August 17, 2023 • 12 mins
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.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Hatching Creativity.
This isn't just anotherbehavioral health podcast.
This is the place where thoughtleaders converge to talk about
real life challenges,breakthroughs and pivotal aha
moments.
Hey everybody, thanks fortuning in.
In today's episode, I'minterviewing Devin Wait.
Devin is a behavioral healthcare industry veteran and
(00:23):
advocate, as well as one of themost respected consultants in
the space, and we're going to betalking today about some of the
ways you can use yourcompliance program to protect
your business, increase yourrevenue and improve your
outcomes.
If you like what you hear,please like, subscribe and tell
all your friends about hatchingcreativity.
Here, devin is going to tell usa little bit about himself.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
The circuit behavioral health care solutions
.
We do licensing andaccreditation, help
organizations grow and remaincompliant, essentially, so tune
up their compliance programs.
But we have the nurses on ourstaff, we have clinicians I've
owned and operated a treatmentcenter before and we're
basically full service.
We really like to integrate in,help people, tune up the EMR,
(01:10):
the HR systems, just all systemsreally accept admissions and
marketing.
We don't do that unless it hasto do with compliance and
straining and all that.
What is compliance and howcompliance can be used to
protect your revenue.
Also, how compliance can beused to drive a ratio.
If you're using compliance as atool rather than something to
(01:33):
be afraid of or as a stick, soto speak, you could really get a
lot out of it.
What are your thoughts on that?
Absolutely Well, when you thinkcompliance and revenue, the
obvious is you need youraccreditation to build third
party insurance.
You really just need it to beconsidered a decent provider in
(01:59):
the industry, unless you'reserving some market that doesn't
require that and then you wantto protect that insurance
revenue as well.
So those are some of theobvious reasons, but what you're
talking about is absolutelytrue, and I know a hatch does a
lot of this, but using theoutcome measures.
So here's an example when I wasoperating the treatment center,
(02:22):
we did an outcome study for twoyears and we used similar
software and all of that.
So what we did was weultimately ended up with a great
study that we could take to thepayers and say hey look, this
is what we're doing here.
I'm not really worried aboutanybody else, but here's who we
(02:43):
are, and I truly believe thatwe're able to secure better
contracts with that, showingthat 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 backinto performance improvement, as
you should, then theorganization is just going to be
(03:04):
going to inherently get betteranyways, which should increase
your margins.
There's sometimes increasedcosts with performance
improvement, but at the end ofthe day, that's where I think a
lot of organizations aren'tthinking about these nuggets and
where the revenue is, becauseit's the long term play.
Well, you know, it's kind offunny, right?
Because people look atcompliance as, like you said, a
(03:29):
roadmap to the payers, right?
And how you get paid.
So if you're all looking atyour accreditation as that
roadmap to the payers, really,then what ends up happening is
you have a survey once everythree years, whatever
information is made up as you'regetting ready for the survey,
(03:52):
and then you're not reallycollecting data accurately the
whole way across, sure, and thenwhat ends up happening is, as
compliance should be used as arevenue protection or a way to
drive that revenue, you remisseverything Right and all of the
(04:13):
value that compliance does orhas by doing it that way.
Right, I look at data points,just like you're talking about.
You know and I think this issomething for people to hear
also is data points that youcould be looking at that relate
to compliance that you can usefor performance improvement,
(04:34):
efficiency improvement, riskreduction, right, things like
that.
If you had to say your topthings that you would advise an
organization to track thatdirectly ties compliance to
revenue, what would you say?
So I would say the top three,no specific order, but the first
one would be dischargecategories.
I believe many organizations dothat.
(04:56):
It's kind of a low hangingfruit, but you know, if you have
a lot of AMAs, acas, it's goingto impact the bottom line,
obviously.
But also, if you're having alot of let's call it therapeutic
transfers, people are coming in, they're going to the hospital
right away.
Are we not screeningappropriately?
If you think about it, when youdo spend all the acquisition
(05:17):
costs and getting the client totreatment, if they're going to
the hospital right away, itcomplicates the treatment
program often.
Yeah, because they're at thehospital, maybe they have a bad
experience.
There's so many factors thatcan happen.
Yeah, so you know watching that.
There's, you know, other othercategories, however you want to
classify them, but I thinkthat's important.
(05:39):
The other one would be for meis just QA, or compliance in
general.
So on the charts, and we reallytrack 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 importantto track that because that can
(06:02):
protect you from a clawback.
Making sure everything's in therecord that needs to be in the
record.
Oh, timeframes, that thedocumentation is robust, it
meets medical necessity, all ofthat you know.
So out the top, health we seethis all the time.
I have to imagine you to have ahow somebody is in for their
(06:23):
second or third treatmentepisode 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, andoverall quality is improvement,
is is one Yep.
