In 2011, almost their 25th year in business, DASCO Home Medical Equipment’s growth was bringing them to a breaking point. Patients were expecting services to be faster, personalized and more efficient. The payer landscape was shifting, with payers wanting more proof of service and outcomes. Competitive bidding was seeing more participants. Nothing was easy.
So the family-owned-and-operated DASCO went all in with their technology partner, Brightree, to create an easier path to proof.
“From my team’s perspective, this was an opportunity to consolidate our system and our data and move into more optimal and efficient processes to support a growing business,” says Kristin Kash, DASCO Executive Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management. The Westerville, Ohio-based provider is respiratory-focused but with a full line of medical equipment, including hospital beds, wheelchairs, ortho and other DME. Getting all of their data into one setting was not just a nice-to-have; it was essential for their evolution.
“As our business has grown, scalability, efficiency and the ability to integrate a lot of different systems while maintaining Brightree as our system of record and source of truth is increasingly important,” Kash says.
A lot has changed in this business since 2011. Thirteen years brings a lot of patients and payers, needs and nuisances, technology and troubleshooting. There are a lot of reasons why a company might finally say, “No thank you” to even the best of technology partners. This is the story of why when it comes to Brightree, DASCO always says yes.
How two key points in their business journey brought DASCO to Brightree
DASCO customers depend on their speed and ability to deliver the right HME at the right time. In an ever-changing landscape, this can be a downright grind. That’s where Brightree comes in. By automating every aspect of DASCO’s business, they enable them to deliver a world-class patient experience.
DASCO leans on Brightree not just for their technical expertise but their willingness to step to the frontline.
“The industry is constantly evolving and things are always happening, whether it’s competitive bidding or the pandemic,” says Ann Cornelius, DASCO Chief Revenue Officer. “What I think continues to bring us back to Brightree is that they are always evolving and they do have a very quick response time. They will very quickly build out solutions.”
Two key moments showed DASCO just how valuable Brightree could be. The first was the aforementioned 2011 when DASCO kicked their competitive bidding into a new gear. Medicare allowables were dropping around 40-45%, and DASCO needed new, faster methods for reviewing information.
“Cuts really required a lot of people to think about how to leverage technology and how to scale,” Cornelius says. “Are we spending a lot of time and labor on tasks we could eliminate or do differently?”
Manually scanning paperwork, for instance, had to go. “We just need it to flow in and then we need our order reviewers to be able to grab that from a centralized hub and get that stuff processed and pushed through for billing,” she says. Brightree helped them analyze their business and determine the high-touch areas where they could reduce or even eliminate unnecessary work.
That’s something they continue to do today, albeit with an added component: remote work. That is the second key moment that comes to Kash’s mind: COVID-19 and the spring of 2020, when Brightree was with DASCO every step of the way of their jarring pivot.
“The pandemic created a material shift in how we did business,” Kash says. DASCO shifted almost 100% of their business operations workforce to remote work and had to quickly help patients relocate from hospital settings to home where they would be safe during the rising transmission rates at the onset of COVID.
“How quickly we reacted to that was really important, and I think having Brightree alongside us for that experience really helped us navigate and combat that,” she says.
3 big benefits that DASCO gains from their technology partner
For DASCO, Brightree is more than a tech provider. They are a partner. And nowhere is that more evident than the three major benefits that DASCO sees.
1. Throughput
With everything contained in one system, DASCO’s ability to quickly retrieve, process and send feedback on new orders has drastically improved. “Our providers are sending information, we’re sending information back to the same system, and within 30 minutes they’re getting feedback,” Kash says.
2. Patient experience and communication
Because of that high-level throughput, DASCO patients enjoy greater communication and transparency. Studies show that 95% of home-based care patients want instant communication. DASCO patients get exactly that. They know what’s coming because they can communicate quickly and accurately including via Brightree’s Texting Orchestrator, which keeps patients constantly informed of their status and responsibilities through a combination of automated text messages, appointment reminders and more.
And while Brightree lets DASCO communicate with their patients, the communication is also one of the most powerful features of their partnership.
“There’s a lot of honest dialogue about how we as a company are doing against the rest of the Brightree customer landscape,” Kash says. “There’s a source of knowledge. There’s guidance. There’s escalation when we need help and there’s a partnership with how we can continue to optimize the tools within Brightree.”
3. Talent acquisition
The final big benefit is actually tied to the ability to gain a high-level look at all work. While DASCO uses that capability in its bidding, it also means they have an ideal view of the activity that takes place across all of their locations — 30 locations in seven states.
As they have acquired other companies that are far from their own centralized hub, they’ve been able to bring on experienced people in other states, even if they don’t have a physical location there. That opens their talent pool.
“Everybody can work out of Brightree anywhere they are, and with the landscape of hiring, that’s been a great advantage having that single source of truth in the cloud so that people can do their work wherever they are,” Cornelius says. “Doing more with less, surviving allowable decreases, scaling the business and being able to do things in centralized functions regardless of where people sit — all of that has been a big thing for us.”
This article is sponsored by Brightree. To learn more, visit brightree.com.