By Gregg Timmons

Take a second to look at your billing process right now. What does it look like? Is it backed up? Is it a daunting tower of documents for your billing department to quickly and accurately process? What percentage of deliveries result in revisits due to incomplete or inaccurate documentation? 20 percent? 30 percent? Complaints from your billers about work-life balance?

If your answer to these questions is “yes,” it’s time to consider a mobile solution that better integrates with your workflow. Not only should this solution expedite the billing department's processes, but also eliminate unnecessary expenses and ensure you’re prepared in the event of an audit.

Consider the traditional approach: the night before or morning of a delivery, customer service representatives print delivery tickets and all other necessary forms, which can amount to nearly 10 sheets of paper per stop. Additionally, delivery technicians load their trucks full of equipment for all deliveries prior to leaving the warehouse each morning. At the end of the day, the delivery technicians submit their completed documents to dispatch. Given the vast volume of paper, these documents may take up to a week, if not longer, before making their way to billing. From there, the biller reads through the files, sorts them as necessary and enters the information into the system by hand, and the confirmation process begins.

Industry statistics suggest upward of 25 percent of all paper-based deliveries result in write-offs due to missing or illegible forms, requiring a revisit by the delivery technician. Let’s say each patient visit takes 35 minutes – that's an hour and a half every day spent in revisits for forms compliance, or approximately 375 hours per year, per delivery technician!

A mobile solution takes the stress and guesswork out of completing patient orders, and ensures effective, foolproof processes for the billing department. In fact, not only does real-time electronic documentation save time, it can also increase revenue and reduce Day’s Sales Outstanding (DSO).

This type of software integration allows dispatching the ability to efficiently schedule and monitor all deliveries and ensure the proper forms are reviewed for each unique delivery along with the appropriate signatures and legible delivery notes. Time for confirmation is drastically reduced, as all forms and signatures are transmitted immediately following every delivery, guaranteeing the billing department automatically receives all necessary documentation. This mitigates daunting stacks of post-delivery paperwork, making it faster and easier for billers to complete outstanding orders and improve DSO by days, or even weeks. It also gives technicians more time to focus on patient care as opposed to worrying about collecting the appropriate signatures.

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