Starting to benchmark? Focus on your problems
Starting to benchmark? Focus on your problems
What piques your physicians’ interest?
Before you start on a benchmarking project, think carefully about what you should measure and focus on what’s important to the physicians in your practice.
Even though many practices start with their accounts receivables, if you know that your accounts receivables are in good shape, don’t spend time looking there. Instead, you might want to look at the productivity of your physicians. On the other hand, if your practice is not making enough money, you may choose to look at operations and your financial performance.
"Pick something you are interested in, and do all those measurements. Use your instincts," says Elizabeth Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, an Atlanta-based independent consultant with the Medical Group Management Association in Englewood, CO.
Michael Manansala, manager of The Camden Group, an El Segundo, CA, health care consulting firm, advises physician clients to sit down as a group and decide what they want to improve.
He points out that some physicians are more financially oriented, and some are more concerned with patient access. If you have a small or solo practice and run it like a family, you may not be worried about a lot of the issues faced by large group practice, he adds.
When you start, choose five or six indicators that will give you insight into how you manage your practice, Woodcock advises. For instance, if your practice is interested in patient access issues, start doing trend lines on:
• the no-show rates;
• the number of work-in patients who show up during the day;
• the number of people who don’t come in for follow-up visits;
• the length of time it takes for patients to get an appointment.
For many practices, accounts receivables may be the first place you start, Manansala suggests. Generate reports from your computer to tell you what your accounts receivables are and divide the number into sections, based on age. If more than half of your account receivables are over 90 days, you need to look at why that’s happening and how you can improve that.
If you are benchmarking your accounts receivables, get your own accounting reports and compare your data to that from national benchmarking projects. If you’re not doing as well as your peers, come up with ways to correct it.
Coding problems may be another big area to examine, Manansala says. Look at Health Care Financing Administration norms and compare yourself to those. If your data vary from the norm, look at who does the coding.
"We believe that the physician should be the one doing the coding. Many doctors write their diagnosis and let a $7-an-hour clerk figure out what the CPT codes are. The $7-an-hour person didn’t go to medical school and is not educated enough to get the coding down right," Manansala says.
You may choose to examine operational questions such as repeat X-rays, lost medical records, or the length of time it takes patients to get an appointment.
You could look at clinical issues such as percentage of generic drugs vs. formulary utilization, the number of mammography tests for women over a certain age, and what percentage of your diabetic patients receive retinal evaluations each year.
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