This article is sponsored by Element5. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Eric Gordon, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Element5, to learn why post-acute care organizations are turning increasingly to automation tools to make staff and patients happier. He shares the easiest workflows to automate, and offers why he believes 2022 in home-based care will be the year when the industry changes how business gets done.
Home Health Care News: Eric, you’ve spent your career at the intersection of healthcare and technology, and you co-founded Element5 in 2019 with three others, including Joe Randesi. What experiences do you most draw from in your role today?
Eric Gordon: You’ll probably hear it in my voice as we go through our talk today: I just have a real passion for this industry. All of my grandparents went through home care at one point or another, and a few of them had the good fortune of being in hospice as well. Operational bottlenecks are not a fault of the agencies — they’re just the system that we’re working in. But every dollar we’re spending on these bottlenecks is a dollar we can’t put towards care delivery and driving quality outcomes.
So I’ve spent 16 years working with providers, and have a genuine appreciation for the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis. I know it takes an incredible amount of clicks to complete even some of the simplest tasks in home care, hospice, senior living and other allied post-acute care organizations. It was with that understanding that we created Element5, because we knew automation could have a huge impact on our industry.
How is Element5 helping home-based care operators manage post-acute care?
Gordon: Our mission is to enable staff to work at the top of their licenses. We do that by eliminating operational bottlenecks. The bottlenecks are these high-volume, highly repetitive, logic-driven workflows that our providers deal with every day. That simply means that home care and hospice agencies have very well-paid staff performing hours and hours of mind-numbing work, which prevents them from working at the top of their licenses.
We are attacking these operational bottlenecks that span the patient journey inside of an organization. From intake to eligibility to billing, all the way through, there are opportunities for automation. And it’s working. We have, in a very short amount of time, contracted with over 50 post-acute providers. We have six of the top 10 home health providers in the country under contract with us. Collectively, those clients have contracted with Element5 to automate over 130 workflows.
If we can drive efficiency in the back office, it means more dollars being spent at the bedside. I don’t know how you cannot get excited about that. That to me is where everything’s at. I literally just had a family member go through hospice, and you want that nurse at the bedside, there for those final hours. We want to drive efficiency and put more dollars at the bedside.
Compared to other areas in the aging world — senior housing, skilled care, and so on — what makes home health ripe for automation?
Gordon: Our clients are leveraging automation to support all kinds of workflows. So the potential for automation is ripe across all industries. Specifically thinking about home care, we’re dealing with severe staffing shortages and staff burnout. We have to find ways to drive greater efficiencies and leverage the staff we do have to focus on more meaningful work.
The driver of this problem in home care is our use of fragmented systems. Every provider has multiple systems they’re dealing with, and in most cases, they don’t talk to one another. You’ve got an EHR, you’ve got a payroll system, you’re communicating with payers through payer portals and checking eligibility through clearinghouses and dropping claims. None of this is widely connected. It creates a lot of bottlenecks.
On top of that, home care is a high-volume industry, which compounds all of these inefficiencies. A good example is the ever-changing regulatory and compliance landscape in which we operate. Far too often in order to comply, providers turn to simply adding staff.
We have to think about these problems in new ways. In this environment where revenue is not keeping up with expenses, most post-acute care providers are looking for ways to elevate their staff through automation. We have to adapt in this environment and find greater opportunities for efficiency.
For an operator looking to get started with automation, what are the easiest workflows to use?
Gordon: The opportunities for automation inside the home care and hospice community truly span the patient journey. The patient comes to the provider in most cases through an eReferral system, and we can automate the flow of that demographic information from the eReferral system to create the patient profile in your EHR.
As soon as you get the patient into the EHR, you run an eligibility check, and a lot of times that means you’re plugging patient information into a clearinghouse to check that patient’s insurance eligibility. That’s an integration automation. We can grab that insurance information from the clearinghouse or from a payer portal and bring it back to the patient chart, and even use coordination notes to communicate back to the human staff, anything that we found on that insurance profile that was important.
Once you get the patient in the system and they’re eligible, you move from the commercial payer to authorizations. That process doesn’t end with the request — you have to continually check back in that payer portal until that request is addressed. You have to grab the pending authorization, load that back into your EHR, and then continually check back until you get an affirmed authorization. That’s mind-numbing work. Our aim is to help care-providing staff, especially those who are focused on clinical documentation.
Element5 programs a software robot that can log into and interact with the system in order to manage the transcriptions between EHR and payer portal. This supports and facilitates the authorization process. These and others are all very discrete workflows that we have automated for the post-acute care community.
Furthermore, there are a lot of workflows that I refer to as purely file transfer. We have human staff grabbing OASIS files and uploading them into the clearinghouse. All of these file transfer workflows are ripe for automation.
There are several RPA providers in the market. What advantages do home health agencies gain by engaging directly with Element5, as opposed to building their own automated workflows?
Gordon: The scale and the rapid adoption that this industry is showing toward automation is remarkable. As such, the high-end of the market already knows the need. The bigger you are, the easier it is to automate an individual workflow and show massive ROI. What operators should understand is that this scales, because we’re pricing based on transaction volume. If you have a smaller transaction volume, you have a smaller monthly fee, because you have less transaction volume running through the system.
Yet everybody in our industry, from the top to the bottom, has the same requirements and needs to find a way to drive this level of efficiency. It’s incredible what I see on a day-to-day basis. It amazes me what people are being forced to do just to keep the doors open. The amount of manual work that we have baked into this industry today is surprising.
If you Google “RPA” after reading this article, you’ll see there are many, many companies out there providing agnostic automation tools, but only one that is purpose-built for the post-acute space. What’s unique about Element5 is, we are a workflow-automation company that leverages RPA to satisfy very discrete post-acute-specific workflows. That’s a major difference.
Element5 is bringing to this industry the easy button, where they can subscribe through an Automation-as-a-Service solution to a desired end-state workflow automation. This helps them realize the value of automation without all of the heavy lifting involved in designing, building, supporting and maintaining an automation themselves.
You work with several post-acute care organizations that are already automating a significant portion of their administrative work. How has their reception to automation been and what have you learned from their journey so far?
Gordon: Our experience with our existing clients and the feedback we’re receiving is overwhelmingly supportive. We’re finding that after clients have their first workflow live, they get excited seeing immediate impact and are eager to explore further possibilities. They’re coming back with a list of 10, or even 14 different workflows that they want to automate.
Our real call to action to this industry is just: Get started with automation. You don’t need to boil the ocean on your first automation workflow. Everybody we’ve talked with is interested, and who wouldn’t be interested in wanting to automate every possible bottleneck we have inside our space with technology? It’s just a matter of getting started
Finish this sentence: “The home-based care industry in 2022 will be the year of…”?
Gordon: Rethinking the way work gets done. I think COVID has forced every company to reevaluate their operational models. In the simplest sense, we all used to work in an office, and now so many folks are working remotely. Their entire operation on a model has been under a microscope over the last two years. I think in 2022, we’re seeing providers put into action these changes that they’re starting to visualize, and automation is just one of those tools they have now in their toolbox to really drive greater efficiency and a smarter workforce as we move into the future.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Element5 is simplifying the adoption of RPA by offering end to end workflow automation as a SaaS product. Founded by experts with decades of experience in the post-acute space, we’re tackling operational inefficiencies that are bottlenecks to better care and patient outcomes, one workflow at a time. To learn more, visit e5.ai.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact sales@agingmedia.com.
The post Voices: Eric Gordon, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Element5 appeared first on Home Health Care News.
