Smart Business Solutions
A Game-Changer in Home Health and Hospice Consulting

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n the home health and hospice industry, an agency's ability to maintain compliance with stringent clinical standards and ensure informed and efficient billing processes directly impacts the care quality it provides. However, skyrocketing care demands often force providers to overlook billing, compliance, and other administrative procedures.

Emerging as a one-stop shop for addressing these needs, Smart Business Solutions (SBS) aids home health and hospice agencies with a wide range of consulting services designed to streamline lengthy and tedious processes. It is the go-to expert that answers any emerging questions and provides the best advice to help care facilities holistically boost their operations.

Larry Treystman, the co-founder of SBS, observes that home health and hospice agency executives occasionally worry because of prohibitive healthcare consulting costs; nevertheless, these services are substantially less expensive and stressful than managing organization-wide compliance in-house or not performing it at all, which usually come with dire consequences. According to Treystman, many clients that come to SBS have problems that could have been avoided with its service.

Through its compliance support, SBS handles 90 percent of a client's current posture, guiding them with inspections and surveys, examining existing strategies, and providing feedback on supporting documentation for every audit.

Typically, surveys focus on four key areas—charting audits, providing actual patient care at the bedside, human resources management, and administration. Understaffed or extremely busy agencies miss administrative tasks and the resulting documentation. Mitigating this, the SBS team helps them holistically manage surveys and consistently remain at least 25 percent compliant with all administrative standards.

When onboarding clients, SBS follows a comprehensive methodology that begins with a consultation, where it offers them a checklist of the fundamental details they need to provide. The onboarding process takes about two weeks from the initial meeting and includes a deep dive into the agency’s processes, team, trends, previous survey results, and company setup to identify additional issues that may be hiding under the surface. In many cases, SBS finds and fixes previously unforeseen landmines.

In addition to assisting businesses pass inspections, it offers an active compliance service that monitors and guides through problematic situations, as well as eliminates unnecessary paperwork from daily life, so clients can concentrate on patients and procedures.

“Our key focus is on administrative compliance. We help agencies remain compliant throughout the process rather than just preparing them for inspection. We are trying to change the game by ensuring healthcare firms are always consistent, compliant, and safe when entering this highly regulated industry,” says Treystman.

Perfectly exemplifying the idea behind its success in boosting survey-related processes is Mariam Treystman, Co-Founder and Senior Consultant at SBS, who states, "The secret to a successful and easy survey experience is proper and early preparation."

Recognizing this, SBS provides timely and informative survey preparation and continuous readiness services that are immensely beneficial to new and established home health organizations. Entrepreneurship can feel like a deserted island, and the healthcare industry is no exception. Customers of SBS appreciate that they have “someone to ask” in difficult situations. It also offers affordable management assistance to help customers prepare for a potential random survey.

Another critical value addition comes from SBS' billing service, which identifies trends billing vendors often overlook because they’re outside a traditional biller’s scope, and offers relevant and timely inputs to optimize a home health agency's billing processes.

SBS tracks KPIs internally by recording everything it undertakes for an agency. Across all enrolment checkpoints, it produces client surveys that allow better comprehension of specific areas that need improvement.

Agencies using its compliance service must complete a monthly questionnaire for the company's ongoing consumer monitoring. These responses enable them to always have a finger on the pulse of what is happening in their businesses and get hints about potential problems. Further, SBS uses the responses to trigger critical compliance activities that are commonly missed but can result in conditional deficiencies.

The beauty of working with SBS is its deep understanding of government functions and how they want agencies to engage with them, whether in documentation, communications, or other facets. This insight enables it to shrink application processing times and consistently reduce client timelines.

Prospective home health and hospice agencies usually must wait 2 to 3 years before gaining Medicare billing capabilities. Offering a marked reduction in this timeline, SBS assists clients with the same process and delivers desired outcomes in 16-24 months. For this, it tracks all correspondence between the agency and the state, Medicare, or any other accreditation entity they are enrolling with throughout the multi-year process, ensuring deadlines aren’t missed and all required documentation is submitted in proper formats.

In addition, SBS offers milestone-based education where participants are instructed to better align their operations before and after a milestone and what to do when they reach or surpass it. In contrast to many consultants, it individually interacts with clients while providing them with relevant material in short, manageable stages.
Recently, SBS assisted a client who had received a random visit from the health department, resulting in their home health license seizure. Generally, home health and hospice agencies wait to gain Medicare billing privileges before starting their business and accepting patients they can effectively bill to receive timely remunerations. In this case, the 8+ months of awaiting the results of their accreditation survey to be granted the right to bill Medicare resulted in the health department revoking the client's license and placing them in a non-operational status.

Subsequently, SBS filed an appeal with the health authorities, where its acquaintance with the pertinent laws and regulations allowed it to contest the license revocation without going through a tedious procedure. Ultimately, SBS helped them regain their license by highlighting that they were technically up and running, with the owner, director of patient care services, and administrator all on-site, showcasing the license revocation's flawed foundation and gaining the desired appeal from the regulatory entity without having to represent it in court. Even though crisis management is not its primary focus, SBS considers cases where the people involved have been wronged.

"When there are serious problems, denials, or billing issues, we take on the challenge because we want to be known as the organization that is the go-to and the best," states Treystman.

The team at SBS genuinely cares about clients because they understand that those seeking a consultant are actively trying to improve their care outcomes. Consequently, it will continue to provide best-in-class services and compliance and training processes powered by in-depth industry knowledge to safeguard client operations and help them deliver top-notch patient care.