As I mentioned in yesterday's post, now is a good time to evaluate and assess your medical practice. Here are a few more areas to take a look at:
Coding Analyze the coding patterns for evaluation and management services and well as the coding for all other services. Practices can lose significant amounts of revenue if services are not coded correctly. Also, are your billing and coding all services you are entitled to bill?
Managed Care Review all managed-care plans to evaluate their reimbursement rates and profitability. If the plan’s rates or profitability are not acceptable, assess the potential for renegotiation.
Front Desk Collections Make a critique of front-desk collections. Calculate the percentage of patients who actually made some form of payment at the time of service.
Billing and Collection Take a hard look at your billing and collection policies and processes. Flowchart these processes to identify and eliminate the inefficiencies.
Employees Create a formal organizational chart – are there too many employees? Too few employees? The goal is to make sure workforce is at the optium level to allow your practice to be successful. Also look at payroll costs, including overtime costs and employee benefit costs. Also, did you have excessive turnover and what was the cause of it?
Marketing Review your marketing activities and their successes or failures. Create a new marketing plan for the upcoming year.
Patients If I called a sample of your patients and asked them what they thought about your practice, what would they say? Positive things? A lot of negative comments? Physicians sometimes ignore the importance of patient satisfaction.
Have questions? I’m here to help.
