How can hospitals collect more copays?
While hospitals can send notices to patients with unpaid copays, the procedure is time-consuming and frequently has very little effect. A more drastic approach involves using the services of a collection agency, but this method is so costly that the expenses often outweigh the returns.

The reality is that if a copay is not collected at the time of service, the hospital is unlikely to ever see that money. The best way for hospitals to improve on their copay collection rate is by increasing the number of copays that are collected up front. The good news is that there is one simple step hospitals can take to accomplish this: offer more payment options. This is often the easiest step hospitals can take to see a huge return in the amount of copays that are collected.

Many people don't carry much cash, so offering other payment options can significantly increase the chances of collecting copays.

Many facilities require that copays be paid in cash, but patients frequently aren’t carrying enough cash to cover the copay. Hospitals can greatly increase the chances that patients will be able to pay their copays up front by accepting multiple forms of payment such as credit and debit cards, checks, and – for employees and their families – payroll deduction. The more convenient the payment process is, the more payments will actually be received – and employees especially love the convenience of having copays and other charges directly deducted from their paychecks.

Uncollected copays often result in huge costs for hospitals, but they don’t have to – offering payroll deduction and other payment options can go a long way toward eliminating the problem.

News Facts

• Hannaford Bros. Co., with more than 27,000 employees, has used the Kronos time and attendance and forecasting and scheduling solutions for several years. Based on benefits achieved, Hannaford recently updated the Kronos suite to include the labor analytics application and next generation user interface.
• Like most grocers, Hannaford operates on thin margins. Therefore it is extremely important that it makes the most of every labor dollar spent. With the Kronos analytics solution, Hannaford will be able to identify, predict, and manage opportunities for cost savings and productivity gains – all while ensuring a consistent and positive shopping experience.
• To ensure Hannaford is achieving the most benefit from its existing workforce management investments, the grocer also selected the next generation user interface from Kronos. In addition to offering ease of use, which improves end-user adoption and reduces training costs, the interface offers an early warning and guidance system that identifies potential problems. The interface presents those problems in a simple, intuitive way and guides the user to an appropriate resolution through predictive analytics.
• The new additions will further augment Hannaford’s existing workforce management strategy including its wall-to-wall optimized scheduling approach. The Kronos forecasting and scheduling tools offer access to customer traffic data in 15-minute increments by department and store, enabling managers to generate accurate schedules based on those patterns and trends.

Supporting Quotes

• Norm Daigle, manager of labor and productivity, Hannaford Bros. Co.
  “Through the use of Kronos optimized scheduling, we are achieving many sales benefits. The analytics solution and the intuitive user interface will help us reap further rewards. For example, the user interface will improve the execution of our standard practice for scheduling as it will guide the user through the process, allowing them to spend less time in the back office and more time helping customers. Also, our associates and managers will be able to leverage functionality and additional metrics that they previously didn’t have access to.”
• Liz Moughan, director, retail and hospitality practice group, Kronos
  “As with many of our long-term customers, Hannaford was looking for ways to further innovate with the use of workforce management solutions. It has already achieved significant benefits with Kronos. By leveraging our more advanced solutions, Hannaford will be able to transform its workforce from a cost of doing business to a competitive advantage.”

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News Facts

• The Kronos Retail Labor Index: (This index is defined as the ratio of hires to applications within a given month, expressed as a percentage. A level of 3.0 percent means that for every 100 applications received, three hires occurred). The Kronos Retail Labor Index edged down to 3.8 percent in April from a March level that was revised three-tenths lower. Even with declines over the last two months, the Retail Labor Index remains above levels seen over the last few years, averaging 4.0 percent over the first four months of this year, up from 3.5 percent last year.
• Retail Hiring Level: The retailers representing 18,362 distributed locations across the U.S. that make up the Kronosdata sample made 31,862 hires (seasonally adjusted) in April down from 33,209 in March. The two months of declining numbers followed a strong, nearly 11 percent gain in hires in February to the highest level since October 2008. The February reading may have been in part boosted by unseasonably mild winter weather. If the mild winter weather led firms to pull hires forward into February, this could explain some of the weakness seen in subsequent months.
• Retail Applications Level: The number of applications received by retailers included in the Kronos sample rose 1.6 percent to 843,653 in April from an upwardly revised 830,668 in March, all on a seasonally adjusted basis. Even with the small gain, the level of applications in April was down roughly 145,500 from its level one year ago.
• Retail 60-Day Retention Rate: The 60-day retention rate, measured as the number of hires who remain employed for at least the first 60 days divided by the total number of hires made in that month, rose to 84.0 percent (seasonally adjusted) in December 2011 from 83.0 percent in November 2011. (Note: There is a four-month lag on this indicator as two months are required to measure whether a hire remained employed for 60 days and Kronos customers have two months to return data on separations.)

