Medical providers and staff have always been busy and trying to provide care for patients while also running the business side of a clinic is challenging. Add that to the increasing regulations, processes, and requirements from payers for programs like MACRA and MIPS, and it can leave everyone in your practice feeling overwhelmed. While you may not be able to remove all that stress, there are some things you can do to eliminate wasted time. Often just identifying a few small things can open much more time for you and your staff to care for patients.
1: Not Working at the Top of Your License
Medical professionals have specialized training to provide patient care. Unfortunately, there are many physicians who spend a significant amount of time doing things like clerical tasks or other activities that do not require MD- or DO-level training (some estimates say it could be as high as 80% of physicians’ time). When you work in a small independent clinical practice, you may find yourself doing many things that someone else in your office could take care of—from stocking supplies in the breakroom to checking patients’ vital signs before an exam.
You don’t have to become completely detached from the day-to-day operations, but you should evaluate how much of your time you’re spending on things that an existing employee (or a new hire) could do, and how much additional revenue you could generate by devoting that time to seeing patients. Adding just one or two more appointments each day could reduce wait times for patients to get into your clinic and boost revenue, plus eliminating time-wasting activities gives you more time with patients.
2: Doing Everything Manually
One of the easiest ways to eliminate wasted time in a clinical setting is to use automation to your advantage. Some things are fairly easy to automate with the right tools and medical practice management software, including:
- Appointment reminders via text and email so staff spends less time on the phone
- Lab results reporting through a patient portal
- Electronic patient intake forms that are automatically pulled into your EHR
- Integrated EHR and billing software that seamlessly transfers information about patient encounters and documentation to submit claims
- Templates in your EHR to reduce data entry during charting and documentation
3: MIPS & MACRA Reporting
In a value-based care world, clinics have to provide lots of information to CMS. If you’re struggling to pull together information manually so you can meet your quality reporting requirements, you’re wasting time. AdvancedMD has software platforms that integrate with your EHR and pull all the necessary data to report to CMS so you can meet MIPS and MACRA requirements and not get penalized with lower reimbursement rates.
Find out more about the tools that AdvancedMD has to help you create a more efficient practice and stop wasting time.
