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Friday, April 20, 2018
Understanding Your Practice's Bottom Line
The delivery of high-quality care is the number one priority for physicians — but quality should be supported by sound financial management. Let's take a look at four steps you can take to help you understand what is driving the bottom line at your practice.
• Review financial reports
Three reports – the income statement, cash flow forecast, and balance sheet – can give you a clear, concise indication of your group's financial performance. From these reports, you can learn more about your cash flow. How is revenue trending? Are there any outliers in expenses? What is the forecast for cash flow based on procedure volume, modality mix, payer mix, and payment trends?
You want to compare current periods with prior years' performance and against the budget to reveal variances and trends. Reviewing measures such as revenue per full-time employee (FTE), compensation package per FTE, and overhead as a percentage of total expense will also help you understand whether your practice's performance is in line with your business plan and how your practice compares with other practices nationally.
• Define relevant benchmarks
With regard to benchmarks, be sure to benchmark data that you consider important to the growth of your practice. Common measures include work relative value units (wRVU) per day worked, average procedures per year per FTE, average collections per day per FTE, W2 per wRVU, new patients per month, and scheduling capacity. Obtaining these measures is critical, but even more important is using this information to drive business decisions.
• Start with accurate documentation
Although claim denials may end up in the business office, they often start in the physician's office due to a lack of required, proper documentation. As an independent business owner, you need to stay up to date on proper documentation methods and continuous coding changes to lessen the likelihood of payment denials or long accounts receivable (AR) cycles. Identifying trends in front-end denials should lead to corrective training, education, and action. Similarly, practices must maintain and regularly review their payer contracts to ensure payer compliance and market rates are in place.
• Connect the dots
Keep in mind that each decision you make should comply with your groups financial, strategic, and patient care objectives. Therefore, your group should have a decision framework in place that provides an efficient process for making business decisions.
For example: Who has authority to decide? What are the financial and shareholder compensation implications? Is there a downside/upside? How soon must a decision be made?
Medical practices are unique businesses, and as an owner or administrator of this unique business, you may be well-served to seek revenue cycle management services, medical practice management services and/or, financial management advice from third-party experts aligned to the field.
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• Review financial reports
Three reports – the income statement, cash flow forecast, and balance sheet – can give you a clear, concise indication of your group's financial performance. From these reports, you can learn more about your cash flow. How is revenue trending? Are there any outliers in expenses? What is the forecast for cash flow based on procedure volume, modality mix, payer mix, and payment trends?
You want to compare current periods with prior years' performance and against the budget to reveal variances and trends. Reviewing measures such as revenue per full-time employee (FTE), compensation package per FTE, and overhead as a percentage of total expense will also help you understand whether your practice's performance is in line with your business plan and how your practice compares with other practices nationally.
• Define relevant benchmarks
With regard to benchmarks, be sure to benchmark data that you consider important to the growth of your practice. Common measures include work relative value units (wRVU) per day worked, average procedures per year per FTE, average collections per day per FTE, W2 per wRVU, new patients per month, and scheduling capacity. Obtaining these measures is critical, but even more important is using this information to drive business decisions.
• Start with accurate documentation
Although claim denials may end up in the business office, they often start in the physician's office due to a lack of required, proper documentation. As an independent business owner, you need to stay up to date on proper documentation methods and continuous coding changes to lessen the likelihood of payment denials or long accounts receivable (AR) cycles. Identifying trends in front-end denials should lead to corrective training, education, and action. Similarly, practices must maintain and regularly review their payer contracts to ensure payer compliance and market rates are in place.
• Connect the dots
Keep in mind that each decision you make should comply with your groups financial, strategic, and patient care objectives. Therefore, your group should have a decision framework in place that provides an efficient process for making business decisions.
For example: Who has authority to decide? What are the financial and shareholder compensation implications? Is there a downside/upside? How soon must a decision be made?
