What are some best techniques to improve your medical practice?

On the first installment of our Best Practices webinar series, Best Practices Part 1: For the medical practice, Caroline Balestra, Business Process Analyst at Health Prime, reviewed some aspects you can implement in your practice to improve your processes in the medical office.

In the webinar, Balestra explained some of the best practices for managing your practice more effectively. These include hiring, training, and supporting staff, creating loyal patients, reducing HIPAA risks, marketing your practice, and asking for help.

Hiring, Train & Support Staff

Hiring

Finding great people can be a challenge. When hiring new employees for the front desk or any other position in your practice, it’s important to vet them thoroughly. This includes reviewing all incoming applications or resumes to check their experience in previous positions.

“Putting a standardized plan for the interview process can be key to an effective and simplified hiring process. Using the same template of questions and answers for each candidate can help you identify key skills for any potential employee,” -Balestra said.

You can check the answers to some scenarios to determine how well the candidates work with others; add questions such as: Describe a time when you disagreed with a customer, supervisor, or coworker. What did you do to resolve the conflict? What was the outcome? Be aware that sometimes, you’ll get more candid feedback from prior employers about this situation.

Training

When training staff, it’s important to remember that:

• Everyone learns differently and at different paces.
• Cross-train ALL staff members.
• Hands-on Development.

Support

Continued support is what retains great employees.

There are some essential items to remember if you want to support your staff efficiently:

• Provide the tools and resources they need to do their tasks best.
• Professional growth and development: Evaluate what they are interested in learning and how that would benefit the medical practice. This will be a win-win for both parties.
• Communicate with your staff about career development: Helping them with their professional path is far more than checking off the boxes in a performance development plan. Talk with your staff about opportunities to enhance their skill set and grow within the company.
• Provide an open-door concept: Every manager’s door is open to every employee, regardless of title and position. This sets a precedence for your office culture, allowing interaction on multiple levels. It also allows open communication and feedback about any matter of importance to an employee.

Create Loyal Patients

Reduce HIPAA Risks

Healthcare offices and their business associates must comply with the HIPAA privacy, security, and breach notification rules. Therefore, the implementation of reasonable safeguards to prevent violations is essential. “Even with controls, violations and data breaches can still occur. Most breaches are unintentional but still represent a serious issue that can bring major consequences”, Balestra explained.

How can medical practice employees prevent HIPAA violations?

• Never disclose passwords or share login credentials: Every employee is provided with a unique login, through which they will grant access to sensitive information. Those login details need to remain private.

• Never leave portable devices or documents unattended: Healthcare employees must never leave devices or documents containing Protected Health Information (PHI) in areas where they can be viewed by unauthorized individuals, picked up by other healthcare workers, or seen by other patients.

• Do not text/email PHI: If you must send ePHI, do so only through approved channels, such as a secure, healthcare-designated text platform or encrypted emails.

• Don’t dispose of PHI with regular trash. HIPAA requires that it be rendered unreadable, indecipherable, and unable to be reconstructed when it’s no longer needed.

Remember to never access patient records out of curiosity, don’t take medical records with you when you change jobs, don’t access your medical records using your login credentials, and make sure to report potential HIPAA violations at your work. If you want more information on preventing HIPAA breaches and establishing a risk-aware culture, you can go to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services website.

Market your Practice

When marketing your practice, it’s helpful to establish your goals and how your patients will benefit. Establish your skills and target audience and how your skills will help them. Inform your patients and develop your reputation as an excellent healthcare provider.

Some helpful things to focus on that will improve your marketing strategy are:

Ask for Help

It is essential to know when to ask for help in your practice.

Turning to a professional, experienced practice management and billing service such as Health Prime can offer you the following benefits:

1. Free up medical office staff for more patient-centered tasks. Let someone with extensive billing experience take on daily billing tasks.
2. Improve documentation and coding accuracy before claim submissions to get paid quickly and correctly.
3. Accurate, timely submissions can mean fewer denials caused by staff who can often be distracted by other office and patient-related duties.
4. Faster follow-up within resubmission deadlines on any claims that may have been denied. You will have a better chance of capturing reimbursement for those claims.
5. Fewer denied and rejected claims by focusing your staff on front office duties and allowing HP to help scrub and submit claims.
6. Add-on solutions include certified coder assistance, scribe transcription services, eligibility, and benefit verifications, outbound calls to confirm appointments, and more.
7. Health Prime’s analytical and practice optimization tools can provide insights into your daily, weekly, and monthly performance, streamlining and improving office and billing processes. Datalytics focuses on insights that other medical billing solutions neglect, allowing you to monitor the overall health of your practice at a glance.

If you have any questions or want to know more about how Health Prime can help you improve your medical practice, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. Subscribe to our Health Prime blog to stay tuned to our upcoming installments for our Best Practices webinar and all the latest updates to run your medical practice better so you can focus on what matters the most: your patients.