New Jersey Respiratory Associates (NJRA) is a respected leader in the healthcare service industry. Their customers are skilled nursing facilities with a 24/7 need for respiratory therapy on demand. By deploying a customized mix of Skedulo and Salesforce, Greg streamlined NJRA’s workflows, provide therapists with a better work experience, and grow the family business, doing much more with much less. At the same time, NJRA eliminated hidden expenses, knocked down roadblocks to growth, and transformed their manual back office into a digital powerhouse.
Challenge: Accelerating to the new speed of business
A point of pride for NJRA is the promise of same day service by a team of four respiratory therapists. As their client list grew to 100 SNF accounts, the logistics of optimal scheduling and routing for their therapists began to strain NJRA’s resources. Therapists would often need to visit 5 – 8 different locations in a day. In addition to manually setting up pre-arranged therapist schedules every week using Excel, NJRA would also frequently need to reroute therapists as new patients arrived in various facilities throughout the day.
NJRA knew that to be competitive, they needed a platform for reliable, real-time interactions with their mobile workforce. Meanwhile back in the home office, they needed data-driven oversight to enable better customer service and faster invoicing.
There were bottlenecks with information flow in the other direction, as well. Therapists would fax a sheet of patient info to the home office once a month. NJRA needed feedback more frequently than that. The lag in data collection limited their learning opportunities and stifled business flexibility.
Growing their team would be out of the question until they could find a more efficient way to manage therapists scheduling, routing, and communications
Solution: Skedulo eliminates back office complexity
Change can be hard, even when the old system is painful to work with on a daily basis. NJRA realized that they needed full staff buy-in if they wanted to make lasting changes.
To get everyone on board, NJRA held a series weekly meetings discussing the company’s challenges, mapping out business processes, identifying weaknesses, and coming up with solutions. With team agreement on what changes needed to happen, managers moved to the next step.
In NJRA’s search for smarter tech to organize interactions with customers and patients, they concluded that the best way forward was a combined implementation of Skedulo and Salesforce. Skedulo is a cloud-based platform for automating scheduling and communicating with the mobile workforce.
Salesforce is customer relationship management (CRM) software for better organization and management of customer data.
The NJRA staff was thrilled to see the elimination of repetitive processes and the automation of their most difficult tasks. When it came time to go live, NJRA made sure everyone had plenty of support in learning the system so they could make mistakes without concern over affecting customers or patients.
Skedulo’s integration with Salesforce provided a way for NJRA to automate scheduling and seamlessly interact with workers in the field, while remaining 100% HIPAA compliant. Productivity improvements extended beyond just better interactions with their mobile workforce into smarter back-office operations, faster invoicing, and higher sales revenues.