Most physicians and clinicians didn’t go to school with the hopes of becoming a healthcare administrator, managing and running a clinical practice. But the reality for many small practices is that you have to wear several hats, and with an ever-changing reimbursement landscape, your bottom line might be getting squeezed. The other reality is that all the time you spend performing administrative tasks as a provider can take away from your ability to see patients or create more work for your staff.
Here are four steps you can take today to increase your practice revenues.
1: Keep Your Schedule Full
Two things that lead to schedule gaps are cancellations and no-shows. At the same time, many patients want the convenience of same-day or next-day appointments, so it’s important to fill last-minute cancellations and also reduce the number of no-show patients each day.
Text and email reminders are one of the most effective methods for reducing no-shows and can also help you avoid those last-minute cancellations by giving patients the option to reschedule well in advance at the time they get their first reminder. You can use text message communications to alert patients who are scheduled for later that an appointment just opened up, allowing someone to opt for a quicker appointment if they are available.
2: Use Technology to Automate Care
There are some things that take up a huge amount of staff time with little or no return on investment—for example, phone calls for prescription refill requests and reporting lab results. If you still use the phone as the primary method for performing these two tasks, your staff is wasting a lot of time tracking down information from providers, patients, and pharmacists, or playing phone-tag with a patient for several days just to say that their lab results are normal. This is also frustrating to patients, which can harm patient retention.
Automating these processes through an efficient patient portal is an easy way to increase revenue and decrease staff workloads.
3: Offer Online Check-in Before Appointments
Another way to streamline operations is by offering patients an online check-in option so they can complete paperwork before they arrive, or have kiosks and tablets in your waiting room for self-check-in. You reduce wait times and the need for manual data entry, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.
4: Pay Attention to Online Reviews
Today 90% of patients report that they use online reviews when choosing a new provider, and 71% said they used it as their first tool. If you’re not paying attention to your online reputation, you could be losing out on new patients without even knowing it. There are tools that make it easy for your satisfied patients to let everyone know what a great provider you are, which can help you attract new patients to your practice.
Find out how the tools from AdvancedMD can help boost your practice revenue without adding more work for you and your staff.
