incentive to sign a multiple year agreement?
• Is there an early termination fee if your facility decides to cancel
the service?
• You can add up to 15 questions to the survey that vendors will ask
patients on your behalf. How much, if anything, would customizing
the survey with supplemental questions cost?
Mr. Weiss says one vendor he spoke to charges $10 per survey if the
number of patients reached exceeds 500, which is easy to surpass if
your facility is performing thousands of cases per year. He therefore
suggests you work with a vendor who has a sliding scale of costs
based on volume.
Another piece of advice from Ms. Benze: If your facility uses a
billing company, the company will need to produce and send monthly
reports to vendors that note patients who are eligible to survey. Check
with your billing company in advance to determine how much this
service will cost and how often these fees will be assessed (for exam-
ple, will you have to pay a one-time implementation fee or monthly
fees?).
3. Turnaround time
Todd Albertz, vice president of surgical and specialty services at the
Cincinnati (Ohio) Eye Institute, had interviewed a couple of vendors
and even settled on a negotiated price for implementing the surveys
when he learned the program was delayed.
"We could have stopped," he says. "But we had put a lot of work
into preparing for the program's launch and decided to keep the
process moving forward to see what educational benefits we could
get from it for self-improvement purposes."
The data surveyors collect is intended for Medicare quality reporting
purposes, but you can learn from the feedback. "You can find out, for
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