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13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers

13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers
Sometimes a job just gets a little old, and even the best employees need a little something to get them re-engaged and excited again. Try one of the ideas below at your practice and let me know in the comments the ways you keep your staff energized and engaged!

1. Provide a career track and offer multiple levels of learning jobs. For instance, break the receptionist job into steps (see below) and set time lines for attaining those goals. You may want several steps to be accomplished at 90-days, more at 6-months, and more at 12-months. There may be monetary awards, honor awards, or qualifications for other acknowledgements.

  • Pre-registering patients by phone – demographics
  • Making appointments & mini-register for new patients
  • Registering patients face-to-face – demographics
  • Understanding insurance plans and registering their insurance
  • Taking photo ID or taking photos
  • Collecting co-pays
  • Answering basic patient questions
  • Answering advanced patient questions
  • Reviewing the financial policy with patients
  • Reviewing the Privacy Policy with patients.

2. Offer certifications and credentials – support staff emotionally, time-wise and financially so they can attend face-to-face or online courses.

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Posted in: Human Resources, Leadership

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Guest Author Frank Trew From DataPlus: Ten Ways to Improve Your Bottom Line by Analyzing the Data from Your Practice Management System

Editor’s Note: DataPlus is MMP’s very first sponsor and I want to thank Frank and his crew for their support!  If you would like to sponsor this blog and have over 10,000 readers a month see your flash ad, contact me via email at marypatwhaley@gmail.com.

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The old saying “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” certainly holds true in medical practices today. With falling payer reimbursement it is more important than ever to collect every single dollar your practice is due.

Most practices have sought additional income streams by adding ancillary services. Paying close attention to data can improve decision-making for such services and can dramatically improve revenue without adding any providers or even new patients!

Having ready access to the elusive data within practice management systems can be difficult, but most systems can report the basics.  It is imperative that data is trended over a period of time so that trends can be spotted, benchmarks compared, and improvement plans developed.  Measuring data and comparing it to the MGMA Cost Survey (find it at mgma.com) is one of the best places to start.

1. Collection Rates/Ratios: Two collection rates are measured in medical practices. One is gross collections and the other is net collections, the latter being the most important.

A gross collection rate is payments divided by charges and will depend on an artificial number – how high the charges are set above negotiated allowables – making it not particularly meaningful.

A net collection rate, however, provides a means to benchmark the health of collection efforts. Net collections, simply stated, demonstrate what percentage of collectible dollars (after negotiated contract write-offs)  a practice is actually collecting.   A net collection rate above 95 percent ”“when calculated correctly – denotes a healthy practice.

2.   Denials: Denials are a significant portion of the cost of running a practice in that services that are provided but not paid for reduce the profitably of those that are. Accurately identifying denials and the reasons for them can help prevent them in the future, thus increasing productivity and lowering expenses. Identifying denial trends by specific payer or payer group, by CPT code, and by origin ”“ whether at the front desk, with coding errors, or in credentialing ”“ is equally important.

3.    Evaluation & Management (E & M) Bell Curve: “Overcoding” and “undercoding” are commonly used terms, but how are they measured? Bell curve trending of E&M data can quickly identify areas where providers may be under coding, resulting in lower revenues, or over coding, resulting in the potential for audits. The difference between a Level 2 and a Level 3 E&M code can mean thousands of dollars in losses per provider per year. Documentation is critical to demonstrating the level of care provided to each patient.

The traditional primary care bell curve below demonstrates that level 3 visits typically comprise about 50% of your established patient encounters, level 2 and 4 visits together about 20% each, and level 1 and 5 visits together about 10%.  When plotted on a graph and drawing a line between each, the shape resembles a bell.

4.    Bad Debt: Bad debt is defined as dollars that could have been collected, but were not.  Break this category into controllable factors and non-controllable factors.  Issues that you should have been able to control are timely filing write-offs, credentialing errors, lack of follow-up, and incorrect information provided by the patient.  Non-controllable issues are bankruptcy,  patient failure to pay, and payers retroactively denying coverage due to unpaid premiums.

Reducing bad debt by just two percent can mean tens of thousands of dollars to the bottom line of a practice. The ability to quickly identify bad debt trends facilitates the development of an improvement plan.

5.    AR Days: AR (accounts receivable) days are a measurement of the average time a dollar stays in an accounts receivable before being collected. The ability to measure, benchmark, and lower AR days provides a means to a significant increase in revenue.  Some best practices that reduce AR days are filing insurance daily, sending statements daily, collecting appropriately at check-in and check-out, working denials quickly, discounting self-insured for time of service payment in full, and using an eligibility tool to check every single patient’s insurance.

6.   Encounters: Accurately reporting and separating encounters for most practices is an arduous task of counting fee tickets or using tick sheets. Few practice management systems accurately provide this information. An encounter is much more than a service code. Being able to segregate office encounters from surgical cases, and reporting by payer, time, and location can help identify opportunities for improvement.