Medical practices are unique businesses, and as an owner or administrator of this unique business, you may be well-served to seek revenue cycle management services, medical practice management services and/or, financial management advice from third-party experts aligned to the field.
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Monday, April 16, 2018
Practice Metrics: Working Days vs Calendar Days
Often major decisions are made based upon knee-jerk reactions to data generated by well-meaning employees. But if you are only looking at data on a monthly basis, not a quarterly or annually, you could be hurting your business more than you think.
Each month has a different number of working days and this is something you need to take into consideration. For example for this year, here are the number of working days:
January: 22 working days
February: 20 working days
March: 22 working days
April: 21 working days
May: 22 working days
June: 21 working days
July: 21 working days
August: 23 working days
September: 19 working days
October: 23 working days
November: 19-20 working days (some companies shut down for both Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving)
December: 20 working days
These can obviously change if your company shuts down for more than just the major holidays, or no holidays at all.
So looking at March, August and October your monthly data will look like you are performing much better than if you made decisions based upon data generated on September, February and December. This is particularly important for projecting your inflow, paying out bonuses and payroll, and making sure you have enough to make ends meet.
Of course review your monthly data, but keep in mind that some months will look bette. Looking at your information quarterly or even comparing to this time last year is your best bet. It also much easier to plan capital equipment, raises, or even hiring more employees based upon your ability to project out based upon working days.
I think this is an area that often get overlooked, as several practices often complain about how volatile the market is from month to month. Sure based upon your practice type, you could have seasonal business. If your are an orthopedic surgeon, summer and fall are most likely your busiest times of the year since people are more active and kids are back in school and playing more sports.
Depending upon location can also be a contributing factor. Perhaps you rely on tourism or the weather plays a factor. All of these areas are things to keep in mind, and know that you will have ebb and flow within your business. Just taking a step back and finding perspective when reviewing your information can provide you a less stressful review knowing that your business is not failing or employees are not performing.
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Each month has a different number of working days and this is something you need to take into consideration. For example for this year, here are the number of working days:
January: 22 working days
February: 20 working days
March: 22 working days
April: 21 working days
May: 22 working days
June: 21 working days
July: 21 working days
August: 23 working days
September: 19 working days
October: 23 working days
November: 19-20 working days (some companies shut down for both Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving)
December: 20 working days
These can obviously change if your company shuts down for more than just the major holidays, or no holidays at all.
So looking at March, August and October your monthly data will look like you are performing much better than if you made decisions based upon data generated on September, February and December. This is particularly important for projecting your inflow, paying out bonuses and payroll, and making sure you have enough to make ends meet.
Of course review your monthly data, but keep in mind that some months will look bette. Looking at your information quarterly or even comparing to this time last year is your best bet. It also much easier to plan capital equipment, raises, or even hiring more employees based upon your ability to project out based upon working days.
I think this is an area that often get overlooked, as several practices often complain about how volatile the market is from month to month. Sure based upon your practice type, you could have seasonal business. If your are an orthopedic surgeon, summer and fall are most likely your busiest times of the year since people are more active and kids are back in school and playing more sports.
Depending upon location can also be a contributing factor. Perhaps you rely on tourism or the weather plays a factor. All of these areas are things to keep in mind, and know that you will have ebb and flow within your business. Just taking a step back and finding perspective when reviewing your information can provide you a less stressful review knowing that your business is not failing or employees are not performing.
Medical Office Supplies
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Saturday, April 14, 2018
10 Strategies to Market and Promote Your Medical Practice
Do you worry about having enough patients? Are you having recurring nightmares that one day you will walk in and the schedule will be bare? Are you a new clinic struggling to beef up your daily schedule?
Here are 10 strategies to effectively promote your medical practice:
1. Have a professional website, a well written blog, and an active Facebook page and Twitter handle. You must have a social media strategy to stay current (and continuous shameless self-promotion will not work). Post on Facebook and Google+ a minimum of 10 posts per week, and aim for about four times that amount for Twitter.
