11 Ideas to Grow Your Medical Practice in 2017
The New Year is the time for retrospection and re-evaluating business choices made over in the past. Here are 11 ideas that you could choose to apply to your medical practice for consistent growth and fulfillment.
- Nurture your referrals network:
Identify the top 10% of your referrals that contribute to over 80% of your business. Build meaningful relationships with this referral network of doctors who send you patients.
- Submit claims everyday:
We can’t stress enough the importance of submitting clean claims every day. Your reimbursement and its predictability depends on the frequency of correct claims submissions.
- Take prior-authorizations 5 days in advance:
Denials for pre-authorizations constituted 17% of total denials for a surgery center we closely worked with in the past. Don’t let this happen to your business, take prior authorizations at least 5 days in advance.
- Perform eligibility and benefits check for all your patients:
Despite your good intensions of providing timely services, you would lose money if the patient’s insurance is inactive. Check eligibility and coverage benefits for all patients at least 2 days prior to the date of service.
- Engage patients through your medical record:
Patients are your most underutilized brand advocates for new patient volume, which leads to downstream revenues. Engage patients by sending them a professional looking electronic medical record file right after you see them.
- Check your fees schedule annually:
Review your reimbursements on procedures and consults with the agreed upon rates as per contracts. Appeal on instances where you do not get reimbursed accurately. Negotiate for better rates.
- Work on denials within 24 hours:
Take action on denials as soon as they occur, often within 24 hours. This will not only keep your accounts clean but also ensure timely collection of your claims. Do better than industry standards by keeping your AR 90+ days below 10%.
- Promote your services online:
As of 2015, 85% of American adults were online. Most patients look up their doctors online before their appointments. Getting online will help your business gain visibility, connections and get more patients. Also consider signing up for local listing services such as Google My Business.
- Explore expansion avenues:
Consider starting new procedures that are unique to your region to gain access to bigger patient population. Moreover, look for opportunities to add a new physician or physician assistant to distribute work and improve financials.
- Use better analytics:
Instead of just tracking your reimbursements month on month or quarter on quarter, give a thought about the broader metrics that influence your performance. Analytics such as, top payor mix, physician wise cases to reimbursements (for practices with more than one physician), established vs. new patient volume, first pass clean claims ratio, lag days analysis, etc. prove to be essential benchmarks that give up a complete picture of your practice health.
- Stay compliant:
As per PwC report, 85% of large healthcare organizations experienced a data breach in 2014. Educate your staff and deploy precise HIPAA policy in your practice. Apart for security compliance also be in sync with regulatory, quality and coding compliances such as ICD-10, MACRA, SPARCS and HCRA (for state of New York), PQRS reporting and Meaningful Use compliance.
There you have it – an extensive list of easy and necessary changes that will help you control the business side of medicine, thereby giving you better work-life balance.
Wish you a smooth year ahead!