Geneva polices paperwork

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - When the amount of paperwork Geneva Woods needed to manage to maintain compliance spiraled out of control, the provider knew it was time to get a handle on it.
“We had several full time people who that's all they did,” said Tara Elliston, general manager for Geneva Woods Pharmacy and Healthcare Services. “The biggest 'gasps' in our business were the costs of processing all that paperwork, our compliance percentages, which were horrible as far as making sure we had training agreements and home assessments properly executed, and the DSO was out of control.”
All that added up to leaving money on the table for the provider of long term, home and specialty pharmacy services, so Geneva Woods tapped Apacheta, a mobile business solutions provider, to implement logistics management software into its daily operations.
“Think of us as a traffic cop,” said Bob Shireman, vice president of products and solutions for Apacheta Corporation. “We sit between all of the logistic and the operations side of the business and the delivery and patient service side of the business.”
Rather than shuffling stacks of paper from intake employees to drivers to patients back to the office to be scanned into the system, Geneva Woods now uses Apacheta's Transport Manager and Transport ACE to streamline and manage its operations.
“We take care of the logistics,” said Shireman. “Who gets what and where does it have to be? We follow it through the process and each discrete stage is managed by our dashboard.”
It paid off. In about six weeks, Geneva Woods saw its overhead decrease by 25%, its missing or incomplete paperwork decrease by 26%, and its inventory losses shrink.
“It was pretty instantaneous,” said Elliston. “The measurable impact when we've gone live with other systems we've used, we've struggled to get to the point where it's smooth sailing.”
The impact on employees has also been rewarding, she says.
““It's hugely motivating to do everything right the first time and to not have as many people touch it,” said Elliston. “We're able to take underutilized positions and have them doing other things with growth potential.”