2. Be active in the community. Have a clinic presence at health fairs, sporting events, and anywhere else you can set up a booth. Make it fun and get a mascot and bring it along too!
3. Donate a physical or consultation or cosmetic service for a local charity auction.
4. Have an open house (with refreshments and door prizes). Invite the public, colleagues, and referral coordinators from other clinics and hospitals.
5. Become the expert. Make yourself available to local and national news centers and online and print publications to comment on current health issues. Give seminars and talks on health issues that you specialize in or have special knowledge in.
6. Increase patient satisfaction using customer service from the H.E.A.R.T. and your patients will do a lot of marketing for you.
7. Send a hand written thank you card to each new patient that comes in, and to the doctor that referred them.
8. On that note, send out birthday cards and/or e-mails. This is also a great way to remind people of their annual check ups.
9. Get involved in the local chamber; host lunch-and-learns at the local assisted living facility or library.
10. Give out care packages to patients with all of the brochures from your ancillary services, a pen with your office information on it, as well as a fridge magnet business card.
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Medical and Rx Pads
1. Have a professional website, a well written blog, and an active Facebook page and Twitter handle. You must have a social media strategy to stay current (and continuous shameless self-promotion will not work). Post on Facebook and Google+ a minimum of 10 posts per week, and aim for about four times that amount for Twitter.
2. Be active in the community. Have a clinic presence at health fairs, sporting events, and anywhere else you can set up a booth. Make it fun and get a mascot and bring it along too!
3. Donate a physical or consultation or cosmetic service for a local charity auction.
4. Have an open house (with refreshments and door prizes). Invite the public, colleagues, and referral coordinators from other clinics and hospitals.
5. Become the expert. Make yourself available to local and national news centers and online and print publications to comment on current health issues. Give seminars and talks on health issues that you specialize in or have special knowledge in.
6. Increase patient satisfaction using customer service from the H.E.A.R.T. and your patients will do a lot of marketing for you.
7. Send a hand written thank you card to each new patient that comes in, and to the doctor that referred them.
8. On that note, send out birthday cards and/or e-mails. This is also a great way to remind people of their annual check ups.
9. Get involved in the local chamber; host lunch-and-learns at the local assisted living facility or library.
10. Give out care packages to patients with all of the brochures from your ancillary services, a pen with your office information on it, as well as a fridge magnet business card.
Medical Office Supplies
15% Off All Products
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Launching a New Hospital Marketing Initiative: A 5-Point Checklist Before Pressing Play
When it comes to your hospital’s marketing plan—where literally millions can be on the line—the importance of dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s goes without saying. This can often mean spending more time and focus hammering out the small details to ensure success, and maximize your return on investment (ROI).
In crafting a strategic hospital marketing plan, purpose and direction are more than beginning motivations, they’re vitally important to the success of your campaign from start to finish.
For example, let’s say you’re a hospital that’s looking to broaden its women’s health services from childbirth and prenatal care to more reproductive services such as family planning and fertility testing.
Ideally, you’d start with two simple questions:
Who am I talking to?
And how?
Those two questions alone will define your audience, and more importantly, determine the best mediums for communicating your message.
In the case of the women’s health service expansion, more detail-oriented questions can be borne out. Are the targeted demographic only women? How old are they? What is their general lifestyle? Although these facts can seem numerous and excessively demographical, each fact paints a picture of an increasingly specific patient.
And when it comes to marketing, specificity of the message is everything.
With that said, here’s what to do when launching a new hospital marketing initiative.
The 5-Point Checklist Before Pressing Play
This one is simple: what’s the tangible goal for what you’re trying to do? In the aforementioned case of the women’s reproductive health expansion, what’s the vision of success? Perhaps you’re trying to generate a certain amount of new patients, or maybe raise the annual billing threshold of your women’s health services wing. Regardless of the goal, you should have one that is clear and measurable. Only then can achievement be derived from success, and future lessons be derived from failure.
