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Greetings! I’m Dan Hirschfeld, President of Genesis Rehab Services and Respiratory Health Services,
speaking to you from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania for my quarterly “State of the Union” address.
Today I’d like to focus my discussion on a topic that you should all be familiar with: Patient Care Hours.
Recently, changes in reimbursement,
including implementation of RUGs IV and the Multiple Procedure Payment Reduction,
have pressed us to transform the way we deliver therapy in our gyms.
And while reimbursement rules have changed,
our focus on delivering the highest quality of rehab services to our patients hasn't.
Over the last few months, GRS has shifted focus to a primary goal across the company.
This goal is to increase the amount of time our clinicians are spending with patients.
We define this as Patient Care Hours, or PCH.
This goal applies to not only to our clinical staff,
but our corporate staff as well.
For employees in our gyms, you’ve been introduced to new standards for the amount of time you are spending with patients.
Our corporate staff has been asked to find ways within their daily roles
to assist our gyms with eliminating barriers to patient care.
I believe each employee in this company can have an impact on our ability to improve PCH here at GRS.
In April, I held several company-wide conference calls to discuss PCH in detail.
I’m not going to delve into the specifics again, but I do want to touch on the partnership between employees and GRS.
GRS has invested tremendous financial resources to develop improved tools
and resources for employees to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.
By now, many of you have started to see iPod Touch’s being rolled out throughout our gyms.
A revised, shorter ROX evaluation is also being introduced this month,
at the request of employees for a more efficient evaluation process.
GRS has been and will continue to be committed to improving our employees’ resources,
and as part of the GRS-Employee partnership, I’ve asked for your dedication and commitment to the PCH goals.
In the short time that PCH has been introduced, I’ve seen GRS come together to work as a dedicated, collective team.
I know PCH goals are challenging and different from what we’ve done in the past,
and I want to thank each of you for your commitment to this new standard.
We still have improvements to make, but we’re moving in the right direction.
The improvement I’ve seen thus far makes it clear that GRS employees
truly value the partnership we’ve worked to build in this company.
As I mentioned earlier, the GRS corporate staff has also been impacted by the new PCH standards.
These departments are making changes and re-evaluating their processes
to ensure we are all removing barriers to patient care.
Many of you probably interact with these employees daily via phone or email,
but since we are so geographically disperse, many of you may not have had the opportunity to visit our corporate offices.
Today, I’m here on the first floor of our corporate office in Kennett Square.
Rebecca Haley, Vice President of Human Resources, is coming to join me,
and we’d like to spend a few minutes introducing you to a few of the GRS corporate departments here in Kennett Square.
Hi Rebecca.
Hi Dan.
I’m happy to help you show what a typical day looks like here in our corporate office.
Of course, it’s quite different than a typical day in one of our gyms,
but I hope that our employees in the gyms will enjoy seeing a little bit of our world here!
First, let’s meet some the GRS Recruiting team.
This department is essential to keeping our company staffed with the best, most talented employees.
GRS Recruiters utilize a number of different resources to attract potential employees such as job fairs, open houses,
email blasts, college recruiting activities and mailers.
While these are all excellent resources,
we’ve found that one of the best ways to recruit high quality talent is through referrals from current GRS employees.
A great employee wants to work with other talented and dedicated individuals,
and a great employee probably knows a few great candidates!
The Employee Referral Program allows current GRS employees to refer potential candidates for open positions…
and if your referral is hired, you could earn $1500 just for referring them!
Take a look at the Recruiting tab on RehabCentral for more information on referral bonuses
and how to submit an employee referral.
If you’ve had to schedule a casual employee or book contract purchase service help,
then you’re probably familiar with the next department I’d like to introduce.
The Scheduling department coordinates clinical coverage for temporary staffing needs in our gyms.
The GRS Staffing Coordinators are responsible for managing all of our purchase service vendors and scheduling casual employees.
Though this department is small,
they have a crucial role in helping GRS gyms manage their individual and unique staffing needs.
Our Clinical Practice department is also primarily located in our Kennett Square office.
This group supports our employees by developing clinical tools and resources, and by forming partnerships with associations,
organizations, vendors and academic institutions.
Having an entire department dedicated solely to developing and providing clinical resources
for our employees makes GRS very unique, and certainly is one of the reasons we are a premier rehab provider.
Lastly, I’d like to end our quick tour with our HR department.
Our HR team members play an integral role in the daily operations of GRS
and assist employees with everything from coming onboard as a new hire,
to developing work/life benefits like Sittercity and retention bonuses.
Of course, the HR team is always available as a resource for information on any general employment questions.
I hope you found this tour of some our corporate departments interesting.
In a future State of the Union,
we’ll introduce some of the other departments we missed today such as Finance and Business Development.
I’m going to turn things back over to Dan now who has some questions from employees on PCH that he’d like to answer.
Thanks, Rebecca!
As Rebecca stated, I am going to answer a few PCH-related questions we’ve received from employees.
Our first question is “How is PCH any different than productivity?”
Productivity is a ratio of billed time to worked time.
PCH is a ratio of patient care hours to scheduled time.
We make the distinction between productivity and PCH as a value statement.
The next question is “How can I hit my PCH goal when I have to travel between sites?”
PCH percentage is based on the number of ‘scheduled hours’ in a particular site.
Travel and benefit time will not impact PCH percentage,
because PCH is based on the number of ‘scheduled hours’ at a particular site.
This means that only the hours a therapist is scheduled in a site are counted.
The next question is “Is there a report that will calculate daily PCH instead of the employees having to do it manually?”
We currently don't have a report but it is in the planning stage,
and will be implemented as soon as we finish the ROX 4.1 roll out for direct bill and e-sig.
While we understand that an automated report will be faster,
the manual form should take less than 3 minutes per day to complete in the interim.
The next question we received has been asked a few times….
The question is “Mobile devices will certainly help minimize documentation time that interferes with PCH.
When will mobile devices be available?”
We’ve already started to deploy iPod Touches in our gyms.
We are on track to ensure that every gym will have a mobile device by the end of the year.
Our next question related to PCH is “I don’t understand MPPR.
Can you explain it?”
This is certainly a common question!
MPPR stands for Multiple Procedure Payment Reduction.
It took effect January 1, 2011 and was a result of CMS reducing the physician fee schedule for Medicare Part B payments.
MPPR pays the full fee schedule for the first occurrence of the procedure
with the highest paying practice expense in a single treatment day.
All subsequent occurrences for that procedure and all other procedures billed on that day
are paid at a 25% reduction to the practice expense.
This cut equates to a 5 to 8% reduction in most procedure payments.
The impact on GRS is equivalent to an $11 Million per year loss in revenue.
I hope these questions helped give a better understanding of PCH.
If you have additional questions, you can take a look at the FAQ section in the PCH page on RehabCentral.
You can also submit any PCH questions to the RehabCentral mailbox.
In closing, I’d just like thank everyone for your hard work during the last few months.
I know it hasn’t been easy, but we’re moving in the right direction and seeing great improvement so far.
I sincerely appreciate your efforts and your continued commitment.
Take Care.