December 1, 2008

The Alliance for Children & Families and OPEN MINDS Announce the Medicaid Max Program – Billing & Collections Process Improvement Assessment

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (December 1, 2008) – OPEN MINDS is pleased to announce a new consulting initiative with the Alliance for Children and Families - The OPEN MINDS Medicaid Max Program. The consultative initiative was launched to identify and meet the most pressing needs of Alliance members to survive and thrive in this very challenging environment. In July of this year OPEN MINDS offered a “Board Optimization Assistance” training and now, due to demand in the field, OPEN MINDS is offering a “Medicaid Billing & Collections Process Improvement Program Assessment”.

Many of the organizations in the field are not effective in getting the payment they should for Medicaid services Medicaid represents an estimated 44 percent of all public mental health expenditures ($53.6 billion) and is the largest federal grant-in-aid program for states. Overall, Healthcare revenue leakage is between 5% and 10%. It is not unusual for behavioral health, child welfare, and social service providers to have collection rates of only 80% of net revenues!

OPEN MINDS receives numerous requests to provide on-going technical assistance to child welfare, behavioral health and human service organizations, who increasingly find the Medicaid billing environment complex and difficult to collect Medicaid revenue. To that end, we have developed the OPEN MINDS Medicaid Max Program – an in-depth assessment of an organizations Medicaid billing process from point of service to billing strategies to capture all the revenue available to organizations. Our assessment addresses three critical issues:

• Missed opportunities in service billing

• Service billing coding and procedure problems

• Ineffective collection management processes

The benefits of effective and efficient billing and collecting are the increase of service revenue, shorter accounts receivable days, audit proofing the billing procedures, increase in cash flow, increase in viability with Medicaid based billing opportunities and the ability to pull discretionary cash flow funding from operations to develop new service lines to meet new demands. This is increasingly important for provider organizations in the behavioral health and social service field, especially since states received more flexibility to alter benefits and reimbursements through the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2007. Organizations report that even a small increase in these collections can also result in additional resources for salary increases, staff development, and service line marketing. With this assessment, the OPEN MINDS team can help organizations identify the operational issues – and solutions – to increase Medicaid revenues.

For more information on the OPEN MINDS Medicaid Max Program, contact OPEN MINDS at 877-350-6463 or send us an e-mail message at openminds@openminds.com. For more details on the assessment and bios of the OPEN MINDS Medicaid Max team, go to www.openminds.com/consult/medicaidbilling.htm.

The Alliance for Children and Families provides services to nonprofit child and family serving and economic empowerment organizations. With more than 350 members, Alliance for Children and Families members represent a significant force in the human services sector. Alliance members have a cumulative operating budget of $3.6 billion, almost 53,000 FTEs, 7,000 board members, 58,000 volunteers and serve over 8,000 communities in over 2,700 locations. In all, over 3.4 million clients participate in Alliance member services annually.

OPEN MINDS is a national behavioral health and social service industry market research and management consulting firm. Founded in 1987 and based in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the 75+ associates provide executive education, information, market research, and management consulting services.

For more information on this program or to schedule an interview with Dan M. Aune, M.S.W., please call 877-350-6463 or email at daune@openminds.com.
 

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