Supporting Quotes

• Chris Varvares, senior managing director and co-founder, Macroeconomic Advisers
  “The Kronos Retail Labor Index edged down two-tenths to a still solid 3.8 percent in April, reflecting a moderate decline in hires and a small gain in applications. This was the second consecutive decline in hires, following a strong, nearly 11 percent gain in February. Hiring in February may have been boosted by the unseasonably warm weather experienced this winter, pulling some spring hires forward and helping to explain some of the subsequent declines in March and April. In addition, readings on retail sales and chain-store sales through March were strong and above expectations, suggesting business conditions for retail firms are improving. We look for the pace of hiring at retail firms to pick up in the coming months as this sector continues to strengthen.”

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News Facts

• The Kronos Workforce Analytics™ solution enables organizations to easily access and leverage their workforce data to identify, predict, and manage opportunities for cost savings and productivity gains.
• Key features of Workforce Analytics include:
• Real-time visibility into workforce and operational issues so that questions about labor costs and workforce needs can be addressed immediately and not just evaluated at the end of the week or month when it is too late to respond to problems that have already occurred. Workforce Analytics provides granular alerts against benchmarks as exceptions occur so they can be addressed before they become problematic trends.
• An intuitive, graphical management dashboard that enables users to see all relevant information in a consolidated view to leverage their workforce as a competitive advantage and make informed decisions for business growth.
• The ability to create and edit ad-hoc reports in minutes with an easy-to-use graphical interface and without the assistance of IT or Kronos.
• Built-in, sophisticated security features that provide personalized intelligence, enabling employees at all levels to have the necessary data to make fact-based decisions, while at the same time limiting access to minimize compliance and privacy concerns.
• Interoperability with an organization’s existing business intelligence (BI) tool, enabling organizations to extend the value of their current BI investment.

Supporting Quotes

• David Lawson, productivity and metrics manager, WellStar Health System
  “The Kronos Workforce Analytics solution will help us take our labor management to the next level. The intuitive user interface and easy-to-use ad-hoc reporting capabilities allow any end-user to create, save, and share reports that enable better, fact-based decision making in real-time.”
• Mark Smith, CEO & chief research officer, Ventana Research
  “The need to optimize the value of the workforce requires analytics that can provide the insight to take action and make decisions. Our research finds that organizations need to reduce the time and costs associated with generating the metrics and increase the usability. Kronos Workforce Analytics 6.3 helps meet organizations’ needs for best-in-class workforce analytics.”
• Bill Bartow, vice president, global product management, Kronos
  “Successful organizations make critical business decisions based on facts, not anecdotal information. Whether it’s about generating revenue, building budgets, or attacking costs, analytics drives business performance. With Workforce Analytics, we’ve made it easier than ever for organizations to find value in Big Data and turn their workforce information into competitive advantage.”

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Source: microsoft.com	Many types of video game hardware have proven useful to medical personnel. Motion control technology is being used for many types of physical therapy, the Wii Remote controllers help diagnose certain eye disorders, and the Wii Balance Board has shown to be nearly as accurate as the bulky and expensive medical equipment that serves the same function. Maybe most innovative is the use of the Xbox Kinect sensors in operating rooms as a means of scrolling through different medical charts in a touch-free manner, eliminating the need to resterilize after handling a non-sterile clipboard or computer.
	A game called Packy and Marlon, originally released on the Super Nintendo console, was created to help kids better understand juvenile diabetes, and help teach them better treatment for it. Players had to perform tasks such as monitoring their characters’ blood glucose levels and giving characters insulin at the same time as they took on a more conventional video game adventure.
	High school and college students have the opportunity to learn immunology from the game Immune Attack, in which the player navigates a nanobot through the bloodstream, teaching the immune system how to fight different types of infections.
	Re-Mission, a cancer-themed shooting game created by HopeLab, lets players blast away cancer cells and bacteria. Distributed for free to young people battling cancer as well as to healthcare workers in the oncology field, Re-Mission aims to encourage kids to keep up with their treatment regimens as well as increasing their understanding of the disease and boosting their confidence in their ability to beat it.
	University of Washington scientists were able to solve a medical problem via crowdsourcing through the puzzle game Foldit. In just ten days, gamers replicated the structure of the retroviral protease protein, which had baffled scientists for a decade. This particular enzyme is related to the way HIV multiplies. Scientists are now able to see how the protein bonds and have a better chance of developing a drug to hinder its ability to spread.

