Tuesday, December 31, 2019

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Finding the cure: solutions that can provide financial stability for physicians

Perhaps one thing we can agree on in discussing the health care industry: it is in a state of distress stemming from the challenges created by an ever-increasing regulatory burden, changes in reimbursement rates, uncertainty with the Affordable Care Act, and mounting tort and employment litigation. The recent growth of urgent care centers and retail clinics as well as technological advances and telemedicine has changed the nature of healthcare services. Consequently, these changes have put greater pressure on providers to compete and have altered the economics of health care delivery.


Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, health care providers such as hospitals (large, small, rural, profit or non-profit), ambulatory surgical centers and skilled nursing facilities have suffered increasing strain to alter their business models to conform to the new realities of doing business. Operators have found themselves unable to deal with the cacophony of adjustments related to reimbursement, regulatory oversight, and additional capital requirements that have occurred simultaneously. The result has been a wave of consolidations, and in many cases failures, of smaller and some larger groups. Hospitals, both small standalone facilities, as well as larger systems find themselves looking at bankruptcy. The fact is that you cannot cut your way to prosperity.

This new reality requires new solutions. Many troubled health care companies need to be reorganized, gain access to new capital sources, improve operations and shed old obligations that they can no longer support. This may sound familiar—but what is the fix?

It starts with the same approach that a health care provider would present to a patient:

Detection/Diagnosis: Early detection and the path to ultimate stability and profitability requires a deep dive into the provider’s revenue cycle, its technology platform and its labor force. For example, is the issue one of reduced reimbursements or is it really one of omitting proper billing for certain procedures or devices resulting in a large loss of revenue. Is the issue one of perceived management failures or is it really one of a cumbersome corporate or affiliate or legacy structure. Is the issue one of higher costs or is it really a failure to take advantage of consolidating expenses. Finally, is the issue one of unmanageable regulatory compliance or is it a situation that can be isolated and addressed without jeopardizing on-going operations.

Devising a Treatment Strategy: Strategy without actionable supporting data is just an opinion – not a solution. Only after analysis and pin-pointing the true and critical issues can a treatment be formulated. The foregoing examples illustrate that every situation, just like every patient, is different. Today’s health care playing field consists of a myriad of scenarios and combinations: for example: i) small hospitals are capital constrained; ii) big hospitals want to become small; iii) physicians want to be employees; iv) physician groups want to grow in specialty spaces. The options involve exploring not just one avenue, but rather a focused combination of business and legal tools to accomplish sustainability and profitability.


Course of Treatment Example:


Clearly, as demonstrated by the recent spate of bankruptcy filings across the country, one of the most important business tools in today’s world is bankruptcy restructurings.

In years past, the bankruptcy option was tagged as the remedy of last resort. But, now, bankruptcy means opportunity. It can provide the necessary forum and mechanisms to resolve structure and legacy issues, solve capital requirements, enhance financial stability and maximize value.

In a more modern view, bankruptcy should be considered a business means to use in revitalizing, restructuring, and accomplishing the goals management foresees or needs to anticipate. This may include effectuating a merger, a sale/purchase of assets or equity, a way to deal with regulatory issues and cumbersome leases or contracts, or what might be a straight-up restructure of debt and equity with new capital. In any case, the bankruptcy process can provide a safe haven from which a company can emerge with a clean balance sheet – the proverbial clean bill of health.

Selecting the Right Professionals: As with selecting the right physician for any medical procedure, the same is true for resolving a health care provider’s distressed business malady. Whether an organization is doing well, or underperforming, there are significant opportunities in this uncertain time. Assembling a team of skilled legal, accounting and operational advisors is necessary to surviving and thriving in the changing health care industry. Now is the time to develop strategies to maximize opportunities and goals, whether the concern is about financial sustainability, or about seeking opportunities to expand operations through acquisition of distressed entities.

For the unprepared, the mantra from the television series Game of Thrones, “winter is coming” may apply. But, planning for the change is planning for success.


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Monday, December 23, 2019

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Digital technology and the patient experience

Delivering quality care may no longer be enough to maintain a successful medical practice. Today’s patients are more informed and empowered, and demand convenience and excellent customer service. They routinely go online to research practices before making an appointment and do not hesitate to share their experiences, good or bad, on social media or review sites like Yelp, Zocdoc, and HealthGrades.


The patient experience, which encompasses all interactions between the patient and a practice from appointment scheduling to interaction with physicians and staff to follow-up visits, has become a top concern for practices as it affects physician online ratings, practice reputation, and patient acquisition and retention.

For practices seeking to adopt patient-centered approaches, digital technologies can help alleviate many common patient complaints while also increasing practice-wide efficiency. Let’s take a look at a few digital solutions.

Patient Portal


Patient portals can serve a variety of functions. A well-designed, secure patient portal allows the patient to be in control of their healthcare by providing 24/7 access to their personal health information from anywhere with an Internet connection. Patients can use the portal to schedule appointments, communicate with doctors and staff, request prescription refills, access medical records, receive test results together with clinician’s notes and interpretations, pay bills, check benefits and coverage, and view and complete patient forms.

Portals also provide more efficient ways to deal with various administrative tasks. Practice staff spend less time on the phone with patients handling routine but time-consuming tasks such as appointment and medication refill requests and inputting information onto the patient’s chart, thus freeing up time for more urgent matters.

Self-Service Check-In



Patients often complain about the time required to check in for a medical appointment. Providing for electronic self-service check-in through a smart device or kiosk can significantly reduce check-in time for most patients.

