Small Businesses Turn to Alternative Funding, AR Factoring

Arden Dale wrote an article in this week’s Wall Street Journal reviewing three alternative credit sources for small businesses who are being turned down for traditional bank loans.  Specifically, the article discussed accounts receivable factoring, borrowing from friends and family, and peer-to-peer lending.

Executive Director of the International Factoring Association (IFA), Bert Goldberg, advised business owners to only consider factoring companies who follow industry best practices.  He recommended choosing an invoice funding firm who is a member of the IFA because “all members have agreed to adhere to a strict code of ethics.” 

Note to our readers: For those healthcare vendors looking for an specialized factoring firm, PRN Funding, LLC is a proud member of the IFA.

Medical Transcription Factoring Success Story

The medical transcription factoring specialists at PRN Funding wanted to share one of our most recent client success stories with our readers.  Afterall, it’s one thing to read about our specialized factoring services, it’s quite another to hear a real-life client success story.

Patrick is one of our most recent client highlights because thanks to medical transcription factoring, he was able to utilize PRN Funding’s invoice factoring services to help grow his business.  Today, his company is one of Inc’s 500 Fastest-Growing Private Companies.

Please visit PRN Funding’s web site here to read the entire medical transcription factoring success story.

Unique Staffing Niche – Bilingual Nurses

PRN Funding has written a number of blogs/articles touting Dr. Linda Aiken’s studies on how supplemental staffing agencies can help solve the overall nurse shortage problem.  However, we recently read about a very specific niche in temporary nurse staffing–staffing nurses who are bilingual, especially in Spanish.

In the state of Delaware, where the spanish-speaking population has doubled in the past seven years, bilingual nurses are in high demand.  According to an article on DelawareOnline.com, there is a very real fear that “that with few Spanish-speaking health care workers, those who speak Spanish only, or little English, will be less likely to seek medical treatment.”

Proponents of training and hiring bilingual nurses think that having these specific nurses on staff at key medical facilities will help the immigrants improve their overall health as well as understand the American health care system better.

If you ask the temporary nurse staffing factoring specialists at PRN Funding, staffing bilingual nurses sounds like a unique opportunity that agency owners should think about exploring.

Click here to read the entire article: State needs nurses who speak Spanish.

Getting to Decision Makers

The Haley Marketing Group had a very interesting write-up in last week’s Net-Temps Recruiters e-newsletter, in which they shared different tactics for salespeople to get their foot in the door when it comes to getting their marketing message in front  of the right person.

We decided to include the recap of the article for our Factoring Blog readers below:

  1. Do your homework first
    • identify the right decision makers
    • discover their MBA (ideally, before making any approach)
    • know the value you can deliver (quantifiable if possible)
  2. Plan to get in the door
    • grab the decision maker’s attention – find a creative way to get the door open
    • network
    • partner
  3. Keep the door open
    • educate – teach decision makers how you can help
    • add value – position yourself as an expert not a sales person
    • build credibility – prove the value of the solution you can provide
    • nurture relationships – stay top-of-mind between calls, until a decision is made

Click here to read the entire article: Getting to Decision Makers.

Temp Nurses are More Qualified

Professor Linda Aiken is back with a new study debunking the myth that temporary nurses are underqualified compared to their full-time hospital counterparts.  She delivered the results of her study last month at the Staffing Industry Analysts Inc.’s Healthcare Staffing Summit, held in San Francisco.

As reported by the Staffing Industry Analyst’s e-newsletter, “according to Aiken, 75% of hospitals participating in a study said they use supplemental nurses. Still doubts over the quality of these nurses persist. Aiken’s study shows that on average supplemental nurses are more qualified and the majority of them work in primary jobs in hospitals. They are also more likely to be specialty certified.

Despite the negative attitude, continued shortage of nurses and physicians bodes well for the healthcare staffing industry. The shortage of registered nurses in the U.S. is estimated to reach 800,000 by 2020. The physician shortage is estimated at 250,000 by 2025. Moreover, Aiken added that 30% of nurses say they are burned out and are dissatisfied with their jobs. They seek employment with staffing firms to control their schedules and to earn better wages and get supplemental income.”

Medical Transcription and EMRs: Opportunity Lost

Former CEO of the American Association for Medical Transcription (now known as the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity), Claudia Tessier wrote a very compelling piece for MRInstitute News concerning the ever changing landscape of medical transcription and electronic health records.