Do you have a favorite healthcare-themed game that we missed? If you work in the healthcare industry, what do you think of these games – do they make your job easier in any way? Let us know what you think!

• Cashless Solutions
  For businesses utilizing payroll deduction for payment, the glasses could display an up-to-date tally of deductions and wages for the current pay period to help employees decide how much they want to spend. Imagine having that information appear as soon as you stepped into the cafeteria (or another POS location within the facility)! You could even scan certain items or groups of items to see what your balance would be after you purchased the items in question.

• Contacts
  We all know it’s hard keeping track of all the people you meet. The glasses could support facial recognition software that would identify the person and bring up his or her contact information – you wouldn’t have to worry about calling someone by the wrong name, plus you could know at a glance whether or not you had the person’s phone number or email address.

• Access Control
  Security personnel and executives wearing the glasses could set up alerts to let them know immediately about attempted entries, hardware problems, or other security concerns. Employees on the other hand could receive an alert when they approach a door or area to which they do not have access – for example if an employee approaches a door outside of the hours when he or she has access to that area, the heads up display could let him or her know why access is denied.

• Presentations
  Giving presentations can be a stressful experience, to the point where you may occasionally forget some key points while worrying about impressing your audience. Imagine if you could sync the presentation to your glasses, and have reminders and notes pop up periodically. And as a viewer of the presentation, the glasses could provide more detail about graphs and charts and projections without being too cumbersome in the actual presentation.

• Workforce Management
  Everyone who uses a time clock knows the frustration of realizing late in the day that you never punched in at the beginning of the shift. The glasses could display a reminder as an employee walked past the time clock if he or she forgot to punch in or out. The glasses could also help improve workplace efficiency as scheduling conflicts could be identified immediately and alleviated on the fly – managers would be able to easily tell when their employees arrived (early or late) and who was in the office on a given day.

What do you think – how would Project Glass help you out at work? Would you even be willing to wear the glasses?

That is not to say that the cashless revolution will happen smoothly. Certain obstacles preventing the widespread use of cashless solutions still require resolution. Google Wallet has stumbled a bit out of the blocks with security issues. The major cell phone companies, in an effort to create their own mobile wallet system, may or may not have actively blocked Google Wallet from working on their devices. And, perhaps most importantly, people still don’t trust the new technology to keep their sensitive information safe. Cashless may be the way of the future, but right now it needs a good push to get things moving.

That push may come in the form of the 2012 Olympic Games in London this summer. The London Olympics will be the first Games to feature cashless (or “contactless,” as they say across the pond) payment options at all terminals across each Olympic venue. McDonald’s specifically says it will offer “wave and pay” options in its new restaurant in  the Olympic Park in East London. McDonald’s says the new restaurant will be its largest in the world.

Similarly, transportation, including 8,000 busses and 2,000 taxis, will also feature cashless payment options. Away from the Olympic sites, retail chains, supermarkets, and restaurants will offer cashless options as well. At any cashless terminal, customers can pay with either a card or compatible smartphone.

The cashless initiative is being pushed forward most fervently by Visa, which was the first sponsor to sign up for the 2012 Games. Visa has released an advertisement featuring Usain Bolt to showcase the speed and ease of cashless payments.

Remember when self-checkout lines were scary, foreign objects in your local supermarket? People’s opinions were typically “Why should I scan my own groceries when I’m paying cashiers’ salaries?” Well, that sentiment seems to be a thing of the past. Not only grocery stores but CVS, Home Depot, and even IKEA have recently implemented self-scan machines. (Home Depot’s self-serve checkouts even accept PayPal!)

It seems Americans enjoy the idea of checkout independence. Many argue that it saves the customer time through shorter lines, and allows employees to be more effective by overseeing more registers and spending more time on customer service. A study published by NCR in 2008 showed 72% of Americans are more likely to shop at locations offering self-service options than those that do not.

