ACTION Items with Kim Johnson

Happy New Year! We hope that 2011 is off to a good start for you and your organization. As you make your resolutions for this year, please be sure to add “Join ACTION Campaign webinars” to your list.

One of our goals for 2011 is to have 3,000 individuals and organizations active in the Campaign. We’re very close—can you help us meet that goal by inviting a friend or colleague to join the Campaign? It’s easy to sign up by visiting this link: http://www.niatx.net/Login/Register.aspx

The Campaign offers two free webinars per month. In the next six months, most of our webinars will focus on helping agencies of all sizes learn how to create or improve their billing systems. All webinars are scheduled for 12:00pm EST/11:00pm CST/10:00am MST/9:00am PST

We’ll be working to bust some of the myths about setting up or improving a billing system. You don’t need to have a contract with a provider to submit a bill for services. You don’t need to have a large billing department. And you don’t need to purchase an expensive electronic billing system.

One of the resources that accompanies the webinars is The NIATx Third-party Billing Guide that we published last fall. We encourage you to download a free copy of the guide and follow the simple steps we suggest for setting up or improving your billing system. In the months ahead, we’ll be working on an updated edition. We welcome your suggestions for making the Guide more useful.

Another resource that the Campaign will encourage you to use as you work on your billing system is our inventory of promising practices. We’ve just revised the list to make it easier for you to find the most promising practice for your organization’s next change project. (See the related story.)

This month’s promising practice story is from Community Care Services in Taunton, Massachusetts. Read how they used a NIATx promising practice to increase the collection of co-pays—and as an added benefit, improve communications within the organization.

As always, we welcome your stories and feedback. We look forward to hearing from you in 2011!