To maintain a profitable medical practice your business needs to operate at a high level of efficiency. After maintaining consistent and efficient workflow you can explore opportunities to increase your medical practice revenue. However, it is difficult to do this while dealing with your day to day business operations. Being a healthcare provider several patients get treatment from you which might keep you away from important business aspects. Creating an efficient workflow by taking a proactive approach can increase the time you can provide to patients while simultaneously helping you keep your business profitable. This is extremely important in order to remain independent during an era when so many practices are joining hospital systems. There are many different ways to streamline the work process and enhance revenue in a medical practice. Hence it is extremely difficult to choose a few however, we are going try the same. Below are some suggestions that can be implemented by any practice which in turn will generate an increase of up to as high as 25% revenue.
1. Build an Online Presence
Technology is being used by numerous industries in order to make consumer’s lives easier. Health Care industry is no different. You are already falling behind if you don’t have a practice website or some sort of online presence. Patients are demanding for additional online services in order to have better access to their physicians according to recent surveys. Similar surveys revealed that 72% of patients now consult the internet for healthcare information and 62% use online reviews to find new doctors. Hence your online presence is critical. You are loosing on a lot of new business if you lack an online presence. However, the only building fancy practice website is not enough. You need to provide patients the ability to schedule their visits online or ask basic questions about treatments. Also submitting your practice to online directories, creating a profile on major review sites and setting up a social media profile for your practice can go long way in increasing revenue.
2. Maximize Patient visits using your Schedule
For healthcare providers, time is money. Hence you should try to see as patients as possible each day. The more patients you see, the more claims are processed by your practice. Unfortunately, physicians traditionally haven’t been good at using their schedules to generate income. So your front office staff needs to learn to be calculated in their scheduling process because every vacant appointment represents a loss of income. However, this is not always easy to accomplish. You schedule might already be so full that adding more patient appointments might not be feasible. You can work around this by adding only one new visit per day. This small difference can lead up to 20 new patients a month. However, be careful not take so many clientele that you become overwhelmed. Make sure you’re able to offer the same amount of quality care to everyone.
3. Create a cancellation/No-Show Fee
The number of patients not turning up for scheduled appointments or procedures can be as high as 20-25%. This can cause a huge drain on your revenues. Hence consider introducing cancellation policy. Make sure it is communicated to all patients. In the cancellation policy, many practices require patients to cancel their appointment at least 24 hours before their scheduled appointment time. For surgeries, the necessary notice time can be even longer. For those patients who do not meet the terms, consider charging a late cancellation fee. Collecting cancellation fees can be done much more easily than you think when your office is set up to bill for cancellations and accept credit card payments. By creating a cancellation code, you can bill the patient using electronic statements. The day of the cancellation or no-show, process a patient statement and direct the patient to pay online by credit card. Enabling patients to pay online can increase patient payments and speed the turnaround on those payments whether it is for the cancellation fee or for standard co-pays and deductible payments.
4. Opt For Telemedicine
Telemedicine is increasingly being used by medical providers to increase their medical practice revenue. Using telemedicine gives physicians added flexibility to see more patients, thus increasing their revenue. 70% of doctor visits can be treated via telemedicine according to The American Medical Association. If a patient cannot visit your office, there’s a good chance you can treat them by using telemedicine. As discussed before, your timetable may not allow for you to add extra walk-ins or extend business hours. However, with telemedicine, you can keep your current schedule intact and implement these online sessions at your convenience.
5. Incentivize Staff to Increase Revenue
Your business engine is on fuel i.e. your office staff. Your most valuable resource is your staff. Providing incentives will help motivate staff while generating the revenue increase you’re looking to achieve. Incentives like quarterly bonuses, free lunch or giving the highest grossing employee entertainment tickets or extra vacation time can increase interest in meeting the goals set by upper management
