:26] Speaker C: I look for drive and motivation. What drives you, what gets you going? Because if you have that drive and the right motivation to work each claim from beginning to end, we won't give up. We won't just like try to write off a claim for any particular reason.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: No, we don't want to write off any claims. No.
[00:06:43] Speaker C: Right, exactly.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: We want to keep that money for our agencies. And, and I think that's another thing. I, I know you, Chylynn, really take this personally. Yeah, right. We're not giving up on that.
[00:06:54] Speaker C: That's.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: That's revenue that this agency has already forked out for patient care, for clinician payroll, for whatever. Right. They've already paid that money, and so we're collecting it on the back end, which is so bizarre to me in this industry that we have to.
All of this and our DSO cycles and all of that seem kind of backwards, but here we are, doing the best we can. That's another reason why we take this so incredibly seriously. We take it to heart to make sure that we're doing all those things and digging in, looking for those people who have that drive, that motivation.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: And it is personal. It is personal because you think about it, that's the people taking care of your grandma and your grandpa, like.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: And us. Someday.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Yeah, us.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: We're young and spry right now, but we're gonna be old someday.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: It's coming, right?
[00:07:40] Speaker C: Matter of.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: We had a really great time. It's really great to be here with you all. Thank you so much for sitting down with me. Always. Great.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yes. Thank you.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