A check-in application identifies the patient, determines whether any additional information or consent forms are required (and if so, prompts the patient to complete the intake process), informs the patient whether a co-pay is applicable and accepts credit card payment for the co-pay, and updates the patient’s records. Following check-in, the system can instruct the patient to go, for example, directly to an examination room, to a staff member for additional assistance, or to the billing department to discuss an outstanding balance.

Self check-in results in a quick, paperless process that eliminates the need to check in each patient individually and allows staff to focus on patients needing special attention.

Chatbots


A chatbot is a broad term used to describe automated conversation systems powered by artificial intelligence. It can be anything from an automated text program residing on a website, patient portal, or separate application to a virtual assistant like Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant. Chatbots are widely used in industries such as retail to improve customer service and are gaining acceptance in healthcare.

Available 24/7, chatbots provide an efficient, cost-effective method of communicating with patients and can be used for various purposes. Chatbots can answer patient questions, help navigate your website, provide patient education on diseases and conditions, instruct the patient on procedures (for example, preparing for a colonoscopy), assist with medication management, and monitor chronic conditions.

Hands Free Technology


Physicians spend seven to twelve minutes per patient on face-to-interaction. A large part of this time is spent with the physician looking at a screen entering notes rather than fully engaging with the patient. This leads to frustration on both sides. The patient feels rushed or ignored, and both physician and patient question the quality of care.

Hands-free and headset-free technologies like Google’s Glass allow doctors to record notes and enter information into the patient’s EHR in real time without being tied to a screen. Speech recognition systems together with knowledge bases offer Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD) software that allows for the dictation of notes while ensuring services are captured, coded and billed appropriately.

Freed from the burden of handwriting or typing notes, physicians are able to engage more fully with patients.

Real-Time Location Systems


Another technology increasingly being used to improve practice workflow is real-time location systems (RTLS), used for tracking patients, staff, and medical equipment within a practice.

By capturing data such as patient wait times and flow, duration and location of patient and staff interactions, and equipment use, RTLS can identify utilization trends and identify bottlenecks in the workflow. Targeted actions can then be taken to optimize patient flow, improve staff utilization, and address other concerns that have caused patient complaints. RTLS can also reduce unnecessary expenditures.

Determining which technology best serves your patient demographic and your practice culture, together with privacy and security concerns and financial considerations, can make the decision to adopt digital technology difficult. But in an age of patient surveys and social media, your practice’s success may depend on it.


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Friday, December 20, 2019

Career or calling: Should my children be physicians?

Guest Post By
Jennifer Frank MD


I am having a moment of existential crisis. One of my patients asked me about my kids recently. I recited their ages and a funny anecdote before he asked me, “So, are any of them going into medicine?”. “No,” I replied. Truth is, I have a budding mathematician, engineer, teacher and professor, but no potential physicians. This is perplexing to me as both I and my husband are physicians and both come from families populated with nurses and physicians. I assumed at least one child, if not all four, would pursue a medical career.


There are articles out there about how many physicians would discourage their offspring from charting the same course they did given the hours, the debt, the current state of health care, and the demands of the job. I’ve never been one of them. I love being a doctor even though I don’t love every aspect of being a doctor. Medicine is a wonderful combination of applying science to ever-changing situations. Almost every day in clinic, I am simultaneously intellectually and emotionally challenged. I have such a unique and privileged view into people’s lives and enjoy partnering with them through some of the most difficult moments they face as well as the joyful times. So, I wonder, why has my enthusiasm for what I do not caught on with my kids?

In my better moments, I pat myself on the back for this. Clearly, I am teaching my children to develop their own interests and passions. What a great mom I am! However, I can’t really claim that as I do struggle to keep my opinions at bay when talking to them about their futures. In other moments, I consider what they see of Dr. Mom from their vantage point. Maybe, I spend too much time complaining about the aggravations of medicine or am away from home too many hours, and they don’t wish to live with those same burdens. The dedication I try to show my patients may inadvertently reflect back on my family as a lack of dedication to them.

I wonder about their perception of the notion of a career rather than a calling. It is certainly the case that younger generations of physicians have a different view of things like work-life balance which impact how they practice. The abuses I suffered, somewhat willingly, were born because of my belief that this was the price of admission for the calling of medicine. Newer generations may be smarter than I in questioning what degree of sacrifice is actually necessary for our profession. My high school age children completed a school exercise in which they had to research possible careers and their desired lifestyle and then crunch the numbers. This required them to identify the average salary and then calculate the cost of living for where they’d like to live. I don’t remember those kind of pragmatic exercises as I was growing up and wondering what I wanted to be someday.

Truth is, I only decided I wanted to be a doctor when I was 17. Prior to that, I had my heart set on attending the Air Force Academy and becoming the first female fighter pilot. In a psychology class, we learned about the research being done on premature neonates and how much human touch improved their physiologic function, and I was fascinated. I can still remember that moment when it clicked for me and all of the things I loved to learn about and could see myself doing came together into a career path from which I’ve never deviated. The wonder I felt in that psychology class is replicated regularly as I learn something new about an individual patient or about the human body as a whole. If my own children find that combination of wonder and purpose, I will be a proud mama whether that is in medicine or in another field.

__________________________

Jennifer Frank, MD is a family physician and chief medical officer in northeastern Wisconsin. She continues to find medicine to be the most rewarding profession imaginable, second only to motherhood. She's married to a fellow physician and has four children. Her family reminds her of what is most important and inspires her study and pursuit of work-life balance.

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