Auditing Your Practice
Healthcare organizations are not exempt from the financial problems and woes facing other corporations today; they too must “adapt or die”. Whether large or small, healthcare organizations must constantly seek and implement business and marketing strategies to retain customers (patients) and to attract new ones.
When it comes to healthcare, patients (customers) are demanding quality care that is affordable, offers easy access to primary and specialty care, in close proximity to their home or place of employment and good customer service.
Patients that are unhappy with their healthcare plans or providers are walking with their feet - right next door to the competition.
After all of the website updates, Facebook posts, newsletter sends, print advertisements, and other elements of your marketing mix are placed in front of patients and potential patients, how do you determine the effectiveness of each and whether or not you should continue to invest time and money in them? The answer lies mostly (but not totally, as will be explained later) in your ROI, or return on investment. ROI is the primary indicator of how your marketing measures up.
Determining ROI is not difficult, but it can be complicated. You’ll need to know the cost of each marketing campaign and the amount of revenue that was generated by each campaign. The reason this can be complicated is due to tracking – if you are the practice manager for a plastic surgeon’s office and a new patient comes in for a face lift, how will you know what motivated her to choose your physician?
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How to Handle Bad Press about Your Medical Practice |
Seeing bad press about your medical practice, whether about the physician(s) or simply about your specialty, can be frightening. But if you know how to respond to it, you can keep it from causing harm to your practice or even turn it into a positive experience. There are two types of bad press you may encounter about your medical practice: Direct and indirect. Direct bad press refers to actual negative reviews about the physician(s) and/or your practice, and indirect encompasses any unfavorable media that can affect your practice, such as “exposé” television shows or even credible medical studies.
With direct bad press, a quick response is key, but the need to respond quickly can create panic in the minds of many practice managers. Be careful not to respond with anger or anything that can be read – or misread – as sarcasm. Whether the individual sent you an email, posted on your Facebook Wall, or submitted a review to a website, keep your temper in check. Begin your response with concern, i.e. “We’re sorry you feel that your needs weren’t met during your office visit.” If you need time to investigate the complaint, say so, i.e. “We’re researching your concern now and will respond to you fully as soon as possible.” Then be sure to do so – otherwise, other current and potential patients will note your lack of follow-through. Take care to observe HIPAA regulations; you may have to be content with “We’ve achieved resolution on this issue; please call our office at X for more information. Other patients who have questions can also call this number.” Call the patient as well; you’ll want to do your best to ensure they don’t slip through the cracks and continue to feel badly towards your practice, as well as spread that negative impression among other patients. Conduct a mini-training to ensure that staff responds to questions about the complaint with concern and with the information your physician(s) deem appropriate.
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How to Write a Medical Practice Marketing Plan |
“Nobody plans to fail. They just fail to plan.” This slogan from a commercial on investments is an apt representation of what happens with marketing programs in most medical practices. Busy days slip by with little to no attention paid to marketing, until one day the days just aren’t so busy anymore. Unfortunately, writing and implementing a marketing plan at that point will offer reduced or zero results because your practice will be playing catch-up to others at a time when revenues are lacking. The right time to write a medical practice marketing plan is now – here’s how.
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Planning for Slow Times: How to Ramp Up Patient Appointments |
As a practice manager, you have probably noticed that the number of patient appointments – and the accompanying revenues – tends to ebb and flow. Physicians’ offices are not subject to the same cyclical nature as, for example, retail stores, which rely on holiday shopping to make up for the slow times. However, you may well experience slowdowns during summer, when people take vacations, and around the holidays, when they visit family and spend all their available money and time shopping for gifts. Slowdowns do vary by specialty and geographic area; cosmetic dermatologists, for example, may see an increase in appointments as patients prepare themselves for holiday parties, and gastroenterologists may also see more patients after holiday over-indulgences.
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The Economy is Not Why Your Practice is Suffering |
Many of today’s medical practices are experiencing lower revenues and even some degree of financial suffering. It’s easy to blame that on the economy – after all, nearly every other industry is holding the recession responsible for their fiscal vulnerability, so why not healthcare? However, it’s crucial to the success of your practice that you avoid using the economy as a scapegoat when, in fact, other factors may be a much stronger influence on your dwindling bottom line.
Nearly everyone who works in the healthcare industry believes they are achieving the objective of helping others. But if they don’t measure patient satisfaction, many of those in medicine are making erroneous assumptions. Many patients who receive inferior care never complain to a representative of the medical practice, but instead are noncompliant with treatment protocol and/or switch to another provider. Both of these end results cost the practice money because these patients either sharply curtail their visits or abandon the practice altogether.
Given the state of the economy, dwindling healthcare reimbursements, escalating malpractice costs, and increasing operating expenses, many medical practice managers are finding that it’s advisable or even essential to cut costs, sometimes drastically. But how can you reduce overhead without compromising the quality of your practice, either as a workplace or with regard to patient care? As part of our continuing series on auditing your medical practice, we’ll look at ways to analyze and cut overhead costs with a minimum of difficulty.
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Auditing Your Practice: Finding Alternative Revenue |
In today’s economy, even traditionally stable fields like healthcare need to diversify to stay competitive. Multiple streams of income offer the opportunity to avoid significant income loss if conventional revenue streams fail. If you’ve been sensing a need for locating new sources of revenue for your medical practice, this article will provide guidance.
Auditing your medical practice will help you determine whether or not your practice’s resources are being allocated to the programs and services that will result in the best return on investment, as well as measure the outcomes of both existing and new initiatives. However, while you engage in those efforts, your practice still needs to comply with the numerous and ever-changing regulatory and legal requirements that govern healthcare. This is the subject matter for this article in the Auditing Your Practice series on compliance solutions.