Adapting Your Practice to Increased Patient Volumes!

The healthcare landscape is changing drastically and most practices in order to survive will also require making changes. Whether a practice is participating or not in an ACO and other innovative payment models; no matter the size of the set-up; all medical practices will eventually require finding ways to adapt to the increased number of insured patients.

Industry Standards State

With the Affordable Care Act more than 30 million individuals are expected to gain health insurance

Considering the upcoming influx of newly insured physicians need to rethink their patient flow and find a solution which suits their set-up, to ensure smooth flow of operations and returns. Moreover they will also need to look into practice management issues to avoid penalties and earn population-management bonuses.

Steps a practice can take to adapt to this change

With the expected increase in patient population various practices are thinking of adding physicians, physician assistants or nurse practitioners, however for continued profitability there are various other developments which will have to be considered-

Evaluating areas of the practice-

• The first step is to decide which areas need to be addressed depending on the specialty like – patient safety areas, improving rates of few services and so on
• Identifying practice’s short- and long-term goals
• Short listing incentive plans which insurers may be offering from which the practice can benefit

Better patient care at you practice -

• Next the practice needs to ascertain how to improve patient care by establishing standard practices
• Installing a suitable electronic health record system can help determine patient flow, identify regular and irregular patients or group of high-risk patients
• Identify how patients are going to be suitably notified about a needed appointment
• Create stronger links with other sources of care in the community

Avoiding common mistakes as your medical practice expands-

• Effectively adjusting patient schedules to prevent too much overlap
• Ensure there are enough exam rooms and support staff to manage the increased patient volume
• Building a bigger infrastructure or adding new facilities to handle the expected influx of new patients
• Parking lots spaces and IT expansion are few things which can be overlooked
• Upgrading or paying license fees for an additional user of an electronic health record

Besides these practices can assess and document improvement in health of practice’s population and inform patients about the changes like – improved care, additional capacity or new services added to the practice, and so on.

In the end practitioners need to understand change requires good planning however there may be a few things that cannot be foreseen.  In this case the practice will need to recognize this problem quickly, and resolve it as soon as possible to ensure patients satisfaction hence guaranteeing continued patient flow and high revenue in the future.

Medicalbillersandcoders.com the largest consortium of medical billers and coders across all 50 US States has been successfully providing medical billing services for over a decade now. MBC’s experts with their in-depth industry knowledge can help practices adapt to higher patient volume by assisting practice’s determine areas of improvement.

Our clients can easily concentrate on improving their practice management as they rely on MBC for optimized billing services, well informed decisions, and improved communication. Our team with their years of industry experience can also assist in negotiating higher rates with payers and offer guidance to help gain incentives and bonus payments - an essential to remain successful in the changing US healthcare industry.