Confident approach helps sell management
Confident approach helps sell management
Documentation templates can require a significant investment, especially when you also are planning to hire additional staff to further enhance your documentation process. Showing supreme confidence in your plan, say the experts, can go a long way toward convincing management the investment makes sense.
Robert B. Takla, MD, FACEP, vice chief, emergency services, St. John Hospital and Medical Center, Detroit, recalls going to a hospital administrator with a pro forma for acquiring a documentation product called Emergency Mapping (E/MAP, Lynx Medical Systems of Bellevue, WA), as well as adding an FTE to review the charts for thoroughness and timeliness prior to dropping charges.
Takla offered the hospital two options. The first called for the hospital to foot the bill (about $300,000 for the documentation project and the FTE) based on a projected revenue increase of $1.5 million. "They said the money was not in the budget," he recalls. "So, I told them I was willing to assume all the risk myself." Takla offered to bear all the upfront expenses, in return for half of the additional revenue generated.
"That really caught their attention," he says. In fact, he says, when they saw how confident he was, they decided to fund the proposal themselves. This new approach generated $1.2 million in addition revenue, prompting Takla to say, "I wish they had taken my other offer!"
Takla is not the only one to have successfully used this approach. "Two weeks ago, I was at a hospital in Michigan and laid out the same scenario," says James M. Fox, MD, FACEP, vice president of Emergency Medicine Specialists, a staffing company for emergency physicians and extenders, and managing director for Midwest Emergency Services, a billing, coding and practice management company, both based in Fraser, MI. "They looked at me like I was crazy when I made my original proposal, but as soon as I said I would assume the risk, they decided to take a closer look," he says.
Documentation templates can require a significant investment, especially when you also are planning to hire additional staff to further enhance your documentation process. Showing supreme confidence in your plan, say the experts, can go a long way toward convincing management the investment makes sense.Subscribe Now for Access
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