So what was your?
What was your career?
(06:44):
Because treatment is a servicebusiness is asking the question
your, what is your willingnessto recommend services?
Because we're not, we're notproducing widgets and all of
that, and and that question canbe asked to clients, it can be
asked to families, it can beasked to referents and it can be
asked to your staff as well,too, and maybe even a culture of
(07:04):
safety survey.
That includes the questionwould you recommend treatment
center X as a wonderful place towork, you know, and so a
referral is probably thegreatest compliment you could
ever get, because that meansthat I trusted my loved one at
your treatment center and Iwould absolutely trust an expert
.
So, yeah, you know to come tothe treatment center, and if
you're going to get treatmentanywhere, you want to go to
(07:26):
treatment center X.
So, for sure, I did.
If you want to, actually, ifyou want to have a good
workplace, right, yeah, samething Listen to your people,
yeah.
So what I think is important now, this is an interesting measure
, because what I recommend is isyou get that measure, but
you've correlated across yourother questions, because you
(07:46):
might have a question of like,how was your admission process?
Or you know, how was the timewith your therapist, etc.
How was the gym exercise food?
You insert question here, butif you correlate that question
to the other questions, you canactually find out what's highly
correlated and whatever ishighly correlated.
(08:07):
You know, essentially we wantto move the ball, and where
people are willing to recommendthe most, so if they had a bad
experience with the food andthat's highly correlated to
willingness to recommend, thenlet's do a performance
improvement plan on the food,right, and that will, in turn,
increase the willingness torecommend, which increases
revenue, which ties back intocompliance, because it's a
(08:29):
performance improvement measure.
I think that makes all thesense in the world on.
You know, it's funny is you cancollect all the data in the
world but if you don't look atit, yeah, you would never know
that food.
Yeah, right, and that's such asimple.
It's such a simple metric to belooking at your NBS score like
(08:50):
you're driving them out, right.
It's such a simple measure andmetric that everybody can do,
right, I mean it's.
I hope all of you are doingpatient satisfaction surveys and
employee satisfaction surveysand employee satisfaction
surveys.
Right, you know that'ssomething that that's really
helpful.
But, again, you got to use thatinformation, right.
Yeah, tie it back intoperformance improvement.
You see, anything around anypresentations and speakers today
(09:13):
or anything that you feel isreally exciting, new or anything
that you may want other peopleto look at.
Yeah, yeah, well, definitely,maybe one of those who was our
national compliance director.
She's speaking on the wholehearted journey to compliance
and ethics.
I love it.
And yeah, yeah, yeah.
So she she really brings in thewhole person, you know, and and
(09:37):
is all about authenticity andtransparency.
And you just meet people allaround the industry that she has
impacted in a positive way.
She's a big believer in BernieBrown and some of those
philosophies and all that.
I've worked with manyorganizations over the years.
Sometimes I'll work with onesthat come from outside the
industry.
Call it banking.
(09:58):
You know, maybe a somebody, abanker decides to get in and
start doing treatment which youknow is either here nor there.
But they'll come to me andthey'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'sjust like everybody's kind of
wearing their emotions on theirsleeves and all of that.
And when I owned and operatedthe treatment center, the lady
(10:20):
that sold us the treatmentcenter she goes Devin I got to
tell you if you focus on thestaff, the clients will get
better faster.
And I took that to heart and Ibelieve it.
And so that's what Maeve's talkis.
It's Saturday at 10.45.
But it's about taking care ofour staff and recognizing that
people in the helping professionthey need to help themselves,
(10:42):
they need to fill their own cup.
You certainly can't helpanybody else if you're not.
And sometimes the mechanics carruns the worst.
And so you know, having thisfocus on our staff, making it
okay to be not okay, making itokay to talk about burnout,
having open door policies andall of that, that is a journey
that if organizations start that, that they will see that the
(11:05):
clients get better faster.
It's true we always say youtake care of your people,
they'll take care of yourpatients.
So then overall they're goingto have a good performance.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
One of my favorite quotes, zig Ziglar.
Yeah, and he says he wastalking with a friend and he was
talking about all of theinvestment he makes into staff
training, right, and the guysays to him wouldn't you be
upset if you spent all thatmoney on their training on their
left Tune?
And his response was I would bemore upset if I didn't spend
(11:36):
the money on their training.
And their stare no, that's agreat response.
That was really good, yeah, sothank you for coming on.
Yeah, thank you for having me,mike, and thanks so much.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, and I'm glad Thanks forjoining.
Make sure to check out CircleBehavioral Health and if you're
looking to open a treatmentcenter or you need help, you can
be there in Southern California.
These guys are the experts outhere and thanks for watching.
