Revenue-Boosting Strategies in Compliance with Devon Wayt

Ever wondered how a top-notch compliance program could be a revenue magnet for your business? Get ready to unlock the secrets with our guest, Devon Wayt, a veteran, and expert in the behavioral healthcare industry. He shares how accreditation, data points analysis, and tracking discharge categories can enhance your business performance, reduce risk and boost revenue. He also reveals how to protect your earnings from claw-backs through strategic chart auditing and quality improvement. 

Devon doesn't stop at compliance; he believes staff training is an integral part of a successful business. Hear how CIRCA Behavioral Health, a leading treatment center in Southern California, leverages staff training to deliver stellar service. We wrap up the conversation by exploring the importance of patient and employee satisfaction surveys for performance improvement. With Devon's insights, you'll find new ways to turn compliance into a profit-boosting strategy and a roadmap for excellent service delivery. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to supercharge their business outcomes.

Transcript

Compliance Driving Revenue and Improving Outcomes

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome to Hatching Creativity . This isn't just another behavioral health podcast . This is the place where thought leaders converge to talk about real life challenges , breakthroughs and pivotal aha moments . Hey everybody , thanks for tuning in . In today's episode , I'm interviewing Devin Wait . Devin is a behavioral health care industry veteran and advocate , as well as one of the most respected consultants in the space , and we're going to be talking today about some of the ways you can use your compliance program to protect your business , increase your revenue and improve your outcomes . If you like what you hear , please like , subscribe and tell all your friends about hatching creativity . Here , devin is going to tell us a little bit about himself .

Speaker 2 0:46

The circuit behavioral health care solutions . We do licensing and accreditation , help organizations grow and remain compliant , essentially , so tune up their compliance programs . But we have the nurses on our staff , we have clinicians I've owned and operated a treatment center before and we're basically full service . We really like to integrate in , help people , tune up the EMR , the HR systems , just all systems really accept admissions and marketing . We don't do that unless it has to do with compliance and straining and all that .

Speaker 2 1:18

What is compliance and how compliance can be used to protect your revenue . Also , how compliance can be used to drive a ratio . If you're using compliance as a tool rather than something to be afraid of or as a stick , so to speak , you could really get a lot out of it . What are your thoughts on that ? Absolutely Well , when you think compliance and revenue , the obvious is you need your accreditation to build third party insurance . You really just need it to be considered a decent provider in the industry , unless you're serving some market that doesn't require that and then you want to protect that insurance revenue as well . So those are some of the obvious reasons , but what you're talking about is absolutely true , and I know a hatch does a lot of this , but using the outcome measures . So here's an example when I was operating the treatment center , we did an outcome study for two years and we used similar software and all of that . So what we did was we ultimately ended up with a great study that we could take to the payers and say hey look , this is what we're doing here . I'm not really worried about anybody else , but here's who we are , and I truly believe that we're able to secure better contracts with that , showing that we have that type of data . And the data wasn't always good , so it gave us the opportunity to improve . And when you're tying it back into performance improvement , as you should , then the organization is just going to be going to inherently get better anyways , which should increase your margins . There's sometimes increased costs with performance improvement , but at the end of the day , that's where I think a lot of organizations aren't thinking about these nuggets and where the revenue is , because it's the long term play . Well , you know , it's kind of funny , right ? Because people look at compliance as , like you said , a roadmap to the payers , right ? And how you get paid . So if you're all looking at your accreditation as that roadmap to the payers , really , then what ends up happening is you have a survey once every three years , whatever information is made up as you're getting ready for the survey , and then you're not really collecting data accurately the whole way across , sure , and then what ends up happening is , as compliance should be used as a revenue protection or a way to drive that revenue , you remiss everything Right and all of the value that compliance does or has by doing it that way . Right , I look at data points , just like you're talking about . You know and I think this is something for people to hear also is data points that you could be looking at that relate to compliance that you can use for performance improvement , efficiency improvement , risk reduction , right , things like that .

Speaker 2 4:38

If you had to say your top things that you would advise an organization to track that directly ties compliance to revenue , what would you say ? So I would say the top three , no specific order , but the first one would be discharge categories . I believe many organizations do that . It's kind of a low hanging fruit , but you know , if you have a lot of AMAs , acas , it's going to impact the bottom line , obviously . But also , if you're having a lot of let's call it therapeutic transfers , people are coming in , they're going to the hospital right away . Are we not screening appropriately ? If you think about it , when you do spend all the acquisition costs and getting the client to treatment , if they're going to the hospital right away , it complicates the treatment program often . Yeah , because they're at the hospital , maybe they have a bad experience . There's so many factors that can happen . Yeah , so you know watching that .

