Physician practices are expected to evolve and keep up with the changing healthcare landscape. In order to do so, physician practices need a way to measure their performance and make necessary changes in order to stay competitive. At this point, there is no one set of metrics that will work for all physician practices because every practice has its own unique needs. However, below we have outlined 6 major metric classes for a physician practice that should be tracked on an ongoing basis.
Medical Billing KPIs: Medical billing should be a top priority for physician practices because it has the potential to become their largest expense and cause large losses if not monitored closely. It’s important that an accurate accounting of charges and collections be achieved by obtaining data on all forms of patient payments from insurance companies, patients, Medicare/Medicaid etc., as well as reconciling accounts receivables with payables monthly. Counting number of claims paid vs submitted, Denial dollars as well as claims denied is a good metric to keep an eye on.
Patient Satisfaction Metrics: A physician practice should be measuring their patient satisfaction on an ongoing basis. It is important to measure this because patients are becoming more and more aware of other options for care, so it becomes necessary to keep them happy with the service they are receiving by tracking how satisfied they are. When a patient’s satisfaction is high, they are less likely to switch providers or leave for another care option.
Productivity: Physician productivity will vary depending on many factors such as specialty practice type (e.g.: medical group vs solo), but in general there are three ways to measure this number: RVUs (relative value units), hours billed, and revenue generated. This number should specifically be tracked per physician, as well as , per specialty in a multi-specialty practice.
Patient Panels: This can be defined in many different ways but some common metrics include Patient Panel size, which is the number of patients in the provider's care for the past three years.
Patient Reschedule and Cancellation Rates: Physician practices need to be aware of how often patients reschedule or cancel their appointments with them. This number can vary depending on the practice but it is important that they know what percentage of patients are cancelling or rescheduling as this will have an effect on a practice’s bottom line. If your cancellation rates are high it may highlight an underlying reason that is causing it.
Practice Expenses: Another metric physician practices should keep track of are expenses because not all expense categories correlate directly to revenue generation so it needs to monitored closely and changes made accordingly if there is an imbalance in numbers (i.e. cost per patient ). Operating costs, including labor and supply costs, can be beneficial to to track in your practice.
While tracking this is critical, physician practices often find it hard to integrate various data sources to get all the information is one place. If your practice struggles with that, please contact us at info@purple-pivot.com to see how we can help you.