Welcome to Hatching Creativity.
This isn't just anotherbehavioral health podcast.
This is the place where thoughtleaders converge to talk about
real life challenges,breakthroughs and pivotal aha
moments.
Hey everybody, thanks fortuning in.
In today's episode, I'minterviewing Devin Wait.
Devin is a behavioral healthcare industry veteran and
(00:23):
advocate, as well as one of themost respected consultants in
the space, and we're going to betalking today about some of the
ways you can use yourcompliance program to protect
your business, increase yourrevenue and improve your
outcomes.
If you like what you hear,please like, subscribe and tell
all your friends about hatchingcreativity.
Here, devin is going to tell usa little bit about himself.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
The circuit behavioral health care solutions
.
We do licensing andaccreditation, help
organizations grow and remaincompliant, essentially, so tune
up their compliance programs.
But we have the nurses on ourstaff, we have clinicians I've
owned and operated a treatmentcenter before and we're
basically full service.
We really like to integrate in,help people, tune up the EMR,
(01:10):
the HR systems, just all systemsreally accept admissions and
marketing.
We don't do that unless it hasto do with compliance and
straining and all that.
What is compliance and howcompliance can be used to
protect your revenue.
Also, how compliance can beused to drive a ratio.
If you're using compliance as atool rather than something to
(01:33):
be afraid of or as a stick, soto speak, you could really get a
lot out of it.
What are your thoughts on that?
Absolutely Well, when you thinkcompliance and revenue, the
obvious is you need youraccreditation to build third
party insurance.
You really just need it to beconsidered a decent provider in
(01:59):
the industry, unless you'reserving some market that doesn't
require that and then you wantto protect that insurance
revenue as well.
So those are some of theobvious reasons, but what you're
talking about is absolutelytrue, and I know a hatch does a
lot of this, but using theoutcome measures.
So here's an example when I wasoperating the treatment center,
(02:22):
we did an outcome study for twoyears and we used similar
software and all of that.
So what we did was weultimately ended up with a great
study that we could take to thepayers and say hey look, this
is what we're doing here.
I'm not really worried aboutanybody else, but here's who we
(02:43):
are, and I truly believe thatwe're able to secure better
contracts with that, showingthat 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 backinto performance improvement, as
you should, then theorganization is just going to be
(03:04):
going to inherently get betteranyways, which should increase
your margins.
There's sometimes increasedcosts with performance
improvement, but at the end ofthe day, that's where I think a
lot of organizations aren'tthinking about these nuggets and
where the revenue is, becauseit's the long term play.
Well, you know, it's kind offunny, right?
Because people look atcompliance as, like you said, a
(03:29):
roadmap to the payers, right?
And how you get paid.
So if you're all looking atyour accreditation as that
roadmap to the payers, really,then what ends up happening is
you have a survey once everythree years, whatever
information is made up as you'regetting ready for the survey,
(03:52):
and then you're not reallycollecting data accurately the
whole way across, sure, and thenwhat ends up happening is, as
compliance should be used as arevenue protection or a way to
drive that revenue, you remisseverything Right and all of the
(04:13):
value that compliance does orhas by doing it that way.
Right, I look at data points,just like you're talking about.
You know and I think this issomething for people to hear
also is data points that youcould be looking at that relate
to compliance that you can usefor performance improvement,
(04:34):
efficiency improvement, riskreduction, right, things like
that.
If you had to say your topthings that you would advise an
organization to track thatdirectly ties compliance to
revenue, what would you say?
So I would say the top three,no specific order, but the first
one would be dischargecategories.
I believe many organizations dothat.
(04:56):
It's kind of a low hangingfruit, but you know, if you have
a lot of AMAs, acas, it's goingto impact the bottom line,
obviously.
But also, if you're having alot of let's call it therapeutic
transfers, people are coming in, they're going to the hospital
right away.
Are we not screeningappropriately?
If you think about it, when youdo spend all the acquisition
(05:17):
costs and getting the client totreatment, if they're going to
the hospital right away, itcomplicates the treatment
program often.
Yeah, because they're at thehospital, maybe they have a bad
experience.
There's so many factors thatcan happen.
Yeah, so you know watching that.
There's, you know, other othercategories, however you want to
classify them, but I thinkthat's important.
(05:39):
The other one would be for meis just QA, or compliance in
general.
So on the charts, and we reallytrack 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 importantto track that because that can
(06:02):
protect you from a clawback.
Making sure everything's in therecord that needs to be in the
record.
Oh, timeframes, that thedocumentation is robust, it
meets medical necessity, all ofthat you know.
So out the top, health we seethis all the time.
I have to imagine you to have ahow somebody is in for their
(06:23):
second or third treatmentepisode 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, andoverall quality is improvement,
is is one Yep.
