2017 Product and Service Improvement Plan

Kareo 2017 – Looking Ahead

Robert Fosmire, Kareo’s Vice President of Customer Success, recently published a Kareo Blog post that reviewed the many product and service enhancements Kareo delivered in 2016. Most notably, launching the seamless and fully integrated Kareo Platform in May of last year. I wanted to follow Robert’s 2016 update with an outline of our product and service roadmap priorities for 2017.

Late last year we spent considerable time talking to our users about what was working for them in using Kareo and what areas they would like to see further improvements. Overall, we heard that customers loved our new platform and that they appreciated the ability to rely on Kareo for a wide range of their technology and service needs, from patient engagement and practice marketing, to care delivery, and, of course, getting paid. With the amount of change to our solutions, though, our users asked that we focus on efforts in 2017 on core functionality, usability, and required compliance items. 

With this in mind, our priorities for the first half of the year fall into three primary focus areas:

1. Reducing work and improving efficiency
2. Advancing practice and clinic results
3. Meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, such as MACRA

In January, for example, we delivered new functionality that address the second of our focus areas. Specifically, we delivered the following:

• Superbill Referring & Supervising Providers – The Superbill in Kareo Clinical now includes additional fields for Referring Provider and Supervising Provider. Data from these fields is automatically sent to the draft encounter in Kareo Billing, which will help billing workflows for practices using interns, assistants, aides, etc. to provide care and/or practices with a lot of referral business like mental health, physical therapy, and other therapies.
• Authorization Tracking on Agenda, New Appointment, and Notes Screens – For practices and clinics providing services under insurance authorization, the number of visits a patient has accrued is visible under each authorization. The status of the authorization is available in the Agenda, New Appointment creation screen, and patient encounter note in the Kareo application. The number of visits remaining under the patient’s authorization is automatically tracked and deducted as encounters are billed in Kareo Billing.

Looking ahead, we are working on a wide range of projects to address the focus areas I outlined. These include the following:

• Administrative controls to unlock user accounts, eliminating the need to contact Kareo for resolution
• In-application expert tools to help billers understand and resolve claim rejections, allowing faster payment and higher reimbursement rates
• Improved eligibility checks which enable back-dating based on date of service to enable the sending of clean claims and reducing the number of rejections
• More granular authorization tracking for therapy customers who depend on not only number of visits, but also on the number of units used (and left) and for specific procedure codes.  This facilitates the billing process to allow you to get paid accurately for the work you do.
• Tools to help practices and clinics work with patients to estimate costs and insurance coverage, leading to higher patient collection
• Kareo Clinical templates designed for the unique needs of specific specialties, allowing for faster, more efficient, and accurate encounter documentation
• Kareo Mobile functionality to enable working billing steps from any Apple mobile device, including eligibility checking, approving and submitting claims, and collections and payments posting
• Advanced analytics and cross-practice reporting for billing companies and larger practices that that manage billing for multiple, discrete practices

We also have a dedicated team of Kareo team members reviewing all of our Customer Success cases to ensure we are address issues and smaller functionality improvement that have been suggested by our customers.

I hope that you will begin to see these enhancements in your daily use of Kareo. I also encourage you to pay attention to regular updates that are outlined in our monthly release notes. We plan to introduce product improvements monthly this year with the changes implemented the third week of each month. We will work hard to ensure you are aware of and ready to take advantage of the changes that can benefit your practice or clinic.