Want to Increase Your Revenue, but Don’t Have Any More Hours to Give?
Looking for a surefire way to increase your medical practice’s profitability?
It’s simple. Just see more patients.
Next question?
Obviously, we’re planting our tongue several inches deep in our cheek here.
If increasing revenue were only as easy as packing more patients into already crowded panel sizes (they range from 1200-1900 patients per physician in recent studies), no healthcare provider in the U.S. would struggle with sluggish revenue. After all, America has no shortage of sick people, young or old. Practices should have plenty of patients to pick from.
But the nation’s physicians already feel fatigued and on the brink of burnout. Seeing an average of just over 20 patients per day and working 50 or more hours each week—the AMA reports about 25% work 61-80 hours weekly—probably won’t make most doctors jump at the chance to squeeze in more patient visits, even for the sake of a better bottom line.
We understand. So when you ask us at MDCodePro how to increase revenue in your medical practice, you won’t get glib or unrealistic “advice” about simply expanding your caseload. We know other ways to power your profitability that your practice should take a look at.
Pursue These Profitability-Increasing Goals in Your Practice
Here are three areas you can focus on to make a medical practice more profitable other than forcing physicians to see more patients and work longer hours:
Improve Your Front-End Standard Operating Procedures
Be sure your front-end staff asks patients about their insurance when scheduling appointments and verifies patients’ eligibility in advance. Talk about costs with patients up front. Keep their credit card on file to collect copayments and balance portions quickly and consistently and offer payment plans. Handle as much of the patient’s piece of the financial puzzle at the start as you can.- Automate Administrative Tasks to Make Your Practice More Productive
You can automate many front-end practices mentioned above, like appointment management and insurance verification, as well as much of your billing process. A recent report from Stanford Medicine states around one-third of practices “insist on doing business with paper forms and fax machines.” Investing in automation to generate bills, submit claims, track rejected or denied claims, and more could save you money and realize more profit long-term. - Lower Your Overhead Costs
Practices can find ways to cut the costs of doing business. Physicians Practice recommends shopping around for better-priced malpractice insurance, for example, or renegotiating contracts with service providers. And don’t avoid taking an honest look at your staffing. Are your salaries and benefits in line with comparable practices? Should you outsource some functions, like billing and collections? Or could adding staff increase your medical practice’s productivity, and thus profitability?
Clean Up Your Claims and Coding for More Profit Margin in Medicine
Improving your practice’s first-pass resolution rate (FPRR), or “clean claims rate,” is something else you need to do to raise your medical practice’s profit margin. An “efficient, well-run physician practice” should have an FPRR of better than 90%, according to Medical Economics; however, most practices’ rates land between 70%-80%.
If two or three of every ten claims your practice submits to payers is coming back rejected or denied, you’re seeing serious damage done to your revenue cycle. Even if you ultimately get paid for these claims, you’ll have lost time and money reworking and re-submitting them.
“Only about two-thirds of denials are recoverable,” reports The Advisory Board, “but almost all (90%) of them are preventable.” And one key prevention strategy is ensuring your claims are correctly coded. Double-checking all diagnosis and procedure codes on the claim is crucial, but so is giving practitioners the knowledge and training they need to choose the correct codes in the first place.
That’s why the MDCodePro app can make a huge difference for your medical practice’s profitability. It shows physicians and other healthcare professionals exactly how to make sense of and apply CMS’ E/M documentation guidelines in their visits with patients—the guidelines not only Medicare but also many private payers use to set reimbursement rates—and provides a simple-to-use Code Generator for determining every visit’s optimal CPT® code.
As a result, your practice can claim and support the highest appropriate CPT® codes for the work you do, capturing all your legitimately earned and documented revenue with confidence. The hundreds of doctors who’ve already been using the MDCodePro method have seen their annual incomes go up, on average, $30,000 a year.
If you’d like to find out even more about how to make your medical practice more profitable, contact us today or register now for our upcoming webinar on November 14th.