So what was your?
What was your career?
(06:44):
Because treatment is a servicebusiness is asking the question
your, what is your willingnessto recommend services?
Because we're not, we're notproducing widgets and all of
that, and and that question canbe asked to clients, it can be
asked to families, it can beasked to referents and it can be
asked to your staff as well,too, and maybe even a culture of
(07:04):
safety survey.
That includes the questionwould you recommend treatment
center X as a wonderful place towork, you know, and so a
referral is probably thegreatest compliment you could
ever get, because that meansthat I trusted my loved one at
your treatment center and Iwould absolutely trust an expert
.
So, yeah, you know to come tothe treatment center, and if
you're going to get treatmentanywhere, you want to go to
(07:26):
treatment center X.
So, for sure, I did.
If you want to, actually, ifyou want to have a good
workplace, right, yeah, samething Listen to your people,
yeah.
So what I think is important now, this is an interesting measure
, because what I recommend is isyou get that measure, but
you've correlated across yourother questions, because you
(07:46):
might have a question of like,how was your admission process?
Or you know, how was the timewith your therapist, etc.
How was the gym exercise food?
You insert question here, butif you correlate that question
to the other questions, you canactually find out what's highly
correlated and whatever ishighly correlated.
(08:07):
You know, essentially we wantto move the ball, and where
people are willing to recommendthe most, so if they had a bad
experience with the food andthat's highly correlated to
willingness to recommend, thenlet's do a performance
improvement plan on the food,right, and that will, in turn,
increase the willingness torecommend, which increases
revenue, which ties back intocompliance, because it's a
(08:29):
performance improvement measure.
I think that makes all thesense in the world on.
You know, it's funny is you cancollect all the data in the
world but if you don't look atit, yeah, you would never know
that food.
Yeah, right, and that's such asimple.
It's such a simple metric to belooking at your NBS score like
(08:50):
you're driving them out, right.
It's such a simple measure andmetric that everybody can do,
right, I mean it's.
I hope all of you are doingpatient satisfaction surveys and
employee satisfaction surveysand employee satisfaction
surveys.
Right, you know that'ssomething that that's really
helpful.
But, again, you got to use thatinformation, right.
Yeah, tie it back intoperformance improvement.
You see, anything around anypresentations and speakers today
(09:13):
or anything that you feel isreally exciting, new or anything
that you may want other peopleto look at.
Yeah, yeah, well, definitely,maybe one of those who was our
national compliance director.
She's speaking on the wholehearted journey to compliance
and ethics.
I love it.
And yeah, yeah, yeah.
So she she really brings in thewhole person, you know, and and
(09:37):
is all about authenticity andtransparency.
And you just meet people allaround the industry that she has
impacted in a positive way.
She's a big believer in BernieBrown and some of those
philosophies and all that.
I've worked with manyorganizations over the years.
Sometimes I'll work with onesthat come from outside the
industry.
Call it banking.
(09:58):
You know, maybe a somebody, abanker decides to get in and
start doing treatment which youknow is either here nor there.
But they'll come to me andthey'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'sjust like everybody's kind of
wearing their emotions on theirsleeves and all of that.
And when I owned and operatedthe treatment center, the lady
(10:20):
that sold us the treatmentcenter she goes Devin I got to
tell you if you focus on thestaff, the clients will get
better faster.
And I took that to heart and Ibelieve it.
And so that's what Maeve's talkis.
It's Saturday at 10.45.
But it's about taking care ofour staff and recognizing that
people in the helping professionthey need to help themselves,
(10:42):
they need to fill their own cup.
You certainly can't helpanybody else if you're not.
And sometimes the mechanics carruns the worst.
And so you know, having thisfocus on our staff, making it
okay to be not okay, making itokay to talk about burnout,
having open door policies andall of that, that is a journey
that if organizations start that, that they will see that the
(11:05):
clients get better faster.
It's true we always say youtake care of your people,
they'll take care of yourpatients.
So then overall they're goingto have a good performance.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
One of my favorite quotes, zig Ziglar.
Yeah, and he says he wastalking with a friend and he was
talking about all of theinvestment he makes into staff
training, right, and the guysays to him wouldn't you be
upset if you spent all thatmoney on their training on their
left Tune?
And his response was I would bemore upset if I didn't spend
(11:36):
the money on their training.
And their stare no, that's agreat response.
That was really good, yeah, sothank you for coming on.
Yeah, thank you for having me,mike, and thanks so much.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, and I'm glad Thanks forjoining.
Make sure to check out CircleBehavioral Health and if you're
looking to open a treatmentcenter or you need help, you can
be there in Southern California.
These guys are the experts outhere and thanks for watching.
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