The first couple months of each year present an important time to reflect on how the previous year went for your medical practice and what areas you can optimize or streamline for the future. It’s just as helpful to appreciate the positive aspects of your practice and strategize how you can continue in those areas as it is to recognize which areas need improvement and determine the best course of action to address them.
When reflecting on the status of your practice’s operations and performance with your team, consider the following tips for medical practice management!
Medical practice management is the umbrella term for any and every facet of running a medical practice that serves your patients and community; effective medical practice management is the idea that each component is running smoothly or as efficiently as possible to help your practice deliver quality care to your patients.
Such administrative tasks include:
Each of these responsibilities contributes to ensuring your patients have a positive experience at your practice which further leads to a better overall revenue management cycle for your medical practice.
While balancing patient care and running a business can be a challenge, practice management resources and tips can help develop your practice’s operations and care while making meaningful changes in your overall management.
For this year—and beyond—be sure to keep these tips in mind for striving towards your most effective medical practice management strategy yet!
At the end of each year, it’s easy to slack on setting objectives for the future of your medical practice. Some managers approach it in a formulaic way, establishing goals and KPIs only with a mind for incremental, percentage-based improvements to the practice’s existing performance metrics and revenue targets. Such metrics might include:
And these figures are important to know for evaluating the performance of your medical practice; however, perhaps you’re ready to pursue bigger goals. Whether it’s joining an ACO, pursuing new payer partnerships, outsourcing medical billing and coding, adding a new specialty to your repertoire, or otherwise, there are many ways to re-think the way your practice operates in a fundamental way.
No matter how well your practice is performing—financially or otherwise—you can always do better in one area: patient satisfaction. Why? Because service is an area of eternal importance to your patients. While their clinical outcomes are your providers’ most important priority, it’s their satisfaction that will always keep them loyal to your practice.
In the shifting landscape of care, your patients’ satisfaction and engagement are also ever-more important to your practice’s reimbursements. Be sure to send out surveys and have candid conversations with new and long-term patients to find out what they dislike about their experience with your clinicians, your administrators, and your organization at large. Incorporating their feedback demonstrates that your medical practice values their opinion and further deepens the relationship you have with them.
Take a comprehensive look at the issues that impact your practice on a daily basis. Are they technologically related? Probably not. Are they somehow your patients’ fault? No. Most often, a medical practice’s most challenging issues—be they interpersonal, operational, or productivity-related—result from gaps that exist or develop between one area of the practice and another.
Whether it’s that your front-office team doesn’t support the back office (or vice versa) or that your clinical staff is disconnected from administration, you should talk to employees to find out where your workforce experiences gaps or divisions. From there, make a commitment to invest in initiatives that better integrate your practice as a business in the year ahead, whether that means working with a consultant, investing in new technology, or contracting with a medical billing service that can better support your team.
As government agencies continue to implement policies and regulations that strive to eliminate fraud, abuse, and overall waste, it’s vital that your medical practice stays up to date with such measures in order to stay compliant and avoid fines. After all, the last thing you want is to undergo an audit from CMS or endure a HIPAA violation! Staying informed of new measures and tools to help your practice protect patient information is critical for delivering a great patient experience at your medical practice.
Since 81% of Americans are searching for health-related information online, acquiring new patients means your medical practice has to have a solid online presence and reputation. Your medical practice’s online presence includes everything, good or bad, related to your practice that’s online, such as public reviews, embarrassing public incidents, bad press coverage, or malpractice lawsuits that might threaten your medical practice’s success. By spending time replying to reviews, addressing public concerns, and more, you demonstrate to your patients that you care about having a good reputation.
Putting a good medical practice management system in place is incredibly important for building and sustaining a successful healthcare practice. Whether your needs involve clinical practice management or physician practice management, having the right support can make all the difference when it comes to issues such as medical billing and privacy compliance.
That’s why you should consider outsourcing your medical billing and coding responsibilities to a trusted firm like NCG Medical. We’ve been helping healthcare practices devote more attention to patients for four decades by handling all the ins and outs of the medical billing process. Our customized solutions can improve revenue management cycles and ensure that your practice is realizing the full value of the services it provides.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can transform your medical practice management.
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