AHDI Offers Monthly Webinars

Every month, the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) offers educational webinars. Two that the association is encouraging its members to attend are:

Your Association, Your Benefits: An online presentation that details AHDI member benefits and how to take advantage of them.

Steps to Credentialing: A web presentation that explains in detail how to become credentialed.

There are even more complimentary webinars to choose from on AHDI’s Online Store under “Meetings/Webinars”.

Jan 2011 – PRN Funding’s Recent Factoring Transactions

PRN Funding offers financing services to healthcare vendors. Most notable, PRN Funding offers healthcare staffing payroll funding, medical transcription invoice funding, medical coding factoring and medical billing AR funding. Most recently, PRN Funding also provides private duty home care factoring agencies.  By purchasing these companies’ accounts receivables, PRN Funding provides the cash needed for them to sustain and grow their healthcare business.  With that said, we are pleased to announce some of our most recent factoring transactions:

A Nurse Staffing Agency Finally Gets Approved for AR Financing
In an attempt to get her company started, this Illinois nurse staffing agency owner borrowed from friends and family, maxed out all of her credit cards and fell behind on her bills. Naturally, her poor personal credit was greatly hindering her ability to obtain ongoing business financing from a traditional lender.

Frustrated from being turned down, the nurse staffing agency owner started researching alternative financing options and came across PRN Funding’s nurse staffing invoice funding web site. Through her research, she learned that PRN Funding based its credit decision on her customers’ creditworthiness, rather than her own. The agency owner applied online that day and after hearing ‘no’ for so long, she was finally approved for a line of credit.

An Allied Health Staffing Agency Works with Long-Term Care Facilities
Two business partners from Louisiana knew that in order for them to start a successful medical staffing agency in a down economy, they would have to focus a specialized staffing niche. So instead of placing RNs, LPNs and CNAs, they chose to focus on providing various types of therapists to help fill gaps exclusively at long-term care facilities. Within two months of opening their doors, the savvy business partners had more shifts to fill than therapists. However, they couldn’t hire additional therapists because their cash flow was continuously held up by slow payments from the long-term care facilities.

The business partners were familiar with factoring, and they knew that most general factors wouldn’t be comfortable purchasing receivables that could consistently age out past 90 days. Luckily, a friend of one of the partners suggested they approach PRN Funding because it was a factoring firm that specialized in allied health factoring. The business partners called in on a Friday, received documents the next day, and factored their very first allied health invoice by the end of the week. Having a better cash flow allowed them to bring on three new therapists that month, and they haven’t had to turn down new business since.

Tennessee Business Owner Uses Medical Coding Invoice Factoring to Improve Cash Flow
When this entrepreneur first started her medical coding business, she coded exclusively for one physician. Over the years, the business owner’s outsourced medical coding services expanded steadily. She gradually started hiring new coders and while simultaneously adding multiple doctors to her portfolio.  Then the economy turned south, and with it, the business owner’s receivables started coming in slower.

At first, the medical coding entrepreneur tried to make up for the lack of cash flow by paying her own bills with credit cards, and paying the coders out of her own pocket. It didn’t take long before her credit cards were maxed and her savings account had dwindled. While flipping through an industry magazine, she found an ad for PRN Funding’s medical coding factoring services. According to the ad, PRN Funding’s factoring services could help her get paid quicker, so she dialed the toll-free number and was connected to a medical coding factoring specialist immediately. Two weeks later, she submitted her first medical coding invoice for factoring, and she worried less about her company’s cash flow.

Click here for more information on PRN Funding’s accounts receivable factoring services.

Nuance Releases Speech Transcription SDK for iOS and Android Apps

Per Mashable,

“Nuance, the maker of popular speech recognition apps such as Dragon Dictation, is releasing the Dragon Mobile SDK to members of the Nuance Mobile Developer Program. The SDK will enable app makers to add speech transcription capabilities to their iOS and Android applications.

The SDK is free of charge and lets developers add speech-to-text translation capabilities in eight different languages, as well as text-to-speech functionality in more than 35 languages.

Nuance’s suite of Dragon Mobile applications is widely recognized as best-in-class when it comes speech transcription, and the SDK is already being used by companies such as Ask.com. The SDK should help robust speech-enabled apps become more prevalent, and we look forward to seeing what developers can dream up.

Nuance has been working on speech-based services since the early ’90s. The veteran company has made a number of acquisitions in recent years, including startups like Jott and SpinVox.”

Top 5 Nursing Careers

Everyone knows that nurses are going to be in high demand for the foreseeable future. Driving that point home even more, Brian Summers recently blogged about the Top Five Nursing Careers in the upcoming years. For the benefit of our nurse staffing readers, the nurse staffing account receivable specialists at PRN Funding wrote a condensed version of the post below:

One: Travel Nursing Careers
Travel nurses have the ability to control their career paths while working in a variety of healthcare settings. The pay is good too, ranging from $22-$40/hour.

Two: Military Nursing Careers
Basically, military nurses choose a career in the armed forces, which opens the door to some exciting travel and education benefits while adding a lot of support to the nation.

Three: Forensic Nursing Careers
The main objective of forensic organization is to ensure that criminals are brought to book for their wrongdoings, and forensic nurses help these organizations by documenting injuries and collecting DNA evidence. In addition, forensic nursing is considered one of the top-paying nursing jobs.

