Our favorite ways to better manage your medical practice
We like this exhaustive list on 101 Ideas for Increasing Revenue and Decreasing Expenses in Your Medical Practice from the blog Manage My Practice.
The ones we’ve seen work particularly well for our medical practice clients include:
1. Add physician hours – add evening or weekend hours; start your office hours earlier and end hours later.
2. Reduce physician time off – decrease vacation or change weekly days off to 1/2 days off.
80. Shop everything. Negotiate existing service contracts. Do not assume anything is non-negotiable. Negotiate the rent.
81. Get rid of yellow pages advertising. It rarely brings you new patients and is primarily a place to look up phone numbers. You will still get your white pages listing free with your phone service.
85. Improve your accounting cycle. Invoices and statements are matched up with packing slips and negotiated prices. Use purchase order numbers.
88. Remind patients of their appointments to decrease no-shows. Call patients who no-show and attempt to reschedule (unless they feel better!) Track no-shows and evaluate the reasons for them.
91. Take advantage of any discounts offered by your malpractice carrier by completing risk management surveys and having speakers give annual updates on decreasing malpractice claims. Some carriers give discounts for managers who are members of MGMA or Fellows in the ACMPE.
93. Evaluate your leases – are those big old copiers and faxes worth paying for a service contract?
99. Replace your answering service with an answering machine educating patients on the limited reasons for calling after hours and giving the number of the physician on call.
100. Destroy archived financial and medical records that you are paying to store, once you have ascertained that they exceed the required time limit.
And you should be able to answer “YES!” to these questions:
37. Do your scheduling staff know how to educate patients about what payers you have contracts with and are in network with and what the patient’s financial responsibility will be?
50. Do you file claims daily?
51. Do you correct claims daily when they are rejected at the practice management, claims clearinghouse or payer level?
52. Do you correct claims daily when they are rejected at the claim level and are not paid for for reasons that can be corrected?
53. Do you have your contract allowables in your PM system so you know when you are not being paid correctly by contract?
54. Do you appeal unpaid or underpaid claims?
59. Do you collect the patient’s portion of the service at the time of service?
66. When adding a physician to the practice, do you timeline the credentialing appropriately so the physician can see patients with insurance as well as those without?
73. Are you protecting your practice from embezzlement?
If your medical practice needs help implementing any of these cost-saving measures, be sure to contact your ShindelRock medical practice management professional.