HBMA MEMBERSHIP Your Return on Investment recently had a discussion with Andre Williams, HBMA’s executive director, about the value of membership. Karen Linsteadt, our VP of operations, and I have been members since the group’s inception in 1992, and we have spent more than $200,000 during that time on our HBMA membership. Williams asked a very interesting question: Did I think there had been adequate return on this investment over the 20-year period? To answer that question, I looked back at my involvement with the organization. I served on the board from 1993 to 2000, and I am a past president. Linsteadt has been actively involved in HBMA in committee membership from inception and served on the board from 2009 to 2012. We have attended approximately 90 percent of the spring and fall membership conferences. I have attended three O&M Conferences, and Linsteadt attended one. I have also attended three Compliance Conferences and three EHR conferences. Our investment includes the cost of all these meetings as well as 20 years of membership and a significant amount of money spent on board meetings. Without essentially any thought, there has unquestionably been a significant return on investment. In many ways, I am not sure if we would even be in business today had it not been for much of the information received from HBMA and guidance in managing the direction of our business. From the O&M conferences, we have returned with hundreds of ideas on how to improve our marketing, control 8 HBMA BILLING • MARCH.APRIL.2015 costs, improve our clients’ return, and improve the relationship with our clients. It is hard to quantify the exact value, but there is no doubt in my mind that we have saved thousands of dollars of expenses from ideas picked up at the O&M conferences, and there is a direct relationship in the improvement of our marketing developed at these meetings. The O&M conferences are truly one of the highlights of HBMA membership. For any members who have not attended one, you are missing out on opportunities to significantly improve your profitability. You will return with more ideas for improving your operations than you can possibly imagine. Each time I come back with more than 100 new ideas to improve our profitability. With total cost of about $2,500 to attend one of these meetings, we easily exceed that amount every year by adopting the best of these ideas. The EHR meetings held in Phoenix from 2009 through 2011 enabled us to figure out ways to deal with possible revenue loss from clients installing EHR systems and finding ways to more closely solidify our client relationships by marrying their EHR efforts to our system. Had these meetings not been available, we would have been hard pressed to even survive the onslaught of client EHR involvement. As a result of the compliance meetings, we were able to develop our first compliance plan and further upgrade the plan to ensure we remain in compliance with all new rules and regulations as they develop. There is no telling how much trouble this has helped us avoid. Believe it or not, even our marketing pitch is improved because of our compliance plan. I By Charles M. Barker III
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