NORCROSS, Ga. — Adding new technologies, diversifying into new service lines and scouring your business for efficiencies can definitely help prepare for competitive bidding, according to provider Todd Tyson, president of Hi-Tech Healthcare. But the changes won't be instant.
"Don't think you just turn on a switch and everything works tomorrow," Tyson said. "It takes a lot of work to get prepared for this."
For the past three years, Tyson has embraced automation, outsourcing and expansion to buffer his business from the bid program's effects, he said. As a member of the Georgia Association of Medical Equipment Services, the Committee to Save Independent HME Suppliers and the American Association for Homecare, he has also worked hard in support of efforts to derail the program.
"We all see the train coming, so we are still in that effort of trying to prepare and being engaged to try and learn more about what to do and be ready for it," he said.
For starters, Tyson said, "We've looked for every efficiency we can find in our business."
Based in Norcross, an Atlanta suburb, with eight locations, Hi-Tech has improved time management with flex schedules and overtime monitoring, centralized intake with emphasis on "clean in, clean out," and incorporated both GPS routing and new handheld point-of-delivery devices. A central dispatch has "one person watching every one of our drivers and every vehicle move live in real time," Tyson said.
After converting to eFax, "we have seen our DSO reduced by 10 days," he said. The company has also outsourced CPAP supply replacement, "so we've got a zero inventory" with no dead inventory sitting on the shelves. In times like these, Tyson said, you can't allow any savings to fall through the cracks.
Historically focused in the respiratory sector, the 21-year-old company has transitioned to non-delivery systems for oxygen. But it has also moved into services "such as simple power and other things we've never done before," said Tyson, including expansion into some service lines outside of Medicare.
"Our biggest thing now is trying to put away some cash," he said, referring to the continuing credit crunch. "I don't necessarily want to slow our growth, but my biggest fear is that we would grow faster than I could finance … because my bank certainly won't give me any more money."
With all of the changes, Tyson said, "I feel pretty confident that if [the next round] doesn't bid to the bottom, we'll survive it. I hope we would win at least one or more of the locations, and if we don't, we're diversified enough outside that that we could survive."
The company has expanded geographically, too, recently opening a location in Birmingham, Ala. — its fifth inside a Round 2 CBA. With existing branches in metro Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tenn., that gives Hi-Tech shots at three bid areas in Round 2.
"Hopefully we'll get three bites of the apple," Tyson said. "I just hope it's not the poison apple."
His best hope about competitive bidding, though, he added, is that more providers will join the fight against it. "Get involved, get engaged and … keep trying to stop this train," he urged.
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