Are you meeting your financial goals? As an owner, you really have to be on top of things to make sure your private practice in the Bay Area is thriving. Following these strategies can bring you closer to success — or take you to the next level.
1. Manage costs and resources
Use your comparative advantage: build partnerships with vendors that can assist with work that’s not directly related to patient care. In the process, you’ll expand your infrastructure, convert fixed costs to variable costs, and free staff to focus on the work that’s core to your organization’s value proposition.
When adopting new technology, choose software-as-a-service solutions that won’t require major upfront costs or long-term maintenance.
Find vendors to manage business tasks on your behalf like payroll, legal support, accounting, billing, coding, scheduling, collections and medical answering services. Balance staff according to core business operations.
Consider leasing expensive equipment instead of buying.
2. Acquire and retain patients
Aggregate clinical and claims data to identify care gaps to target in outreach campaigns. Then study the results of your outreach to determine exactly when and how to message patients and encourage them to make an appointment. The right combination of text, email, and voicemail can get patients in for routine or preventive care like annual wellness visits and flu vaccines.
You'll need to reduce no-shows and fill schedule gaps. Schedules may appear to be full, but nearly 30% of all appointments go unused according to a survey by Athena health. Here's how you can avoid missed opportunities:
Use sophisticated appointment confirmation events
Send appointment instructions along with appointment reminders, like fasting prior to a surgery, directions on where to arrive, or information on how to check in.
Give patients the opportunity to communicate with their physician in advance of their appointment, so that specific issues or concerns can be described and reviewed ahead of time.
Be smart about schedule organization
When a patient self-schedules, confirm that the correct appointment type has been booked, like a physical instead of a procedure, so that care team time is appropriately accounted for.
Analyze patient no-show patterns and identify cancellation trends to predict when it’s safe to schedule multiple patients for the same time slot.
3. Improve productivity
Design workflows that delegate administrative tasks to non-clinical staff when possible, so that your care team isn’t bogged down with unnecessary distractions and can maximize time with patients. Ensure that your EHR’s clinical workflows can meet the needs of all your specialties to save time for providers rather than forcing them to seek workarounds or alternate systems.
Make access to patient information easy and affordable Care becomes the most efficient and effective when patient information is coordinated seamlessly between care teams and sites. Reduce the time and costs associated with sharing patient information by adopting an EHR that connects you to other EHRs — without requiring you to build the integrations. An effective solution should let providers open a patient’s chart, auto-query the record they’re looking for, and view it directly in their own charting system.
Free up staff to focus on patients Find a vendor to automate or take on back-office services whenever possible, like submitting and processing claims more efficiently and effectively, securing prior authorizations, scanning documents, spending time on the phone with payers, and handling government regulation and reporting requirements.
4. Boost collection rate
Use your collections data to understand where you are being underpaid and where there are opportunities to improve your contracts with payers. The ability to compare your performance to that of similar organizations will also give you greater leverage in negotiations.
Make each claim count
Strong revenue cycle discipline will ensure you are getting paid as quickly as possible. Stop denials before they happen and control the number of days a claim spends in accounts receivable by avoiding demographic and information errors and monitoring first-pass claim resolution rates.
Make value-based care a priority
It is possible to avoid compliance penalties, maximize revenue, and ease the transition to value-based care — without additional administrative burden or resources. Start by incorporating technology solutions that are always up-to-date with government and private payer mandates and that streamline workflows to help providers capture quality measures in the moment of care. Regularly review data on your ongoing performance in value-based care programs to help your staff identify and close care gaps, improving both care and compliance.
A strong technology partner should have a shared interest in driving results for your organization. If you are interested in gaining a true partner to help your practice, please give us a call at 408-444-8845, or contact us for a free practice assessment at HorizonRevenueSolutions.com.