7.   Referral Sources: It is fundamentally prudent for specialty practices to know the origin of patient referrals. This data is rarely reliable or easily created in most practice management systems. Practices need to know not only the source of patient referrals, but also what type of patients (by insurance, by procedure, etc.) are being sent by those sources, and if the referrals from a particular source have increased or decreased over time.

8.    Payer Mix: It is not uncommon for practices to drop payors due to perception, and not because of actual data or trends. Emotions sometimes come into play and can result in a provider demanding that a payer be dropped because their rates have changed (or other perceptions). This simply does not make sense. Being able to accurately produce and graph data on major payers without hours and hours of work is of high strategic value to a well-planned business decision. It can answer questions about the impact on a practice if a particular payer is dropped, or how those patient slots would be filled.  Remember to keep adding payers to the practice when feasible; the loss of your largest payer can be minimized if many smaller ones are on board.

9.    Under Payments: One of the more significant ways to improve a practice’s revenue is the swift and accurate identification of carrier underpayments. Identification of underpayments is not simply comparing the payment to an allowable fee schedule.  Practice management systems that have any type of payment audit functionality commonly do not take into account circumstances such as modifiers, or multiple surgical procedures that payers routinely inaccurately apply, causing underpayments.  Having a system to automatically and systematically apply these rules is essential. MGMA states that providers are underpaid an average of six percent of revenue. What does that mean to a practice? The numbers can be astounding to a surgical group, and the identification and collection of those underpayments can be insurmountable.

10.    Fee Schedule Comparison: It can be difficult to determine what payers are reimbursing by contract for specific codes or ranges of CPT codes. The ability to have immediate and accurate access to this data is crucial in payer negotiations. It is important to remember that the payer already has this information and is betting that the practice does not!

It is now more important than ever for practice managers to have access to the critical information outlined above. It is also important to note that not just any one of the above Key Practice Indicators should be used to determine the financial health of your practice, but all, or a combination of them.

The buzzword among practices today is “Dashboards.” The ability to have these Key Practice Indicators in one simple report is proven to increase efficiency, as well as provide a meaningful way to present information to providers. One example of a dashboard is below.

About the author: Frank Trew is the Founder and CEO of DataPlus and  has over 25 years of practice management experience and has served in executive positions in large and small practices. In 1999, as the COO of a large orthopaedic group in Nashville, he was frustrated by an inadequate access to data that limited his ability to measure and improve the bottom line. The development of a data warehouse was the solution.

In 2000, after hearing how this data was a key practice management tool, many of Frank’s peers also wanted to use it improve their practices. DataPlus was formed as a result and has been providing MegaWest, HealthPort, and Centricity users with this unique tool ever since.

Employing a simple to use “point and click, drag and drop” reporting tool, along with an advanced Contract Management and Revenue Recovery System, DataPlus provides key management data across all specialties and throughout the United States.

Frank invites readers to visit the DataPlus website at www.mydataplus.com. Frank may be contacted via email at ftrew@mydataplus.com or by telephone at (888) 688-3282.

Posted in: Day-to-Day Operations, Medicare & Reimbursement

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13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers

Group of nurses, Base Hospital #45

Image by The Library of Virginia via Flickr

Sometimes a job just gets a little old, and even the best employees need a little something to get them re-engaged and excited again.  Try one of the ideas below at your practice and let me know in the comments the ways you keep your staff energized and engaged!

1.  Provide a career track and offer multiple levels of learning jobs. For instance, break the receptionist job into steps (see below) and set time lines for attaining those goals.  You may want several steps to be accomplished at 90-days, more at 6-months, and more at 12-months.  There may be monetary awards, honor awards, or qualifications for other acknowledgements.

  • Pre-registering patients by phone – demographics
  • Making appointments & mini-register for new patients
  • Registering patients face-to-face – demographics
  • Understanding insurance plans and registering their insurance
  • Taking photo ID or taking photos and explaining the Red Flags Rule
  • Collecting co-pays
  • Answering basic patient questions
  • Answering advanced patient questions
  • Reviewing the financial policy with patients
  • Reviewing the Privacy Policy with patients.

2.  Offer certifications and credentials – support staff emotionally, time-wise and financially so they can attend face-to-face or online courses.

3.   Offer specific responsibilities and the title of lead person for that responsibility – don’t assume you know what staff are or are not capable of – they might surprise you!

4.  Meet every 6 months or every quarter to set goals.  A job can be a drag if there’s nothing new to learn or to accomplish.

5.  Set up process improvement teams to work on problems that everyone complains about – give them the responsibility to come up with solutions and try them out.

6.  Involve them in social media marketing of the practice.  Make sure they understand your social media plan ( you do have a plan, don’t you?),  give them guidelines to work within and let them work on your website, your blog, and your Facebook page.

7.  Install a wiki (many are free) and have them work on loading all the practice knowledge into the wiki.  Have different staff responsible for different parts of the wiki and set goals for adding all the information that runs your practice every day.

