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Running a medical practice is hectic. Your organization must provide top-tier care that helps patients reach their health outcomes while staying organized, profitable, and compliant with healthcare data regulations. Having ineffective, complex, or cumbersome processes hinders your ability to do that. This results in dissatisfied patients, less trust, and decreased revenue.
How do you streamline your medical practice’s operations?
You might have already pinpointed certain practice management processes that aren’t working quite how you want them to. Or, you might just have a general sense that your practice could be doing better. Regardless of your situation, this guide will give you strategies for a more efficient practice that generates your desired results.
When you feel ready to improve your medical office’s operations, it’s natural to want to jump in and start making adjustments immediately. However, you don’t want to implement a change that negatively impacts processes and damages the patient experience. Your first step should be to analyze your practice’s data and pinpoint the areas that need work.
Here are a few key metrics to keep an eye out for and what they might mean for your practice:
Definition: Measures the number of patients that are seen at your practice over a specific amount of time
Why it’s Important: This gives you an idea of the demand for your services and each physician’s workload.
Definition: Measures the percentage of patients who return for treatment, usually within 30 days.
Why it’s Important: A high readmission rate may indicate issues with patient care.
Definition: Measures how long a patient must wait to be seen by a physician or provider after checking in.
Why it’s Important: Long patient wait times indicate inefficiencies in your systems or a high ratio of patients to physicians, resulting in worse outcomes.
Definition: Measures how many patients book an appointment but do not show up.
Why it’s Important: When patients are a no-show, it’s an inefficient use of physician and administrative time, resulting in lost revenue.
Definition: Measures how often your practice books more patients than physicians or other providers can handle in a given period.
Why it’s Important: A high overbooking rate might indicate disorganized or otherwise poor scheduling practices.
Definition: Measures how satisfied your patients are with their experience.
Why it’s Important: If patients are unhappy, you may not deliver the experience you envisioned at your practice.If patients are unhappy, you may not deliver the experience you envisioned at your practice.
Definition: Measures the average number of days it takes to collect payments after services are provided.
Why it’s Important: High A/R days indicate that your billing and collection practices may be inefficient or need reworking.
Definition: Measures the percentage of claims denied by insurers.
Why it’s Important: A high denial rate may result from issues with billing codes, documentation, or regulation compliance.
Definition: Measures the rate at which staff members leave your practice.
Why it’s Important: High turnover is detrimental to efficiency and revenue, as the average cost of replacing an employee is one-half to two times the employee's annual salary.
Definition: Measures your practice’s overall profitability after all expenses have been accounted for.
Why it’s Important: A positive net profit margin is crucial for financial sustainability and organizational growth.
If you already have dedicated healthcare analytics tools, tracking these metrics should be straightforward. However, if your systems are outdated or if you use multiple standalone solutions, you must piece together the data as best you can to get an accurate picture.
Although the primary goal of every medical provider is to offer the care their patients need, your first step is to consider your back-office operations. Convoluted or disorganized back-office operations can lead to unsatisfactory patient experiences, no matter how qualified your physicians are or how well-trained your front-office staff members are.
A few key areas you should keep an eye on include:
Address any major issues with these practice management areas so your practice is well-positioned to handle business day-to-day. After establishing a baseline of efficient operations, look for ways to optimize your processes further. For example, you might automate time-consuming, routine tasks to free up valuable staff time.
Once you’ve set up your back-office systems to facilitate front-office and patient-facing tasks efficiently, it’s time to focus on the patient experience. Care seekers are often vulnerable and sometimes even afraid, so it’s paramount that you deliver care in a way that encourages patients to engage with their health and follow your treatment plans. Showing patients that you respect and genuinely want to help them goes a long way to establishing trust.
Here are a few parts of the patient experience you should pay attention to:
Stay on the lookout for new, innovative ways to improve patient care. For example, you might grow your tech stack with a solution that enables you to provide telehealth or remote care.
The people you employ are another important component of your medical practice’s ecosystem. Qualified staff members have the experience and know-how to handle any practice management issues and can even provide advice for streamlining your operations. To ensure that all your new hires are good fits for your organization, follow these best practices:
As your medical practice scales up, you might find using a dedicated hiring platform worthwhile. These tools offer various benefits for medical practices, such as cost savings, improved candidate experience, and enhanced candidate quality. Explore JazzHR’s list of small business hiring platforms to help you start your search.
Streamlined operations are the foundation of every successful medical practice. With these strategies, you’ll create efficient and effective systems and have the staff members needed to keep them that way. Build upon your operations with further optimization that helps you deliver better care, build your reputation, and reach your goals.
PracticeSuite
Founded in the heart of Silicon Valley, PracticeSuite has grown to a user base of over 92,000+ medical professionals, processing over $10 billion in claims annually. Their mission is to help doctors practice profitably by providing unequaled medical billing software with exceptional practice management features, and revenue cycle management services. Their experience in medical billing, and unique set of revenue cycle diagnostic tools provide deep insight into the fine tuning of your revenue cycle to achieve maximum profitability.
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