The challenge: overcoming hurdles in a complex industry
SimiTree is a consulting and services company dedicated to the home health and hospice industry. Their expertise spans mergers and acquisitions, compliance with government regulations, billing, coding, and OASIS review. With more than 500 professionals, SimiTree provides critical back-office and clinical support to agencies across the United States.
Heather Curren, Director of Education for Coding and OASIS, leads staff training and education initiatives at SimiTree. Her division alone manages 70 full-time employees and 100+ contractors who must stay current with frequent Medicare and ICD-10 regulatory changes.
Before Easy LMS, Heather’s team faced several obstacles:
Dispersed training: Training materials were emailed to staff and customers, making it difficult to verify whether people actually read and understood updates.
Lack of tracking: Without a central platform, Heather couldn’t easily see who had completed training or ensure compliance with 90-day orientation requirements.
Limited resources in customer agencies: Many home health and hospice providers had eliminated dedicated training staff due to budget pressures, leaving staff underprepared.
Heather explained:
“I could send out updates, but I wasn’t sure people were actually reading them. Some even claimed they never got the email. It became very time-consuming to chase people down.”
The solution: a centralized platform for scalable and trackable training
SimiTree adopted Easy LMS in 2022 as an internal and customer-facing training solution. The platform became a central hub for onboarding, regulatory updates, and continuous training.
Heather and her team use Easy LMS to:
Provide onboarding and orientation modules for SimiTree staff.
Offer customers ongoing training as a value-added service alongside coding and OASIS reviews.
Support agencies in meeting compliance requirements and corrective action plans.
Assign, track, and report staff completion of critical training.
Heather also maintains SimiTree’s 50+ Easy LMS academies, managing over 800 active participants internally and externally.
We provide access to Easy LMS as a bonus to our customers. It helps them focus on quality assurance instead of worrying about training their staff.
The results: faster reviews, lower costs, stronger compliance
By implementing Easy LMS, SimiTree achieved measurable improvements:
✅ Time savings: Customers who used Easy LMS performed reviews 5-10 minutes faster than those without access. Across an eight-hour day, this could add up to an entire additional patient review per staff member.
✅ Cost savings for customers: SimiTree normally charges $200 to $500 per hour for live training. With Easy LMS, customers receive online training for free as part of their contract.
✅ Competitive advantage: Offering free customer access to Easy LMS strengthens SimiTree’s market position in a highly competitive industry.
✅ Regulatory compliance: Customers use Easy LMS to document corrective action plans and prove 100% staff completion within mandated timeframes. Avoiding late Medicare submissions prevents penalties of $1,200 to $2,500 per patient.
✅ Improved performance: Agencies that use the training perform better in coding and OASIS reviews, reducing errors and avoiding costly compliance issues.
We’ve had agencies use Easy LMS as proof in their government surveys. It’s the perfect platform for showing compliance.
Built for efficiency and future growth
For SimiTree, the decision came down to cost, simplicity, and flexibility. Compared to more complex and expensive corporate systems, Easy LMS gave Heather exactly what she needed: a straightforward way to deliver and update training quickly. She now adds new modules every quarter, covering both home health and hospice topics, and already has content planned through 2026 to keep staff and customers prepared for constant Medicare changes.
I don’t need a polished, complicated system. I just need to get the information out there quickly, keep it updated, and make sure everyone has access. Easy LMS makes that possible.
With Easy LMS, SimiTree has turned training into both an internal efficiency tool and a competitive advantage, helping customers and staff save time, reduce costs, and stay compliant.
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