By Miriam Lieber
Meet the Expert:
Miriam Lieber is president of Lieber Consulting LLC, a national consulting firm specializing in revenue cycle management for HME providers. With decades of experience, Lieber partners with organizations to improve operational performance, streamline processes, and strengthen the order-to-cash cycle. She is a recognized industry leader and frequent speaker on best practices in HME operations and billing.
In today’s landscape, HME businesses are constantly seeking ways to improve their bottom line. As regulations tighten and reimbursement continues to be squeezed, we must constantly look for ways to contend with the cuts through operational efficiencies.
The key to these efficiencies lies in establishing a culture of accountability with clear expectations, performance standards, process improvement, and automation initiatives.
Further, with employee scarcity and absenteeism, we must have a plan to serve patients and continue to grow despite these obstacles.
One way to find efficiencies is to conduct an operational assessment of your organization. Search for holes in the order to cash process, look for manual and archaic systems, excess touches, duplication of effort, and more inefficiencies that delay the revenue cycle.
Finding these bottlenecks and obstacles is the first step in getting to the root cause of your cash slowdown.
To determine the lowest-hanging fruit and biggest potential gain, start by assessing people, process, and automation.
For example:
- How many orders does each intake representative process?
- How many touches does each order require?
- Where does the order typically get bottlenecked?
- How many manual interventions are required in the order-to-cash process?
- Do you use KPIs to measure and trend your employees’ productivity?
The answers to these questions will help you find the root cause of the inefficiencies so you can begin to employ remedies.
As you look to shore up your operation, aim to hasten the order-to-cash timeline and minimize denials and errors.
Use automation and AI to tackle bottlenecks by rote functions, outsource tasks as necessary, and train new (or retrain existing) staff in a more structured and measured manner. Use KPIs for accountability and trend progress.
Celebrate the wins and create and maintain a positive work environment. As leaders, it is incumbent upon you to model the behavior you want others to emulate.
With set expectations via KPIs and regular meetings to report on progress, staff will begin to see how they can improve and achieve success. As success breeds success, you will start to find an operation of engaged employees, streamlined processes, outsourced partners, and automation initiatives to scale your company.
Connect with Miriam Lieber at the PAMS 2025 Fall Program
Lieber will be presenting Operations Management — Bottom Line Improvements at the upcoming Pennsylvania Association of Medical Suppliers (PAMS) 2025 Fall Program on September 18, 2025. In this interactive session, she’ll share current trends, key accountability measures, and practical strategies for using automation and operational efficiencies to do more with less—without sacrificing profitability. We’ll see you there!