The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Agencies

1. Keep cash flow king - Cash flow is the lifeblood of a home health agency. Like clogged arteries, sluggish cash flow threatens the viability of a business. Successful agencies keep aging receivables under a microscope. They focus their investment dollars and activities on solutions that improve cash flow.
   
   
2. Retain quality employees - excessive employee turnover affects cost and impacts customer care. Effective agencies quickly weed-out poor performers and spend their energies retaining and motivating good employees.
   
   
3. Passion for quality care - successful agencies make improving the lives of their patients a top priority. It makes good business sense too. Happy patients provide powerful word-of-mouth advertising--the engine driving referrals and growth for an agency.
   
   
4. Manage growth - unmanaged growth can easily tax a high-quality agency and cause them to quickly become a mediocre one. If the quality of care diminishes, this impacts customer satisfaction, and ultimately referrals.
   
   
5. Paranoid about fraud - agency audits are time-consuming and expensive. Throw in the loss of goodwill and you’ll see why top performing agencies are very concerned with fraud - even though they have good people.
   
   
6. Minimize paperwork errors - great agencies are sticklers for detail and strive to eliminate errors at the start, with correct documentation. Bad documentation leads to rework, re filing, delayed collections, and even loss of revenues.
   
   
7. Maximize productivity - profitable agencies actively seek ways to get the most return from their largest expense—people. Benchmarking, setting performance standards, squeezing out unnecessary admin costs, are just some of the means agencies do more while holding down costs.