Although the gut response to this question is usually a resounding “yes,” it’s an important question to consider. Within your hospital’s new marketing initiative you’re making a decision to promote a product or service. But before deciding to spend hundreds of thousands, to millions of dollars, knowing whether this product or service will resonate with your audience is imperative. In measuring the value of what you’re offering, first, consider how it will fundamentally improve the lives of those who use it. That’s your message. Once the key benefit—the promise of a better life—to your prospective patient is distilled, you can communicate that message directly in a way that breaks through the noise of your competitors and inspires action.
As we mentioned before, who you’re targeting is everything when it comes to strategic hospital planning. Do you have a specific demographic within your marketing initiative? Is it women? Which women? What race are they? Where do they live? How much money do they make? Have you created a detailed persona for this group? All these questions are critical to understanding the needs and thought patterns of a targeted community of people. You want to personalize your message to the point that it feels like a handwritten letter. And that’s only possible when you truly understand the needs and day-to-day struggles of the demographic you’re talking to.
As the research and planning stage nears completion, it’s important to focus on distribution. In fact, based on the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your time should go towards crafting a message and the other 80% should go towards distributing it, it’s easily one of the most important steps on this checklist. To determine which distribution channels are best, it all goes back to knowing your demographic.
Let’s say for instance that you’re targeting young, caucasian, female millennials, that are single and in their mid-twenties. Let’s also say they’re highly educated with professional degrees, high career aspirations, and a desire for children, but only at later stages of their lives—let’s say in their early 30’s. Given that these young women are particularly deliberate on when they want to have kids, and your hospital is attempting to target them for reproductive health services (in this case, birth control), communicating to them through channels that are appropriate for them would yield the best return on investment.
This strategy may include social media sponsored posts, content marketing to capture users looking for answers on birth control, and paid search ads that target keywords specific to the information this demographic is looking for.
Finally, you want to have a clear workflow from start to finish. If you place a specific phone number on your marketing materials to track each lead that it generates, what’s the next step when that number is dialed? Who do they talk to? And what happens after that? You want to have a clear journey for your patient—one that you can measure, reiterate, and scale.
After all the work in understanding your audience, setting up a plan, and implementing it, is complete, the final step is to look to simply collect and analyze the data. This will allow you to understand the efficacy of your work, and more importantly, what to dial in or remove in order to make your campaign more effective in future iterations.
In measuring this data, you should outline very clear key performance indicators. These can be metrics that make-up the tangibility of a goal. For example, if the goal is to generate more in billings from your women’s health services department, a key performance indicator may be the dollar amounts themselves, or the number of new patients admitted.
Key performance indicators are there to ensure accountability to your goals, giving you clear and tangible steps to judging your progress. Collect as much data as you can, keep it as clean as possible, and use it to influence your decision making to increase your performance and optimize your hospital’s marketing initiative.
Creating a new hospital marketing initiative can be challenging, particularly when trying to target with specificity to inspire action in your prospective patients. With the help of Scorpion, you’ll not only gain the online visibility necessary to get in front of the patients you want but the marketing techniques that are imperative to inspiring action.
Billing and Collection Supplies
Business Cards and Stationary
Chart Labels
Medical and Rx Pads
In crafting a strategic hospital marketing plan, purpose and direction are more than beginning motivations, they’re vitally important to the success of your campaign from start to finish.
For example, let’s say you’re a hospital that’s looking to broaden its women’s health services from childbirth and prenatal care to more reproductive services such as family planning and fertility testing.
Ideally, you’d start with two simple questions:
Who am I talking to?
And how?
Those two questions alone will define your audience, and more importantly, determine the best mediums for communicating your message.
In the case of the women’s health service expansion, more detail-oriented questions can be borne out. Are the targeted demographic only women? How old are they? What is their general lifestyle? Although these facts can seem numerous and excessively demographical, each fact paints a picture of an increasingly specific patient.
