Content about Operations

It may seem innocuous, but patient check-in is an extremely important part of running your medical practice. From making a first impression on the patient to collecting important data and payment to moving the office visit and treatment process along, patient check-in holds a lot of value. Well-run practices have efficient patient check-in procedures that help the patient feel welcome and cared for, minimize wait times and take care of the “housekeeping” part of the patient/practice relationship. Here, MOT details five ways your practice can improve patient check-in.

Dealing with any personal issue involving employees is never easy, and personal hygiene is especially uncomfortable. If an employee has a personal-hygiene problem, you may be tempted to ignore it and hope it’ll go away, but these things rarely do. Plus, if you do ignore it, it’s bound to snowball and become a bigger issue for your practice—one that could drive patients and other good employees away.

As a medical office practitioner, you want to spend your increasingly limited value-added time and energy practicing medicine as opposed to non-value-added administrative tasks. So what can you do to focus more on your patients and less on the business side of running your practice? One thing you can consider is outsourcing your billing and collections. Here MOT details five signs you need to outsource these functions.

Real estate investing is not always the first thing doctors consider when they make the move to open a practice or expand operations – but with a significant uptick in medical developments opening in 2013, medical professionals have an excellent opportunity to get in the game and solidify their practices.

For any small business, including medical offices, the decision about when it’s appropriate to hire additional staff can be a perplexing one. On the one hand, more staff tends to suggest increased opportunities to get things done, or to positively impact service. On the other hand, particularly in service-oriented industries like healthcare, more staff means higher costs of service. Finding the right balance can be tricky and the “right” decisions are often counter-intuitive.

The do-it-yourself or D-I-Y trend has become quite popular among homeowners looking to save money or gain satisfaction by renovating, decorating or landscaping on their own. In the medical arena, D-I-Y has become more popular recently as practices look for ways to make up for reimbursement and revenue shortfalls. It can be very rewarding to save money by doing certain things yourself, but not everything in a medical practice is – or should be – D-I-Y, for the sake of you, your staff or your patients.

Since most medical practices depend on insurance reimbursements for a majority of their income, it’s important to view payors as key partners to help you grow your business. In fact, a solid relationship with your payors is essential to the smooth operation and profitability of your practice. While most practices are content with the relationships they have, there are times when it makes sense to add new payor partners to your practice. Below are three common times during the operation of your practice when you should consider adding new payors.

While the use of clinical interns is commonplace in medical practices, many may not be taking advantage of other, non-clinical, opportunities to use interns as a source of staffing to help drive productivity. Universities, technical colleges – and even high schools – can be good sources of energetic, enthusiastic and low-cost/no-cost assistance for medical practices. For medical practices, internships provide two key benefits: access to a pool of talent that can bring enthusiasm and fresh perspectives at low cost and on a temporary basis and a link to the academic community and the opportunity to support student learning.

One of the most important areas of your medical office is the nurse station. Whether you realize it or not, the nurse station is the physical “hub” of your practice, a place where staff members exchange communication about patients and move them on to the next stage of care. For such an important purpose, the design of your nurse station is critical to your practice’s flow. A well-designed nurse station can move you, your patients and your staff along smoothly throughout the day, while a poorly designed one can create chaos, opportunity for errors and poor communication.

How well do you understand Stark Law? The legislation was initially created to curb perceived unnecessary referrals and over-utilization of services by physicians within groups or at facilities to referral recipients with which they have ownership or financial interests. It can impact your practice in very specific ways. Here, MOT reviews three common scenarios in which Stark Law applies to your practice.

Medical practices spend a tremendous amount of time teaching and training employees on policies, procedures and detailed instruction of where everything goes and what to do to streamline the operation of the office. Where they fall down on the job is business etiquette and office professionalism. They take for granted the new staff member is well versed in compassion and professionalism.

Decades ago, it was reasonable to imagine that one could work for the same company from the start of one’s career to the end. Times are different now. Workers change jobs (and often careers) with far more regularity than they did in the years following World War II.  Each time an employee leaves – whether voluntarily or otherwise – he or she can depart with valuable information and patient relationships. The higher an employee’s perch in a practice, the more likely it is that he or she can go to a competitor and move patients in the process.