A Business Tune-Up Checklist

There are several essential steps for home care businesses to take in order to get ready for working under provisions of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA). Whether these preparations will be a re-evaluation of standard procedures providers already have in place or something entirely new, they are essential for continuing success in the changed environment of HME.

1. Get Accredited — The new law requires that all Medicare DME providers become accredited. The law is not definitive on the timing, but we know that once the Health and Human Services Secretary determines standards, the accrediting organizations the government designates will have one year to include those standards in the accreditation requirement. The choices are not if, but when. Wait if you want, but the wait list could have thousands of providers on it. I am with comedian Larry the Cable Guy on this one, so “GIT-R-DONE.”

2. Review and Adjust Your Company's Strategic Plan — For all practical purposes, whatever strategies a company has been executing just got flushed. Any management team that is to be highly effective will update its competitive intelligence, anticipate the effects on and reactions of others in their environment and adjust their strategies accordingly.

3. Revise the Operations Plan — Even though being a low-cost provider in this industry does not produce competitive advantage, HME businesses will have to behave like low-cost providers. That means developing business models, business processes and control systems that rival the best of those in commodity industries.

   Revising your company's operations plan is the start. The revised plan must reflect your business strategies, which, in turn, should reflect the vision and values of the people involved. Divide the plan into process groups such as customer processing, vendor processing, employee processing and accounting processing. Each of these groups actually may represent several processes, but every one, as it currently stands, should be suspected of being inefficient.

   The revised operations plan should justify why every person performs every activity. No action can be justified by the statement, “that's the way we've always done it.” To assess processes and activities, ask questions like, “Why do we go to the file room or cabinet?” or “Why can't we have the charts on our computer screen on demand?”