How to Optimize Your Medical Practice’s Revenue

Greater Efficiency in Practices Leads to Optimized Cash Flow…

As with any business, cash is vital to keep the doors open, the employees paid, and the patrons, or patients, happy and cared for. When it comes to a medical practice, it can be hard to find ways to optimize your revenue and increase streams to bring in more money. The key is to find helpful strategies that your practice can maintain over time to ensure cash never stops flowing. The following are some ways to optimize revenue at your medical practice.

Strong Financial Management

This one might seem obvious, but it is imperative to manage your finances efficiently. What money is going out of your practice each month? This can be in the form of overhead costs, payroll, and miscellaneous expenses. What areas can be cut from your expenditures to save your practice a bit of green each month? Chances are that you will uncover spending that is unnecessary at your practice, or that you are experiencing a small ROI on a large cost that can be removed. If a service isn’t bringing you a good return for your buck, don’t be afraid to remove it.

A strong revenue cycle management system aid you in this process. RCM systems facilitate the administrative and clinical functions associated with claims processing, payments, and revenue generation as according to RevCycleIntelligence.com. Through an RCM, the financial processes of identification, management, and collection between patient and providers can all be facilitated. An RCM system helps you optimize your revenue cycle at each point of the financial process. This helps that ensure you collect and increase revenue where and when you should.

Create (and Maintain) an Online Presence

Digital marketing is essential to your practice’s tool kit, even if you aren’t quite sold on it yet. Truth be told, practices that haven’t established an online presence are doing themselves a disservice in the long haul. Creating and maintaining a website or social media page creates an easy way for your practice to be found, seen, and recognized by anyone looking to visit, call, or find more information.

We recommend creating a website – if your practice doesn’t have the bandwidth to create one, outsource the heavy lifting to a digital marketing company, like Demandforce. A digital marketing company can get this process done for you efficiently, timely, and correctly. On your website, you can detail information about the following…

• Practice location
• Provider information/credentials
• Accomplishments/Awards/Recognitions
• Different ways to contact the practice
• Services provided at your organization
• Insurances accepted
• More…

The possibilities are truly endless, but these are some great ways to highlight how great your practice is. This also supports your revenue stream in attracting new patients and some sites even have the ability for patients to complete payments. The more ways you give patients to complete payments, the more likely you are to collect on patient statements.

Utilize Healthcare Information Technology

You have heard the expression, “you have to spend money to make money,” right? While the cost of that initial and ongoing investment is solely up to your practice, most of the following technological investments will help your practice save and make money over time if you are using them optimally…

• Telehealth: Utilizing telehealth for virtual video visits opens up a whole other stream of visits for patients. This allows for even more visits throughout your day, if your practice has the capacity to allot for the appointments.
• Appointment Reminder Services: Many practices lose revenue by missed appointments, no shows, and late cancellations. If patients are better informed and reminded of appointment times, practices have a better chance of retaining revenue and fulfilling appointment times.
• Practice Management Systems: A full PM system includes all of your appointment scheduling, patient registration, billing, claims processing, clearinghouse integration, reporting, and much more. An investment into a PM system can bring billing in house and allow your practice to fulfill all RCM services and retain previously claimed revenue from outsourcing.

As you can see, there are many ways for your practice to grow, maintain, and create revenue streams. You might be surprised what revenue your practice can uncover when you dig a bit deeper.

Are you interested in any of the services mentioned above or getting started with MicroMD? Visit us at micromd.com/marketplace or call us at 800.624.8832 today.