Six More Vital Tips for Enhancing Your Practice’s Profitability

The number of ways to enhance the profits in your medical practice are endless. Consider implementing these six additional tips.

A previous blog post featured six tips for making your practice more profitability. This list includes six more vital tips to integrate into your practice.

7. Centralize your scheduling.

My company works with a physician whose practice has four locations and is in the process of building a fifth. Rather than having the staff at each office take calls to schedule appointments, they’ve centralized their scheduling at a single location. Thanks to the efficiency of that move, they’ve been able to extend their hours and hire additional staff to make sure every call gets a live answer.

In addition to reducing overhead, centralizing your scheduling will improve your conversion rate. Why? Because you won’t be losing prospective patients by missing their calls. You’ll also find a centralized call center with dedicated staff is easier to manage and train than separate ones.

8. Batch similar procedures together.

For just a moment, imagine your medical practice as a kind of assembly line. Will this assembly-line approach work efficiently if it constantly changes up the fixtures and machinery to alternatively produce one product and then another different product? Of course not.

And while a medical practice is not precisely akin to an assembly line, some aspects of business management and supply economics can be applied with significant effect. In this case, you’ve got to be strategic about when you produce which services. The time and energy required to set up for any given procedure is almost always significant, and in many cases, it’s two-thirds of the entire time required for that procedure.

I suggest you start batching like procedures back-to-back in your schedule, rather than scattering them throughout the week. That way, you and your staff won’t need to reset for each appointment. You can do it all in one fell swoop and save a considerable amount of time and money in the process.

9. Stagger your staff.

There’s no reason your practice has to be open from eight o’clock in the morning to five o’clock in the evening Monday through Friday and closed at all other times. If you’re limited by clinical capacity, consider staying open until seven on certain days or opening on Saturday (without your being physically present).

I recently worked with a medical practice in Southern California that was badly constrained by its physical space because real estate in the area is prohibitively expensive. So they started staggering staff, with some people coming in at the normal time and others arriving later, allowing them to keep the practice open in the evening. As it turned out, their patients loved the flexibility. That practice is now open an impressive four evenings each week and on Saturdays. More impressively, they’ve nearly doubled their revenue while keeping most of their overhead costs fixed.

Not only is this idea a win-win for your practice, but it may also be a huge positive for your staff.

10. Add specialty testing to your practice.

Consider expanding your practice into specialty testing. A primary-care physician, for instance, can add services such as vascular testing, echocardiograms, carotid Doppler, and a variety of other tests. Besides growing your revenue, this adds value for your patients because they no longer have to trek all over town for their tests.

11. Improve billing accuracy.

This is a big one. Billing accuracy can mean the difference between a highly successful practice and one that goes bankrupt. There are five primary places where billing accuracy comes into play:

• Treatment: Are you accurately recording services rendered at the time of care?
• Checkout: When patients leave your office, are they paying the appropriate co-pays or private-pay fees?
• EMR Coding: Are staff members and providers throughout your office using the right EMR codes? This is absolutely critical to improve compliance, reduce under-coding and over-coding, minimize accounts receivable, and reduce your number of denials. For managed care, validation of codes is also essential to avoid subsequent denials. Proper coding requires educating staff and providers–and it’s well worth the investment.
• Insurance: Are you billing for the correct services in the correct volume?
• Collection Controls: Do you collect your third-party-payer receivables on a timely basis? Are you receiving the correct amounts you are owed? Can you qualify for higher reimbursement rates?

My team recently worked with a medical group that discovered a whopping $75,000 in missed billing over a single sixty-day period. That’s a surefire way to go broke.

Make it a habit at your practice to regularly pull a report and determine if claims are sitting in your system. Sometimes claims languish in the equivalent of your drafts box. All it takes is one click to push them out.

12. Create financial controls.

Here’s the most frightening statistic a physician will ever hear: an astonishing 82 percent of medical practices are victims of fraud or theft, according to a report conducted by the Medical Group Management Association in 2009. That is twice the national average for private companies. Effectively, this means you have a four-in-five chance of being defrauded or stolen from. In 18.4 percent of these cases, the amount taken was over $100,000.

This is why this vital tip is practically a call to arms. You must create financial controls. The following are some examples:

• One person on your staff should be responsible for tallying, while a second person should check the math and make the deposit.
• One person in accounts payable should handle invoices and cut checks, while a second person should review and sign those checks before they’re sent out.
• The person who has the power to withdraw money from the bank account should not be the same person who reconciles that account.
• No single staff member should have the ability to move funds between accounts and withdraw funds.

It’s essential that your staff members perceive you as vigilant in regard to finances. One common way employees steal is by putting expenses on credit cards or by creating false vendors. This is most likely to happen, of course, when the boss isn’t paying close attention.

Your staff members probably know if you actually look at the credit card statements. At the very least, take those statements and mark them up–even if you don’t look at them closely. It suggests that you’re keeping an eye on expenses.

Also, limit your potential losses. Perhaps $400,000 came in this month. Does that money just sit in your operating account? Consider moving the surplus over what is needed for operations into a higher-order account–an account your staff cannot access.

If you do see something out of the ordinary, even if it’s relatively small, question it right away. Don’t do so in an aggressive fashion or one that blames anyone. Just question it and get to the bottom of it. This shows your team that you’re keeping watch.

External controls are also crucial. Here’s an example of what can happen: One doctor’s comptroller got an email from the doctor saying the practice needed to wire $20,000 to a vendor in Miami immediately. In their practice, they have set an internal guideline stating that both the CFO and the doctor must approve wire transfers. In this case, since the comptroller believed the doctor was rushing it, he went ahead and initiated the wire. Then he saw the account was located in New York, not Miami, and immediately emailed the doctor to clarify. It’s a good thing he did. The doctor had never sent that email; their accounts had been hacked.

Diligence is essential to protect your practice’s profitability.

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