And when it comes to marketing, specificity of the message is everything.
With that said, here’s what to do when launching a new hospital marketing initiative.
The 5-Point Checklist Before Pressing Play
5 ) Do I Have a Tangible Goal?
This one is simple: what’s the tangible goal for what you’re trying to do? In the aforementioned case of the women’s reproductive health expansion, what’s the vision of success? Perhaps you’re trying to generate a certain amount of new patients, or maybe raise the annual billing threshold of your women’s health services wing. Regardless of the goal, you should have one that is clear and measurable. Only then can achievement be derived from success, and future lessons be derived from failure.
4) Am I Offering Something of Value?
Although the gut response to this question is usually a resounding “yes,” it’s an important question to consider. Within your hospital’s new marketing initiative you’re making a decision to promote a product or service. But before deciding to spend hundreds of thousands, to millions of dollars, knowing whether this product or service will resonate with your audience is imperative. In measuring the value of what you’re offering, first, consider how it will fundamentally improve the lives of those who use it. That’s your message. Once the key benefit—the promise of a better life—to your prospective patient is distilled, you can communicate that message directly in a way that breaks through the noise of your competitors and inspires action.
3) Do I Know My Audience?
As we mentioned before, who you’re targeting is everything when it comes to strategic hospital planning. Do you have a specific demographic within your marketing initiative? Is it women? Which women? What race are they? Where do they live? How much money do they make? Have you created a detailed persona for this group? All these questions are critical to understanding the needs and thought patterns of a targeted community of people. You want to personalize your message to the point that it feels like a handwritten letter. And that’s only possible when you truly understand the needs and day-to-day struggles of the demographic you’re talking to.
2) Do I Know the Channels to Reach My Audience?
As the research and planning stage nears completion, it’s important to focus on distribution. In fact, based on the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your time should go towards crafting a message and the other 80% should go towards distributing it, it’s easily one of the most important steps on this checklist. To determine which distribution channels are best, it all goes back to knowing your demographic.
Let’s say for instance that you’re targeting young, caucasian, female millennials, that are single and in their mid-twenties. Let’s also say they’re highly educated with professional degrees, high career aspirations, and a desire for children, but only at later stages of their lives—let’s say in their early 30’s. Given that these young women are particularly deliberate on when they want to have kids, and your hospital is attempting to target them for reproductive health services (in this case, birth control), communicating to them through channels that are appropriate for them would yield the best return on investment.
This strategy may include social media sponsored posts, content marketing to capture users looking for answers on birth control, and paid search ads that target keywords specific to the information this demographic is looking for.
Finally, you want to have a clear workflow from start to finish. If you place a specific phone number on your marketing materials to track each lead that it generates, what’s the next step when that number is dialed? Who do they talk to? And what happens after that? You want to have a clear journey for your patient—one that you can measure, reiterate, and scale.
1) Can I Measure It?
After all the work in understanding your audience, setting up a plan, and implementing it, is complete, the final step is to look to simply collect and analyze the data. This will allow you to understand the efficacy of your work, and more importantly, what to dial in or remove in order to make your campaign more effective in future iterations.
In measuring this data, you should outline very clear key performance indicators. These can be metrics that make-up the tangibility of a goal. For example, if the goal is to generate more in billings from your women’s health services department, a key performance indicator may be the dollar amounts themselves, or the number of new patients admitted.
Key performance indicators are there to ensure accountability to your goals, giving you clear and tangible steps to judging your progress. Collect as much data as you can, keep it as clean as possible, and use it to influence your decision making to increase your performance and optimize your hospital’s marketing initiative.
Creating a new hospital marketing initiative can be challenging, particularly when trying to target with specificity to inspire action in your prospective patients. With the help of Scorpion, you’ll not only gain the online visibility necessary to get in front of the patients you want but the marketing techniques that are imperative to inspiring action.
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