is the year of the home.
Patients
are becoming more comfortable using technology to receive care in the comfort
of their own home while simultaneously becoming concerned about entering
hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. And both hospitals and skilled nursing
facilities (SNF) are beginning to battle home health agencies for ownership of the
at-home space.
One
key to people staying in their homes at all, though, is long-term care insurance.
And a smooth long-term care insurance (LTCI) process requires smooth billing.
For its needs, Alliance Homecare out of New York City turned to cloud-based,
home health care software provider AlayaCare.
“We’ve
been with AlayaCare for about a year and a half,” says Shena Melgar, Alliance
Homecare’s director of accounts receivable and payroll. “A lot of agencies in
New York City don’t do long-term care insurance. We’ve been utilizing
AlayaCare’s platform for about a quarter now, and it’s been very helpful for
us.”
Here
are the top four benefits that the right long-term care insurance billing
system can provide.
Straightforward technology
Alliance
Homecare is a concierge home care agency, offering care in the home or in
senior living, with a focus on 24/7 care. There is often a language barrier
between Alliance Homecare’s administrative team and the direct care staff,
Melgar says, so the ease of interfacing with AlayaCare’s LTCI billing system is
critical.
The
AlayaCare system and its accompanying apps are very straight-forward and
intuitive, and that increases use and adherence to the technology.
“Our
clock-in-and-out rates are dramatically higher than they used to be in our old
system,” Melgar says. This improves notation, too. When caregivers check out of
their shifts, they have to check off that they have supported each client’s
activities of daily living (ADL). Showing the insurer that the caregiver has
helped with each ADL is required for getting paid 100% for all work.
“That’s
a big change from our old system to this system,” Melgar says.
Streamlined billing
Private
pay is very straightforward, but insurance, obviously, is not. Before Alliance
made the move to AlayaCare, it used three different systems for its LTCI
billing needs. With multiple systems, Alliance’s head of claims submission and
billing had to extract data from the invoice and break it down so that the
client could see both the entire bill and what they owed after insurance, if
anything.
With
AlayaCare, everything is simplified. Each person’s file includes the policy
number, claims number and policy details, such as a daily cap of $400, Melgar
says. If the invoice says $500, AlayaCare will generate two invoices: one for
the insurer, showing the $400, and one for the client, showing the $400-$100
split.
“We’re
able to split the invoice the way it needs to be split based on the policy
limitations,” she says.
Centralized Department of Health
Documentation
Another
benefit of being able to do away with its previous three systems is having all
client details and caregiver details in a centralized location, Melgar says.
“I personally no longer need to go into a care
management system to look at all the care managers’ notes,” she says. “It’s all
in AlayaCare.”
As a result, Melgar and other members of the
Alliance team can easily access any client information, especially information
required by the U.S. Department of Health (DOH), no matter where they are.
“The DOH-required documentation is actually way
better in AlayaCare,” Melgar says. “Before we had it housed in a regular file
in our shared drive. Now it’s all been customized in AlayaCare. Whenever a
nurse is out doing an assessment, they can easily pull up a client’s folder on
the app and fill out a plan-of-care while they’re on the road instead of having
to go back to the office to do a clinical writeup.”
Major time savings
All
of this adds up to a major time savings. Melgar estimates that AlayaCare saves the
head of billing up to four hours of work per day.
“Our
agency does bill on a weekly basis,” she says. “That’s 16 hours of work per
week that she’s been given back.”
This article is sponsored by
AlayaCare. To learn more about how AlayaCare can help you with your long-term
care insurance billing needs, visit AlayaCare.com.
The post How Long-Term Care Insurance Billing Systems Boost Care Outcomes appeared first on Home Health Care News.