In her post, Medical Transcription and EMRs: Opportunity Lost, Tessier prefaced the article by stating that there are disparities among statistical information for the medical transcription industry because it’s an industry that “has neither routinely nor widely shared statistical information about its operations and finances…”  However, all of the numbers show that nationwide, the industry of medical transcription is huge, and it’s continuing to grow.

Tessier goes on to explain how both the medical transcription industry and EMR (Electronic Health Record) industry failed to acknowledge one another early on, which she feels was a grave error.  She writes “Had the transcription industry been willing and prepared early on to move toward integration with EMR and had the healthcare industry recognized the stimulus that medical transcription could bring to EMR adoption, they could have jointly benefited and advanced.”

She follows up with the question: Can medical transcription still stimulate the EMR market?  Tessier says yes and no–but as a whole, “the transcription industry and EMR vendors should ramp up their cooperation to create uniform integration.”

The remainder of Tessier’s article lists inherent concerns about the medical transcription industry from the point-of-view of healthcare providers, administrators and executives, and then she makes some practical suggestions for how the medical transcription industry could potentially alleviate those problems.

Click here to read the entire article: Medical Transcription and EMRs: Opportunity Lost.

Five Ways for Business Owners to Control Their Cash

A business simply cannot operate without a healthy cash flow, but credit crunches and tight lending regulations from banks can make it difficult for today’s business owner to maintain a steady cash flow.  Elizabeth Wilson of Entrepreneur.com shared five ways for business owners to reduce their vulnerability:

1. Diversify your revenue stream. Staffing temp nurses in only one large nursing home or transcribing for only one big hospital is not ideal because if your only customer starts extending its payments, it will affect your cash flow immensely.  If you spread out your work among a couple of different clients, you will stand a better chance of balancing your cash flow if one of them starts to pay slower.  In other words, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

2. Cut back excess spending and protect your cash flow to meet payments. Stay on top of spending and collections patterns to be sure that the amount of cash coming in balances the amount that needs to go out.

3. Cut costs whenever possible. Work to negotiate better terms with the healthcare providers you are servicing.  Oftentimes, doctors offices are willing to make credit card payments as well.

4. Raise capital in innovative ways other than traditional banking. Healthcare vendors can and should take advantage of accounts receivable factoring to help them maintain a positive cash flow.  Selling their invoices to a factor provides cash immediately so business owners can make payroll and meet other financial obligations without having to wait to be paid.

5. If you have excess cash, you should be leveraging it. “If banks are tightening up their credit, use it to borrow what you need as collateral, and have it in capital investments you need to grow the busienss.  Having it in cash is useless unless you have disbursements on an ongoing basis,” founder of BUZGate, Deborah Osgood said.

MedicalCodingandBilling.com Gets New Look

As an advertiser on the MedicalCodingandBilling Web site, PRN Funding is happy to announce that the site has had a recent overall, offering even more to individuals considering a career in medical coding and/or medical billing.

The MedicalCodingandBilling Blog announced: “It has a brand new “face”, i.e. new template and its layout is much easier to navigate via the navigation panel near the top.”

PRN Funding supports MedicalCodingandBilling.com because we offer both medical coding funding and medical billing factoring services.

Get your customers to pay you first

Experian is offering the complimentary webinar, Get Your Customers to Pay You First on Thursday, September 18 at 1pm EST.

The hour-long seminar will discuss new services for firms that want to encourage more timely payments and aid in commercial collection efforts. In addition, the webinar will discuss ways to reduce acquisition costs, more effectively prioritize collection efforts, and forge business relationships that improve both customer experience and bottom-line performance.

The Experian Webinar offers the following:

  • Motivate your customers to pay you before other creditors
  • Reward positive payment behavior and speed collection efforts
  • Grow marginal accounts into good accounts
  • Compare the way your customers pay you with the way they pay your competitors

If you are interested in this webinar, click here to register.

Southern Florida hit hardest in RN shortage

The Florida Center for Nursing published a report last month showing that Southern Florida is among the hardest hit when it comes to the national nurse shortage.  Currently, 16 percent of registered nurse jobs are vacant in the Florida-area, and the shortfall is projected to climb rapidly over the next decade.

Research director at the Florida Center for Nursing said these southern Florida facilities will rely heavily on shifting duties to nurses aides and hiring additional temporary nurses to help alleviate the problem.

Read the article: State nursing shortage needs urgent attention, group says in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com for more information. (NOTE: The original article is no longer available online.)

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