A holistic approach can help you focus on processes and resources within the medical practice to ensure an excellent patient experience and proper reimbursement.
Practice optimization ensures that your medical practice works smoothly and efficiently. Physicians should focus on providing good care during face-to-face encounters with patients. However, administrative burdens can prevent them from delivering this outstanding experience.
Providers and physicians shouldn’t have to worry about administrative aspects of their medical practice. Instead, they should ensure that their team is working effectively and taking proper care of all these tasks while focusing on patients and their wellness.
Therefore, optimizing your medical practice requires you to ensure:
- Appointment processes are working flawlessly.
- Your schedule is filled out, and pre-registration is being appropriately managed.
- Open slots are available for the next person who needs an appointment.
- Collections are done effectively.
- Check-in and check-out processes are smooth and deliver a pleasant experience for your patient.
Bring support to your office staff
Practice optimization is based on keeping your team focused on providing excellent customer service to the patient. Therefore, for some administrative and complex tasks, you can consider hiring a medical practice partner to relieve them from them and improve your processes.
At Health Prime, we take the administrative burden from you, ensuring that your medical practice is working efficiently and that you are getting paid for your work.
A critical aspect of optimizing your medical practice is ensuring that money is captured at the point of service. Too many patients don’t pay when practices send a statement. Knowing in advance how much money to collect from the patient and collecting that money is part of the registration and check-in process, which makes your practice a lot more efficient.
With Health Prime’s best practices, patient collections account for 17-20% of all cash coming in. Conversely, less effective practices collecting from patients at the point of service usually have 5% or even less cash from patients. However, this significant collection gap can be softened if the medical practice implements some changes to optimize its processes.
How can you optimize your medical practice?
- Review your schedule: Make sure all slots are scheduled. If not, talk with the people responsible about why they are leaving openings.
- Monitor your no-shows and cancellations: What is your medical practice’s policy? Are you calling everybody who didn’t show up to get them back on schedule?
- Ask patients about their appointment process: Was it smooth and efficient? Did they encounter any barriers? How long did they have to wait? Ask patients about their experience and make sure they are comfortable with it.
- Monitor your denials: Analyze why your claims are being denied. Are there some barriers? Monitor the reasons behind your denials. Set up a plan for those reasons to prevent them from happening again. If you want to know more about how to avoid denials, you can read our blog What are some simple steps to get your denials under control?
- Monitor your adjustments: What did you write off? Are you accurately representing adjustments? By auditing your processes for adjustments and looking at a report for adjustment reasons, you will know which flaws are causing you to lose money and write off charges.
Revenue Optimization & Practice Optimization
The overall success of your medical practice should be based on more than just how much money it generates. Revenue is an integral part of this because the incoming cash pays physicians for their work. However, practice optimization is more than just increasing revenue.
Medical practices typically focus only on the transaction between the doctor and the patient. However, analyzing and monitoring other essential aspects of practice management that contribute to whether there is cash is critical to optimizing your medical practice.
Practice optimization and revenue optimization are connected but are not the same. Increased revenue is a byproduct of practice optimization.
Through Datalytics, our business intelligence platform that focuses on insights that other medical billing solutions neglect, physicians can see how processes within their medical practices are doing. Getting valuable data about your practice will help you manage productivity and utilization, enhance processes, and optimize revenue while maintaining the highest service levels.
Another aspect that Datalytics can show you to optimize your medical practice is our unique metric: Plus 1 (One More Patient Per Day). Making minor adjustments to how you manage your schedule, and your patients will help you achieve this goal.
In our blog, 4 strategies to see one more patient per day in your medical practice, learn how you can see one more patient per day and how much revenue you will generate in your medical practice.
At Health Prime, we can help!
At Health Prime, we offer different solutions that can help you optimize your medical practice, increase your revenue, and ensure that you focus on what matters most: your patients.
- Appointment confirmations
- Credentialing
- Coding
- Eligibility checks
- Verifications
- Authorization checks
- Bilingual call center
- Referrals
- vScribe
- Reporting
Our business intelligence platform, Health Prime’s Datalytics, can help you monitor every metric in your medical practice and allow you to identify the reasons behind them. With the drill-down capabilities of Datalytics, we can help you understand your medical practice’s story and how it’s doing.
With access to this unique medical billing solution, you can set action plans within your medical practice to improve processes, deliver a great customer experience, and ensure proper reimbursement.
If you want more information about optimizing your medical practice, email us at [email protected]. We can also set up a meeting to discuss how Health Prime can help you get your practice back in its prime.
Subscribe to our Datalytics blog for future articles and learn how to improve your medical practice. You’ll also learn about our software updates and new features and see how our analytics platform has had a tremendous impact on physician practice revenue cycle management.
