Home Health & Hospice Week

Not sure what to stress as the highlights in your marketing message to physicians (see previous story "Tailor Your Marketing Message To Docs' Tight Schedules")? Stressed-out docs want to hear how you can do four things for them, according to Dr. M. Tray Dunaway in a Feb. 5 teleseminar for Tweed Jeffries' Leading Home Care. They want you to help them:

1. Save time. For example, in addition to sending along detailed progress reports on patients, you can send physicians weekly or bi-weekly mini-summaries consisting of just a few words each for patients who are stable and don't need further physician intervention at the moment.

2. Make money. Physicians' Medicare payment rates still aren't up to 2001 levels thanks to cuts, Dunaway said. And managed care companies' rates aren't much better.

Only about 3 percent of physicians currently are billing for home care certification/recertification and care plan oversight, according to Dunaway. The vast majority of docs don't know about this lucrative billing option for work they're already performing. Offering to give the nitty gritty billing details to office staff - not the physician herself - can be very welcome.

3. Take away stress. From clinical aspects that keep patients healthy to administrative procedures that make referrals easier, emphasizing how your home health agency can take a load off the physician's shoulders is important.

4. Increase credit and recognition. "We're being blasted everywhere you turn," Dunaway says of physicians. Reports criticizing physicians and hospitals are numerous, and docs are aching to win back their good reputations.