Benchmarks can give you a handle on how your practice is running
Benchmarks can give you a handle on how your practice is running
Compare your practice against your peers, yourself
If you run your practice like every other successful business in America, you sometimes need to step outside your boundaries and compare your practice to those of your peers. That’s where benchmarking comes in.
"If you were an investor, you wouldn’t want Microsoft or Cisco Systems to manage in a vacuum. Whether or not the benchmarking statistics are 100% accurate, it’s important to get as close as possible to find out if you are managing your business OK," says Elizabeth Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, an Atlanta-based independent consultant with the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) in Englewood, CO.
Benchmarking gives physicians and practices a sense of how well they are doing compared to their peers within a specialty or in a group.
Benchmarking against national data helps you see if your medical group is on the right track. But it’s more important to compare your practice against itself to see how you change over time, says Sandra McGraw, Esq., MBA, chief executive officer of The Health Care Group, a Plymouth Meeting, PA, consulting firm. "With comparative benchmarks, you’re ideally comparing yourself to yourself and seeing how you vary over time. Then you look for reasons as to why changes are occurring."
Practices don’t necessarily need to compare themselves to other organizations’ information to find benchmarking useful, points out Michael Manansala, manager of The Camden Group, an El Segundo, CA, health care consulting firm. "If they are not happy with their performance in certain areas, they come up ways to improve it, and track it over time."
Benchmarking can tell you how well you are doing with revenues and managing expenses, how efficient your practice is, and how satisfied your patients are.
Benchmarks allow you to see how much your doctors make compared to those in other groups in the same specialty and how long your patients are waiting. You can measure your no-show rate, how many medical records are lost each day, and how many repeat X-rays your office does.
"Benchmarks are intended as a way to gauge the overall financial health of the practice. They’re useful for looking at the practice over time, but they are only a tool, not a total solution," McGraw says. Benchmarking may be a current buzzword, but in reality, physician practices have been doing it forever. For instance, most practices know their overhead ratios and how they have changed. This is a benchmark they’ve been doing for a long time, she adds.
"Benchmarking is an important tool for practices in a managed care environment. It helps you focus on efficiency. It’s less expensive and better to do it right the first time," Manansala says.
Cardiovascular Associates, PC, a 39-physician cardiology practice in Birmingham, AL, doesn’t have the kind of managed care penetration as in other areas, but Birmingham is a very competitive market, says William Cockrell, FACMPE, administrator.
However, the group makes extensive use of benchmarking, examining its own data and information from other sources. In addition to tracking financial statistics, the group runs numerous benchmarking projects on patient satisfaction and quality of care and posts those results on its Web site and in the newsletter it sends to referral sources.
"When you look at the cost for measuring patient satisfaction and quality improvement, it’s hard to see an immediate return, but it’s extremely important," Cockrell says.
The practice participates in a number of surveys, including one from the MGMA, and takes the data from the survey to compare the practice to other similar practices. Cardiovascular Asso-ciates was cited by the MGMA in its 1999 report, "Performance and Practices of Successful Medical Groups."
The practice employs about 250 people, all of whom receive the benchmarking data. "We take the data and try to lay them out for everybody to see. We use the good reports, too. Everybody needs a pat on the back now and then," Cockrell says. The practice has been tracking patient satisfaction for the past three years. "We do a telephone patient satisfaction survey. We can see marked trends in areas we thought were doing a good job in and improvement in other areas," he says.
The practice also has focus groups with patients to gather their input, then they take the data from the patient discussions and try to use them. For instance, the group has learned that one of the key factors in patient satisfaction is having the physician sit down and explain things to the patients.
Benchmarking actually tends to increase a practice’s efficiency, even before it starts to examine the data, Manansala asserts. "You’re more likely to do it right the first time if you know you’re being checked."
If your staff enter the right information into the system when patients come in to be seen, you’ll have a clean claim rather than the wrong information. Benchmarking can help the staff understand how much more work was involved in fixing the problem because somebody didn’t do it right the first time.
Subscribe Now for Access
You have reached your article limit for the month. We hope you found our articles both enjoyable and insightful. For information on new subscriptions, product trials, alternative billing arrangements or group and site discounts please call 800-688-2421. We look forward to having you as a long-term member of the Relias Media community.