On the other hand, sometimes the idea of self-checkout is more appealing than its execution. Headaches over machinery complications and failures, and slow checkout by customers leave something to be desired. Some large grocers such as Alberton and Kroger have scaled back on self-checkout lanes to increase interaction with customers and keep lines moving.

What’s your opinion? Do these systems help improve customer service and increase customer satisfaction? Or are they putting the average customer to work? Let us know what you think!

It’s no wonder so many people end up with all of their important passwords written on a Post-it note and stuck to the inside of their desk drawer. We’re so overwhelmed by these efforts at security that we end up resorting to methods like that which are completely insecure.

The password problem has become a “something’s gotta give” situation – and in fact it’s been there for a while. Back in 2004, Bill Gates spoke about the issues with traditional passwords, but 8 years later we’re still relying on them for a lot of important uses.

More and more replacements for passwords are emerging, though, and in addition to being easier to use and/or more secure, some of them are just plain cool! We already took a look at a few, but here’s some more that are really intriguing:

• Researchers at Newcastle University developed a system that lets you unlock your phone by drawing a picture instead of typing a password. Don’t worry, you don’t have to recreate your doodle exactly – but the system does track where you start drawing and how many times you pick up your pen, so it’s hard to fool. Plus, for those with dyslexia or other language difficulties, this is much easier than a traditional password!
• Applications such as KeePass and LastPass use one master password to access a database holding all of your other passwords (encrypted, of course). One password to rule them all, for all you Lord of the Rings fans. You can even integrate the software with your browser to keep passwords available at the click of a button.
• DARPA has proposed a system that would make sure you were who you said you were just by paying attention to how you type. Since your typing style is mostly subconscious, it would be difficult for anyone else to replicate. Okay, this one doesn’t exist yet, and a lot of people would probably be hesitant to trust it, but it would be so convenient to just sit down and start typing and never have to enter a password!
• The pattern unlock feature on Android phones (where you draw a pattern by connecting dots on a 3×3 grid) is old hat to many of us by now, but it still deserves a mention – with nearly 400,000 combinations it’s much more secure than your old combination lock. And pattern unlock is perfect for phones since drawing that pattern is so much easier on a touchscreen than typing a password.

News Facts

• Kronos^® Workforce Mobile™ Manager – allows managers to use their devices to monitor workforce operations, resolve exceptions, and respond quickly to employee requests.
• Kronos Workforce Mobile Employee – enables employees to track their work in real time, quickly and easily review information such as their schedules and timecards, and request time off.
• Kronos mobile applications are delivered as native applications for the Android™, iPhone^®, and BlackBerry^®, providing a familiar user experience in each environment. A JavaME option is also available, which runs on a wide range of feature phones.
• Kronos Workforce Mobile applications are available in Chinese, English, Dutch, French, and Spanish.
• To try Kronos Workforce Mobile, download a demo at: www.kronos.com/mobile.

Supporting Quotes

• Denise Harding, human resources global specialist , Kimball Electronics
  “Kronos Workforce Mobile is a great tool for productivity. It makes it easy to perform simple tasks on-the-go and saves the time of plugging in a laptop and signing into the VPN from a remote location.  We foresee great benefit to our organization as adoption increases.”
• Ramona Fierro, human resources director, Valley Power Systems
  “Kronos mobile applications have revolutionized our business. We have field-based technicians, and keeping track of their whereabouts used to require them to call the corporate office when they left for a job, arrived, finished, and departed, with someone on the other end of the line manually recording the information. With Kronos Workforce Mobile, this process has been automated, and best of all, the GPS capability lets us verify and confirm that our technicians are where they say they are. Kronos has been a great and collaborative partner for us – we couldn’t ask for more.”
• Suzanne Linder-Goswick, vice president of human resources, YMCA of Metropolitan Dallas
  “Kronos Workforce Mobile works great for us. We have 90+ off-site, after-school programs staffed by more than 300 employees. Our off-site staff is able to use their smart phones to clock in and out and request time off; no more manual timesheets or having to worry about getting them to the main office. Having Workforce Mobile has taken our workforce management to the next level.”
• Bill Bartow, vice president of global product management, Kronos
  “Mobile technology continues to transform the way we communicate and do business in ways we could never have imagined just a few years ago. Kronos will continue to invest in our mobile applications, as they are critical to the future of effectively managing the workforce.”

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