8. “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” – this is also great for getting the clinical and administrative staff to understand each other better.  Have the staff shadow each other and take turns seeing parts of the practice they don’t know much about.  I recently participated in this at my hospital and shadowed a nurse (and asked a million questions) for about an hour.  It was wonderful!  I felt better equipped to work with my hospitalist service after having been on a patient floor for just a short time.

9.  If you are a practice that receives referrals from others, have staff responsible for regularly touching base with staff from referring practices and asking how service can be improved.  Teach staff about relationship building and remember that it’s the staff that often choose where the patient is referred to instead of the provider.

10.  Have staff take turns going with you to meetings, seminars and local events where you represent the practice and introduce them to everyone.

11.  Forward listserv discussions to employees and have them monitor the discussions and bring things to you that they want to know more about.

12.  Encourage employees to become the practice expert in a payer, an employer, a referrer, a process or a protocol and help them learn about their topic by sending them information from the web or your professional organizations.

13. Have the staff put together an internal or external newsletter and help them with concepts of internal and external marketing.

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Posted in: Day-to-Day Operations, Human Resources, Leadership

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50 Ways to Attract New Patients to Your Practice

Some practices are overwhelmed with patients and can’t find enough hours in the day to see all the patients that want to be seen.  Others are in a highly competitive environment and are looking for ways to attract new patients.  Here is a list of 50 ways to attract new patients to your practice.  Some will be better for primary care, others will be better for sub-specialists. Number One will attract patients to all types of practices.

  1. BE NICE TO EVERYONE: patients and their families, staff, hospital staff, vendors, janitors, everyone.  What do people say when they recommend someone?  “You’ll like him, he’s nice.”
  2. Have an open house and offer BP checks, cane/walker checks, free H1N1 shots, etc.
  3. Offer free meet and greet visits to let patients meet you before establishing.
  4. Take extra unassigned ER call or fill-in for other docs (the ER staff will recommend you to patients.)
  5. Visit nursing homes and meet administrators and staff, leave brochures.
  6. Do home visits.
  7. Have a Saturday morning clinic.
  8. Do a radio interview or talk show taking callers’ questions about a medical topic.
  9. Visit the pharmacies and introduce yourself to pharmacists, leave brochures.
  10. Visit high school guidance counselors in the spring and leave information about college physicals.
  11. Place brochures with the Welcome Wagon or Newcomers Club.
  12. Join the Chamber of Commerce and attend meetings.
  13. Join the Lions, Kiwanis, or Rotary Club.
  14. Join the worship center of your choice and become involved.
  15. Join a journal club.
  16. Join a business leads organization.
  17. Take credit cards, offer payment plans and offer a financial hardship program.  My book has advice about collecting from patients.
  18. Call schools and volunteer to do sports physicals in the spring.
  19. Contact the local Parish Nurses and meet them.
  20. Volunteer to be available at local school sports events.
  21. Start a medical issue support group that meets at your practice.
  22. Call local employers and offer to come on site to do physicals, flu shots, wellness talks.
  23. Do DOT physicals and take worker’s comp patients.
  24. Go visit the home health equipment stores and leave brochures.
  25. Specialize in difficult conditions and disease states and advertise that you do.
  26. Volunteer at the local free clinic.  The volunteers will refer patients to you.
  27. Offer to be “on tap” for the local TV station to provide sound bites on the latest topic: vaccines/autism, radiation exposure
  28. Send out info to the newspaper every time you attend a meeting, speak, write, or do anything notable.
  29. Take Medicaid and insurances offered by local large employers.
  30. Tap into social media and have a great website, blog, online registration, online scheduling, online drug refills, etc.
  31. Speak about any medical topic, anytime, anywhere.
  32. Give travel vaccines.
  33. Place a sign outside your practice saying “Now Accepting New Patients.”
  34. Meet the local hospitalists group.
  35. Offer virtual visits to your established patients.
  36. Talk to the local managers group.
  37. Make friends with potential referring practices, take lunch, leave brochures.  Don’t forget practices in surrounding areas.
  38. Have a private line into your practice just for other physicians and practices.
  39. Make it incredibly easy for staff from other practices to refer patients to you. Many referral decisions are made based on ease of entry to the practice.
  40. Ask satisfied patients to log on to a physician review site and leave a review of your services.
  41. Visit daycares and leave information for parents on kindergarten physicals in the summer.
  42. Develop “loss leaders” and advertise them: free/discounted flu shots, inexpensive physicals for <19 year olds, etc.
  43. Take students in your practice: medical assistants, nurses, phlebotomists, healthcare career students.  When they get jobs they will recommend you.
  44. Place small ads in the local professional, amateur or high school theater playbill.
  45. Round twice a day on your inpatients. Satisfied patients refer other patients.
  46. Give a talk at your practice for anyone who thinks they might like to be in healthcare.
  47. Moonlight at a local Urgent Care.
  48. Give a talk for local nurses.  Everyone asks nurses which doctor they would go to.
  49. Let local (nice) hotels know you will make house calls over lunch or after clinic hours.
  50. SMILE.  Never underestimate the value of a smile.

Posted in: Practice Marketing

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