With increasing administrative burden and rising costs, staying profitable is a constant challenge for healthcare practices. Although there are a hundred ways to improve the processes and increase revenue in a medical practice, it is difficult to pick a few. In this guide, we have outlined a few strategies that any medical practice can implement to increase their revenue.
Patient collections have a direct impact on your practice. Collecting payments from patients is increasingly becoming difficult for many practices. Ask for copays or coinsurance payments while serving patients; this can certainly help address some issues in revenue cycle management. In general, billing specialists understand how to approach patients with outstanding balances and can work out a plan. If you have uncollected bills or spending too much time and money on overdue payments, it’s a good sign you need a practice collection overhaul. Having a system that can track the overdue payments and collections is all that is needed to keep money in the practice.
Approving prescription refills over the phone requires you to spend time and cost you more money, and if the patient doesn’t show up, your practice can’t recover those costs. First-time patients can be rescheduled for a follow-up appointment within a month to ensure patients are not encountering any problems with the prescription. Setting up a policy requiring patients to come to the office to refill prescriptions after 90 days can be beneficial.
Physicians spend more time on checkup calls or emails with patients. While this helps patients, this is an unbillable process for doctors. Handling the patient follow-up calls with an automated system or online telemedicine video visits can help doctors get paid for. This can be a great revenue generator for your practice.
Managing schedule effectively can generate revenue for your practice, but if it is poorly managed it can result in revenue loss instead. No-shows and unfilled appointment slots will make your practice lose money. Training your front office staff properly can help ensure that appointments are scheduled strategically. Double-booking appointments should be done in a well-chosen slot as more patients will not show up for the scheduled appointment.
A practice may have different types of visits. Doing an analysis of the types of appointments can help you set timelines and you will also know what resources need to be scheduled. You can then customize the scheduler based on your resources and schedule appointments at your best times. Scheduling appointments for visits give you more control over scheduling and help you get more patients each day and improves the experience by reducing wait times.
One in three patients doesn’t show up. Look at the schedule and try to figure out a group of patients who are most likely to cancel or don’t show up. Double-booking appointments for these patients can help increase revenue for your practice.
Last-minute cancellations can be a huge drain on your practice cash flow. Outline a cancellation policy and make sure you communicate it to every patient. Discuss the policy at the time of booking appointments and send reminder emails out to patients. Collecting cancellation fees can be easy, you can bill patients using electronic statements. Allowing patients to pay online can increase patient payments and improve the turnaround time of those payments.
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