Do You Know Your Practice Management Metrics
Too Many Variables How can Dr. Ben effectively put his information and ideas into his chiropractic practice? Ben closed his office door gently and pulled his chair up to the desk. He pulled his wife’s crayon-made chart from his pocket and smoothed it out on the desktop. Carmen knew a lot about business, he thought. He had to admit that he found that part of his job challenging, but he was also confident that he’d be able to take control of this aspect of the practice now that he had some direction. With medical information, he could look at a few pieces of data and see what was going on — or what else he needed to know to find the answers to his questions. If he needed additional information, he knew where to look for it. And generally speaking, the patients’ charts had the data he needed in the places where he expected it to be. His own experience with that data made it instantly meaningful. It didn’t seem to work that way with practice management. So Carmen had grabbed one of their son’s crayons and drawn him a chart. Ben chuckled. Ben copied the chart into a spreadsheet and hit “print.” He heard “Dr. Ben?” at his door and just had time to put away the original chart before Pam entered. “Dr. Ben, we have another last-minute cancellation.” Pam handed Ben the patient folder. “She’s done this before, hasn’t she?” he asked, checking the file. “She does it pretty regularly,” Pam admitted. “She always says something about work, but I wonder whether maybe she just finds herself short before the appointment comes up, and makes excuses so she won’t have to pay.” “Do we have other patients who work at the same place she does? Do we have the same kinds of problems with them?” “That’s a good question. I’ll check on that. I hate to have to charge her if it’s work-related and she can’t help it.” “If we take that position, though,” Ben pointed out, “we’d never charge anybody for cancelling, even though we have a sign out there explaining the policy. Everybody probably has a reason they think is important.” “I know, but if the cancellations are caused by financial problems, then charging…” Pam continued, but Ben had stopped listening. “This is paralysis by analysis,” he interrupted. “What?” “I mean, we’re looking at so many possibilities and so many hypotheticals that we’re never going to be able to make a firm decision. If cancellations are enough of a problem to us that we have a policy, we ought to follow that policy. She could go to her boss and explain that she’ll lose that $35 fee if she cancels, and then it would be in the boss’s court. Or if it’s financial, she could level with us and we could work out a payment plan for her. All those things about her life are just muddying up the waters for us.” Pam nodded. “You’re right.” “Or if our data shows that cancellations don’t really make any difference to the bottom line, then we could get rid of that policy. But let’s narrow this in to the most basic information we need for the decisions, instead of broadening it out to include all the possibilities we can imagine.” Pam left looking satisfied, but Ben remained in the office, lost in thought. It sounded good when he said that, but the truth was, he didn’t know what no-shows cost him and whether they needed to be firm or not. He didn’t even know how often this particular patient had made a last-minute cancellation or not shown up for an appointment, and Pam simply had a feeling about it, not hard facts. This was definitely a case in which having fast access to the KPIs would improve decision-making at his chiropractic practice. In fact, if he or Pam could spend a little time sorting these things out, they would probably make it up by having fewer conversations agonizing over decisions of that kind and second-guessing their earlier decisions. Ben looked at his spreadsheet. Why couldn’t someone from the office staff pencil in the current figures every week and calculate a running total? Then when questions arose, they could take a quick look at the spreadsheet and find exactly the information they needed. Pam wouldn’t like it, he was sure, but it seemed like just the right solution. How can Dr. Ben effectively put his information and ideas into his chiropractic practice? Disclaimer: For HIPAA compliance, all characters appearing in this post are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chiropractic Software | Improve your practice performance by choosing a singular focal point
Can you prioritize the many daily tasks at your chiropractic clinic without feeling anxiety and puzzlement? Getting a singular focal point for you and your staff is necessary for building your dream practice with the right chiropractic software. This focal point basically serves as road map to success while increasing accountability and transparency. It also fosters teamwork and cooperation, which in turn increases predictable profitability growth and control. In order to build your dream practice, you have to set clear goals and balance Key Performance Indicators (KPI) such as Charges, Collections, Visits, No Shows, No Future Appointments and percentage of A/R over 120 days. All the while you have to stay compliant with your chiropractic SOAP notes. But without measuring your practice performance and tracking how each staff members contributes to the chosen goals you will never achieve your dream. In order to solve any practice performance problems that block your path to long-term profitability you need to be able to see the big picture at a glance and look up the necessary, detailed practice stats. Improving your practice performance requires diligent measuring and tracking of each chosen KPI. Only when you know how your practice is doing today, a reliable prediction of how it will perform tomorrow is possible. And by removing the factor of unpredictability from your practice performance you can gain much needed peace of mind. Of course, you don’t have time to search for and analyze multiple reports, let alone track your practice stats. Moreover, this kind of information overload can prevent you from being decisive about allocating resources. The only way to manage your practice effectively is to choose and balance the right KPI so that you can make progress in the selected areas and shift your focus as needed. At the same time this allows you to keep an eye on your overall practice performance. But without the right tools this approach is merely wishful thinking. Genesis Chiropractic Software, however, makes it a reality by providing you with a Radar to track KPI as well as automatically generated, detailed reports on all areas of practice performance, such as chiropractic billing. When you first log on to the home page of your Genesis Chiropractic Software, you can get a quick overview of your practice performance simply by looking at the Radar. It displays selected, vital stats on a single chart across two time points so that you can quickly see where you are right now and discover any trends before they turn into huge problems. You can also drill down into a particular KPI for a comprehensive sense of practice performance. If you want to get to the root of a performance problem you can look up any stats down to the lowest claim aspect and action taken for the appropriate KPI in a detailed, interactive report. For example, you might notice that your chiropractic billing stats are off and discover that the amount for ‘Insurance Collected’ is much lower than ‘Insurance Billed.’ This might indicate a problem with your chiropractic billing claims cycle. You can then look at the ‘Claim Status’ report to find out what might be causing any issues and fix the problem. You can access your practice Radar on your Genesis Chiropractic Software home page and click on a specific KPI to open a single graph. To look at any details of a particular area of practice performance, such as chiropractic billing stats, go to ‘Reports’ in the top menu and select the appropriate one from the drop down menu. Drill down into the desired details by specifying the date, provider or location. Genesis chiropractic reports also include: Context Search Department-wide Saved Queries for Repeat Usage Configurable, Sortable, and Drillable Report Layout by Arbitrarily Customizable Criteria Reconciled Error Reporting Within Standard HCFA form Export to Excel Reporting Across Multiple Departments/Sites Contact your Genesis chiropractic software Profitability Manager to configure your practice Radar with the right KPI’s to help you achieve your goals and build your dream practice. Watch Dr. Haas demonstrate the documentation interface.