Takin’ Care of Business
I write to you from Baltimore where we have had an exciting day of billing education! Yea, I know…you don’t usually see those words strung together in that order. But hey…it’s OPIE Education. We do things differently here. We have some of the smartest people in the room, the conversations are stimulating, the topics are relevant, meaningful, and immediately applicable, and we have some really good speakers too!
This meeting is focused on a couple of key takeaways, what is happening today and tomorrow in O&P reimbursement, what proactive steps we can take as care providers to incorporate requirements and compliance into our processes, and how we can evaluate those processes to be as efficient and consistent as possible.
Today really has been focused on audits, denials, Medicare’s initiatives for 2025, and how we can ensure proper documentation in the event we need to respond to an audit. Common challenges we face, particularly from the public payers, is having all of our required documentation available and responding in a timely fashion to requests for additional documentation. We have talked a bit about what this means in the age of AI and how that is both a blessing and a curse. We have talked about the need to focus on the most important part of patient care from the payer’s perspective, which in plain English is _____. (Did you really think I’d tell you here? Come to our meeting in Dallas if you want to know!)
At the end of the day, I think we all have a deeper understanding of how we are taking care of business, and if a little Bachman-Turner Overdrive is going through your head, awesome! (And if not, or you have never heard of BTO, we can’t be friends.)
When it comes down to it, we are in business to do good. And we can’t do good unless we do well. And we can’t do well if we do not pay attention to basic business fundamentals. What I love about our meetings is that the people and organizations that participate seem to truly understand this fundamental concept. We are in a profession that has an incredible emotional component. There is nothing that can describe the joy a person has when they take their first pain-free step or their first step! Or can walk with confidence. And this profession supplies that. But we can too often get caught up in the daily grind. We lose the passion and we get beat down by the system.
At OPIE, we get it. We support you, encourage you, and provide you with world-class education and events designed to help you help your patients. We learn so much from you as well. As a partner in your success, with invaluable input from users all over the world, we have been able to think critically about the entire process of O&P patient care. As the people in Baltimore saw here, every day brings us another day closer to putting the benefit of 30 years of experience at your fingertips. More people saw an earlier version of the system this past January. Both groups were blown away by the paradigm we are introducing and the improvements we have made in just a few weeks.
But back to business. No matter what else comes our way, the basics of patient care have not changed. We still need what we needed 20 years ago. But today, we have better ways to gather that data and a better understanding of the systems, integrations, and needs to report on that data. So tomorrow is a new day. Here in Baltimore, we are going to focus on, believe it or not, “partnering with your payers!” We are exploring how to create win-win-win relationships with the provider of care, the recipient of that care, and the payer for the care. This alone could be worth the trip! What are you going to get done today?
See ya in Dallas!
