HEALTHCARE AT HOME:
THE  ROWAN TECHNOLOGY REPORT

by Tim Rowan, Editor

There are only a handful of Customer Referral Management software systems on the market for home health, home care, and hospice providers. Some are built for use by all types of industries and have to be customized for use in post-acute care. Some come with expensive, third-party data sets and that cost has to be passed to the user. Some are little more than sophisticated appointment calendars.

Tony Onaissi looked at these and decided there must be a large number of providers in the middle, not large enough to be able to afford the top-tier CRM systems, not small enough to be able to get by with a simple calendar app for their one sales rep. What he came up with, and is just now releasing to the U.S. market, is a middle-range CRM to meet the needs of those middle-range providers.

The new Isoratec CRM is a HIPAA-compliant software application, designed to meet the needs of home health, hospice, home care, infusion therapy, pharmaceuticals and home medical equipment. The system's HIPAA compliance comes from its cloud hosting with Amazon Web Services. We took a tour and found that it offers almost all of the features of its high end competitors but comes in at a price point that makes it worth consideration by small- to medium-sized agencies.

"We decided to embed CMS data in our CRM because it is publicly available," Onaissi told us. "It may lag several months behind the updated physician data other systems sell, but it is still quite usable. Not every physician retires every year, so the accuracy level is reasonably high. And the price of the data, zero, we think more than makes up for the occasional outdated bit of information."

He added that he is not looking to compete with the establish CRM firms with regularly refreshed physician data. "We believe there is a place for this kind of alternative in the market," he added.

Features and functions

Isoratec CRM compares favorably with other systems. In addition to a sales person's appointment schedule, it integrates local physician referral history based on zip code. Field sales personnel who take patient referrals on the spot have access within the mobile app to built-in forms to ensure they gather the required information to meet PDGM requirements and for the needs of private duty agencies. The system also offers a sales forecasting feature.

We were a bit disappointed to see that the mobile app for field staff is iOS only at this point, but Onaissi assured us there will be an Android version by the end of June. The office application, also cloud-based, is accessed through any browser.

Data can move bi-directionally with an agency's EMR through Excel or .csv files. However, Onaissi told us he is actively seeking EMR vendors open to building integrations in order to automate data exchange. Isoratec will white label the system for vendor partners and for larger healthcare organizations desiring to push their own branding to the forefront.

Multiple management features

There is a dashboard for use in the office by sales managers and above. It displays prospects, individual performance, visit outcomes and data summaries at a glance. It also provides the opportunity to grade sales reps on a number of different metrics. At the control center, managers can track mileage and other expenses, travel time, vacation accrual and usage, and other supervisory functions across multiple branch offices.

Stock and custom tutorials can be uploaded to the system and shared with new staff for orientation or with existing staff as needed for regulatory or company policy updates and reminders. As needed, a prospect or referral source can be easily transferred from one sales rep to another.

To make the new system easy to test-drive, Isoratec offers a free trial period and no implementation or training fees.
https://www.isoratec.com
tonaissi@isoratec.com

©2020 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Home Care Technology: The Rowan Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com