Consumerism in healthcare and the transition to value-based care has had far-reaching effects. Profitability for providers depends on both satisfying their current clientele and expanding their clientele base.
Even while this difficulty may seem insurmountable, there are strategies to increase your practice’s productivity and income while keeping your team from becoming overworked. It gets even better since you may raise profits without sacrificing the high quality of care your patients want and expect.
As long as you’re willing to put in the effort, there are ways to increase the productivity and profitability of your practice without overburdening your personnel.
Give these three suggestions some thought:
1. Increase positive interactions between healthcare providers and their patients
To maintain and grow their patient base and achieve financial targets, practices must improve the quality of their patient’s interactions with the organization.
In spite of this, many people worry that implementing cutting-edge technologies or expanding service offerings may put providers at a financial disadvantage. They are concerned that making adjustments to better serve their patients will have a negative impact on their financial line.
What does it cost to have unhappy patients? A recent poll found that 91 percent of dissatisfied individuals stated they would not return to or suggest their previous medical provider. When weighed against the expense of bringing in new patients, patient churn caused by dissatisfaction with care is an argument against using technology to improve connections between doctors and their patients.
Providing a patient portal and enforcing a patient-centric strategy to increase its use is one of the simplest and most immediately beneficial strategies to enhance patient-provider interaction. That way, the practice’s employees can devote more time to actually taking care of patients rather than juggling paperwork. Patient involvement requirements for value-based payments can be met with the help of online patient portals, which are available on a wide variety of devices and feature quick and easy registration, encrypted messaging, and instant access to medical records.
Patients can use portals to access their health records and communicate with their providers. More efficient service delivery is another benefit. Practices can improve patient compliance with treatment regimens and cut no-show rates by as much as 56 percent simply by sending out automated appointment reminders.
2. Using data and analytics to fill in the gaps in patient care
Although analytics are increasingly being used in clinical settings, they still have a ways to go before they are widely implemented in other areas of healthcare. According to a survey conducted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), only 21.6 percent of healthcare organizations use analytics for population health, and even fewer, just under 11 percent, use these insights for chronic care management.
Solutions that mine patient data using analytics are available for use in your clinic. Value-based care programs can get efficiency and revenue boosts from the insights provided by these solutions. Using an analytics system, your clinic may boost its efficiency on three fronts: with patients, doctors, and overall operations.
Benchmarking performance, comparing quality metrics, and disseminating information to payers are all possible with the aid of analytics. To return the favor, these insurers can learn how to better ensure the health of their populations. You can monitor workflow and see how well your business is doing financially in real-time, and you can set up alerts when key performance metrics dip thanks to these technologies. You can either change your billing practices to reduce revenue lost to payer rejections, or you can prioritize training on workflows that enhance data capture for quality metrics.
3. Use technologies that can be upgraded in the future
Over the past decade, there has been a near-doubling of the usage of electronic health records (EHRs) by office-based physicians, with 86% installing some form of an EHR system. Make sure the EHR you choose is flexible enough to satisfy your present and future demands.
The goal of developing cutting-edge EHRs is to help practices expand while remaining compatible with existing procedures.
Business intelligence and automation elements, such as artificial intelligence and speech recognition, are standard in other sectors but are only now making their way into the healthcare sector, therefore it is important that these systems take advantage of them. The EHR should be able to communicate with your patient portal and messaging systems, and it should aid doctors by recommending preventative measures and subsequent actions.
By using these three measures, medical facilities may increase the productivity of their doctors, nurses, and other support workers, and provide the excellent treatment that modern patients want. Medical centers will see increased profits and improved patient acquisition after first investing in technology solutions to support these objectives.