Helping Medical Practices Increase Revenue

Dependable healthcare providers are increasingly difficult to find, so once you have hired, trained and on-boarded an employee, you need to do everything you can to retain them for the long term. Every time you have to hire a new nurse or medical professional, it costs your facility money; recent research suggests locating, screening and hiring a single nurse can cost your facility over $14,000. A physician or specialist is even more costly to replace; if you lose one of your doctors and you'll need to fork over a hefty $58,000 in recruitment, screening, onboarding and credentialing costs to replace them. Since the replacement process is so incredibly costly, it pays to retain your best employees as long as you can. 

The era of relying on word-of-mouth to grow your medical practice is long over. These days, many people look to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to find a new healthcare practitioners. That's where putting in a little bit of effort can make a big difference.

Unfortunately, many doctors fail to see the benefit of this approach and struggle with how to market themselves via social media. That’s why we have put together this list of ten tips for utilizing social media to bring in more patients to your practice.

For many medical practices, office expenses are on the rise, regulatory demands have increased, and reimbursement from insurance companies may be declining. When your overhead continues to rise but your revenue per patient is staying flat, you may be tempted to see even more patients or perform more procedures. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t work. You end working hard and faster, something that increasingly leads to dermatologist burnout. Instead of working harder, the key is to work smarter and increase efficiency. If your practice revenue has flatlined, the following four medical practice management strategies can help you reduce expenses and increase your revenue. 

Ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) are in for more challenges in the coming months as well as a new windfall from CMS, all of which will serve to create more challenges (and headaches for billing staff) in 2019 and beyond.  

With the emphasis by CMS to implement site-neutral policies to incentivize lower-cost settings, three major outcomes can be predicted, according to Linda R. O’Neill, the Health Industry Distributors Association (HIDA) Vice President of Government Affairs.

• These resulting lower costs are making ASCs much more attractive to potential buyers, such as hospitals looking for mergers and acquisitions in facilities favored by the latest CMS ASC rulings.
• Nearly a fifth of the healthcare executives who responded to HIDA’s survey reported that they are interested in acquiring surgical centers.
• On the other hand, over 70 percent of ASC decision makers don’t anticipate any mergers or acquisitions within the next two years.

Over the past decade, we have seen many changes in how medical care is delivered and consequently billed and reimbursed. One of the results is the greater financial burden placed upon patients themselves for charges not paid by insurers. This in turn has led to more delinquencies by patients and families for money owed for health care. In fact, a recent report showed that from 2009 to 2015, patient liability has jumped from $250 billion to almost $410 billion – and increase of nearly 70 percent in that relatively short time period!