Speaker 2 5:34

There's , you know , other other categories , however you want to classify them , but I think that's important . The other one would be for me is just QA , or compliance in general . So on the charts , and we really track that on a weekly basis . It could be tracked daily . And when you're sending off , you know bills to the payers . I think it's really important to track that because that can protect you from a clawback . Making sure everything's in the record that needs to be in the record . Oh , timeframes , that the documentation is robust , it meets medical necessity , all of that you know . So out the top , health we see this all the time . I have to imagine you to have a how somebody is in for their second or third treatment episode and you're using the same treatment . Oh , yeah , absolutely . Yeah , yeah , yeah . So easy to catch . This is such low hanging fruit , right , right . So so chart auditing , yeah , and overall quality is improvement , is is one Yep . So what was your ? What was your career ?

Speaker 2 6:44

Because treatment is a service business is asking the question your , what is your willingness to recommend services ? Because we're not , we're not producing widgets and all of that , and and that question can be asked to clients , it can be asked to families , it can be asked to referents and it can be asked to your staff as well , too , and maybe even a culture of safety survey . That includes the question would you recommend treatment center X as a wonderful place to work , you know , and so a referral is probably the greatest compliment you could ever get , because that means that I trusted my loved one at your treatment center and I would absolutely trust an expert . So , yeah , you know to come to the treatment center , and if you're going to get treatment anywhere , you want to go to treatment center X . So , for sure , I did . If you want to , actually , if you want to have a good workplace , right , yeah , same thing Listen to your people , yeah .

Speaker 2 7:37

So what I think is important now , this is an interesting measure , because what I recommend is is you get that measure , but you've correlated across your other questions , because you might have a question of like , how was your admission process ? Or you know , how was the time with your therapist , etc . How was the gym exercise food ? You insert question here , but if you correlate that question to the other questions , you can actually find out what's highly correlated and whatever is highly correlated . You know , essentially we want to move the ball , and where people are willing to recommend the most , so if they had a bad experience with the food and that's highly correlated to willingness to recommend , then let's do a performance improvement plan on the food , right , and that will , in turn , increase the willingness to recommend , which increases revenue , which ties back into compliance , because it's a performance improvement measure . I think that makes all the sense in the world on . You know , it's funny is you can collect all the data in the world but if you don't look at it , yeah , you would never know that food . Yeah , right , and that's such a simple . It's such a simple metric to be looking at your NBS score like you're driving them out , right . It's such a simple measure and metric that everybody can do , right , I mean it's . I hope all of you are doing patient satisfaction surveys and employee satisfaction surveys and employee satisfaction surveys . Right , you know that's something that that's really helpful . But , again , you got to use that information , right . Yeah , tie it back into performance improvement .

Speaker 2 9:10

You see , anything around any presentations and speakers today or anything that you feel is really exciting , new or anything that you may want other people to look at . Yeah , yeah , well , definitely , maybe one of those who was our national compliance director . She's speaking on the whole hearted journey to compliance and ethics . I love it . And yeah , yeah , yeah . So she she really brings in the whole person , you know , and and is all about authenticity and transparency . And you just meet people all around the industry that she has impacted in a positive way . She's a big believer in Bernie Brown and some of those philosophies and all that .

Speaker 2 9:51

I've worked with many organizations over the years . Sometimes I'll work with ones that come from outside the industry . Call it banking . You know , maybe a somebody , a banker decides to get in and start doing treatment which you know is either here nor there . But they'll come to me and they'll say , hey , devin , what's up with the staff , you know ? And I'll say , what do you mean ? And I say , well , you know , it's just like everybody's kind of wearing their emotions on their sleeves and all of that .

Speaker 2 10:17

And when I owned and operated the treatment center , the lady that sold us the treatment center she goes Devin I got to tell you if you focus on the staff , the clients will get better faster . And I took that to heart and I believe it . And so that's what Maeve's talk is . It's Saturday at 10.45 . But it's about taking care of our staff and recognizing that people in the helping profession they need to help themselves , they need to fill their own cup . You certainly can't help anybody else if you're not . And sometimes the mechanics car runs the worst . And so you know , having this focus on our staff , making it okay to be not okay , making it okay to talk about burnout , having open door policies and all of that , that is a journey that if organizations start that , that they will see that the clients get better faster . It's true we always say you take care of your people , they'll take care of your patients . So then overall they're going to have a good performance .

The Importance of Staff Training

Speaker 1 11:14

Yeah .

Speaker 2 11:14

One of my favorite quotes , zig Ziglar . Yeah , and he says he was talking with a friend and he was talking about all of the investment he makes into staff training , right , and the guy says to him wouldn't you be upset if you spent all that money on their training on their left Tune ? And his response was I would be more upset if I didn't spend the money on their training . And their stare no , that's a great response . That was really good , yeah , so thank you for coming on . Yeah , thank you for having me , mike , and thanks so much . Appreciate it . Yeah , and I'm glad Thanks for joining . Make sure to check out Circle Behavioral Health and if you're looking to open a treatment center or you need help , you can be there in Southern California . These guys are the experts out here and thanks for watching .