HEALTHCARE NAVIGATOR

Takin’ Care of Business

How to make your practice and patient efficiency sing in 2015

more than a rock ‘n roll anthem, “Takin’ Care of Business” also means taking advantage of the new year to increase practice efficiency and patient contact. Here are three ways to play that tune in 2015.

1 MERCHANT SERVICES. Review and shop your credit card technologies, and review who can offer you the best rates. Be aware of hidden fees and negotiate them out of your contracts (e.g., statement fee? I think not!).

Remember that effective October 1, Visa will be instituting “the shift”—that is, the Global Point-of-Sale Counterfeit Liability Shift—which will move the liability of fraudulent charges to the merchant if your point-of-sale terminals are not EMV chip-enabled terminals (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa).

Even if you are in a contract right now, contact your current merchant services company to ask about the incentives that Visa is planning on offering merchants to upgrade their terminals. Best not to wait until the last minute in case the hardware is difficult to come by.

2 FEE SCHEDULES. Time to compare! CMS and many other carriers updated their fee schedules in January. Even if you don’t think you have gotten any notices from your carriers in the mail, you nonetheless need to review all carriers and obtain any new fee schedules that have been issued since your last one was updated. And, then, you need to program your systems.

It’s important to always know what you should be receiving for every service you provide from each and every insurance carrier or network with which you participate. How else will you know if they are paying you correctly?

By programming your fee schedules into your billing software/EMR/EHR, and assigning them correctly to your superbills, you are able to take all contractual adjustments at the time of service. That way, you will also always know what is actually outstanding, what you should be collecting from patients, and what you are missing at check out.

By having a clean A/R report, you are able to budget correctly and staff the practice appropriately. It is also a golden opportunity to review insurance carriers that you may need to stop accepting if reimbursements are too low.

3 SCHEDULING AND PATIENT FLOW. Your practice should review patient flow and chair costs annually. Pull your schedules for last year and determine how many patients you actually saw. Then calculate your per-patient cost. This is usually determined by the cost to run the practice (doctors’ salaries and optical are usually removed) divided by how many patients you saw last year.

This tells you how much you spend to see each patient and may give you a better idea of additional ways to increase patient contact while limiting per-patient cost.

— Krystin Keller

Krystin Keller is an instructor and consultant with Cleinman Performance Partners, a business consultancy specializing in the development of high-performing optometry practices.