How will more Patient Visits Reduce Practice Revenue?

Let’s admit that there is a realistic limit to how many patients a doctor can see in a single day.  Additionally amidst the current physician shortage it becomes increasingly clear to physicians that patient volume’s above or below a limit may adversely affect the bottom line of the practice.

Industry Standards

Various practices sometimes due to physician shortages may over cross their patient limit - leading to reduced patient satisfaction.

Dissatisfied patients are likely to harm a practice as it would lead to a decline in future referrals from the right sources besides marring the practice's reputation. Moreover while combating attrition means replacing one patient with another; it does so at a high cost to the practice - eventually hindering the practice revenue.

When more than adequate patients affect a practice’s income adversely?

• Seeing more patients requires harder work, creates more stress and an also result in poor quality care if not handled correctly
• The extent of harm to a practice's revenue is actually proportional to the number of its scheduling inefficiencies while dealing with too many patients

These scheduling inefficiencies may include - late provider arrivals, overabundance of same-day appointments, excessive appointment durations, unmanaged no-show frequency, and inadequate planning for peak demand cycles –leading to unhappy patients.

Practice’s can make an organized approach to increase their patient volumes prudently…

The goal of any business, including a practice, is to increase income to its shareholders by selling more to every patient, hence few steps doctors can take to increase patient volumes strategically:

However amidst industry changes it is difficult for doctors to find time to streamline patient volumes in this manner along with concentrating on billing, patient care and other administrative activities.

Industry changes increasing patient flow volumes

• Although the shortage started much earlier, the new law will make matters worse with physicians likely to retire early or reduce work hours in response to the new healthcare reforms
• Specialties such as Primary Care are overloaded with work and are unable to attend to new patients
• With the anticipated Medicare cuts various doctors may no longer accept new Medicare patients, which is already the trend with many doctors today

Physicians hence may find it imperative to get a specialized billing service to help improve patient volumes strategically.

Increasing patient numbers strategically with MBC