Archive for November, 2008
Katie, Bar the Door
One of our newest customers, a large hospital in the Southeast, was in the process of kicking off their program when this event occured.
On Wednesday, a vendor rep came to call. With no badge, no appointments and no products on the approved supply list, the rep wandered the halls, buttonholing every physician he could find. Administration eventually rounded him up and sent him on his way.
Yet, he came back the very next day and started working the Med/Surg floor again. He ran across a physician conducting a family conference about potential treatment modalities for a very sick patient. The rep lurked behind for a while, then chimed in, “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. I have a product that may be helpful here.” The physician was appalled and scolded the rep for interfering, particularly because the product proposed wasn’t appropriate for the case in question. The family, desperate to explore any promising course of treatment, began to quiz the physician about what the rep had said. The physician then spent 20 minutes redirecting the conversation away from the rep’s comments and back to realistic options.
Add comment November 19, 2008
When the OIG is Not Enough
Want to be confident that your Medicaid supplier can actually service your healthcare system?
You can’t necessarily rely on the fact that a supplier isn’t listed on the OIG List of Excluded Individuals and Entities as a your proof of legitimacy.
A recent AP news article noted that 491 suppliers in South Florida had their billing privileges revoked. 243 appealed, and most were reinstated. Then about two-thirds of them had their privileges revoked again.
Effective supply chain management and vendor credentialing requires more than one source. Increase your confidence by verifying the supplier business itself through Secretary of State filings, credit reporting, government sanction checks as well as your own intuition. One source is not enough.
1 comment November 13, 2008
Compliance is not equal to Credentialing
The concept of “vendor compliance” often gets equated with “vendor credentialing.” But if you harken back to your elementary math days, you can think of it as a Venn diagram, with “vendor credentialing” being a category that intersects with the ring of “vendor compliance.”
Vendor compliance is a vendor’s ability to understand and successfully participate in a buyer’s policies. Vendor credentialing is verifying that vendors are as they present themselves. The intersection of compliance and credentialing occurs when a vendor meets (complies with) a set of verified qualifications (credentials).
Add comment November 5, 2008