Four: Legal Nurse Consulting Careers
In order to become a legal nurse consultant, you need to have specialized training above and beyond your RN license. In addition, legal nurse consultants can easily bring in $100-$150/hour for their services, which include: providing medical and legal inputs to a legal team after analyzing the medical evidence of an event and/or testifying in court as an expert witness in cases that include medical malpractice and product liability.

Five: Surgical Nurse Careers
If you recall, we blogged about how some hospitals are seeing shortages in specialized nurse positions yesterday. So it’s no surprise that surgical nurse careers are anticipated to be in high demand in the next decade. Basically, surgical nurses assist doctors in prep work for surgeries as well as carrying out post-op recovering procedures and administrative duties.

Hospitals See Specialty Nurse Shortages

It’s no secret that the United States is on the cusp of a nationwide nurse shortage as baby boomers continue to age and need more medical care. In fact, the Journal of the American Medical Association projects the RN shortage to hit 400,000 by 2020.

The nurse staffing factoring specialists at PRN Funding have blogged about how nurse staffing agency owners can and should take advantage of this shortage by filling open positions before, however, we found a recent article stating that facilities don’t just need RNs. They need specialty nurses too.

The article, Nationwide Shortage of Nurses Hits Local Hospital in Specialty Health Care Departments, talks about nurse shortages specifically in cardiology and pediatrics. Specifically, the medical facility has been trying for two years to fill the catheter lab nurse position.

For nurse staffing business owners, this would be a great opportunity to get your foot in the door at a facility.

PRN Funding helps provide reliable nurse staffing funding solutions for your agency. Learn more about our nurse staffing factoring solutions today.

Health.com’s Top 10 Careers with High Rates of Depression

Health.com recently released the results of a study that ranked personal care providers as having the number one career that’s linked to bouts of depression. Nearly 11 percent of the people working in this field reported a major bout of depression.

Specifically, Health.com posted this about the caregiver career:

A typical day can include feeding, bathing, and caring for others who are “often incapable of expressing gratitude or appreciation…because they are too ill or too young or they just aren’t in the habit of it,” says Christopher Willard, clinical psychologist at Tufts University and author of Child’s Mind.

“It is stressful, seeing people sick and not getting a lot of positive reinforcement.”

Here is the Top 10 list of careers with high rates of depression:

  1. Personal care providers
  2. Food service staff
  3. Social workers
  4. Healthcare workers
  5. Artists, entertainers, and writers
  6. Teachers
  7. Administrative support staff
  8. Maintenance workers and groundskeepers
  9. Financial advisors and accountants
  10. Salespeople

Click here to read the entire article: 10 Careers with High Rates of Depression

Frequently Asked Factoring Questions – What Will My Customers Think?

The healthcare factoring specialists at PRN Funding have a list of Frequently Asked Factoring Questions, and we wanted to respond a little more in-depth to an invoice factoring question that we hear often: What will my customers think?

This is a concern of many companies who are considering accounts receivable factoring as a finance strategy. However, establishing a credit line is a positive statement–not a negative statement–to make to your customers. It’s important to keep in mind that not all healthcare vendors qualify for lines of credit.

Selling accounts receivable to generate cash is a finance method used by very large corporations worldwide, with the factoring service provided by the largest banks in the nation. Because  factoring is widely known, your customers will view your funding relationship as a positive ability on your part to secure financing, not as a problem with cash flow.

It’s likely that many of the healthcare institutions that you service already deal with factoring companies and may not even be aware of it. Sometimes payments for invoices directed to a P.O. Box are actually going to a factor. Shell Oil, Georgia-Pacific, IBM and other substantial companies factor millions of dollars of their accounts receivable every year.

Financing obtained through the sale of accounts receivable factoring is most often used by a firm to expand and take on larger projects; not merely for cash flow or payroll. Now that this service is available to healthcare companies like yours, you can enjoy both the perception and the reality of being a growing company, moving forward.

Still worried about how your customers will react to a factoring company? View PRN Funding’s What to Tell Your Customers About Factoring page to learn how to talk to your customers about factoring.

Medical Transcription Outsourcing – Benefits for Physicians

MTS Transcription Services (MTS) recently issued a press release on how medical transcription outsourcing is beneficial to physicians.

The press release listed out a number of medical transcription outsourcing services features, namely:

  • Automated electronic report disctribution
  • Document flow management system
  • Electronic medical record solution
  • Web-based file transfer
  • Digital handheld recorders
  • Customizing and maintaining EMR
  • Secured FTP (File Transfer protocol) with an FTP software package
  • Retrieval of completed records using a secure VPN (Virtual Private Network)

In addition, the press release touched upon multiple benefits that medical transcription services offer physicians:

  • Reduces overhead costs
  • Quick turnaround time
  • Complete data security
  • Savings in costs – up to 40-60%
  • Assured data quality
  • High level of accuracy
  • Confidentiality of data
  • Reduce capital costs of infrastructure
  • Availability of services 24/7
  • Improve office effeciency
  • Ability to create backup copies of patient records

NOTE: If the MTSO works with a medical transcription factoring firm, the medical transcription service can offer extended payment terms to the physicians they serve.