As a medical services provider, your professional goal is to see as many patients as possible while balancing your daily endeavors with patient care. After all, you could likely see one patient per five minutes, but you would certainly not be able to seriously address concerns, run tests, and offer true patient care overeall by taking this approach.
The key to seeing multiple patients per day comes down to time management and billing, but how you do these two things can be the difference between succeeding and failing as a medical practitioner and healthcare provider. As a result, many healthcare providers are turning to group visits in order to see as many patients as possible while still providing the best in care.
The Advantages of Group Visits
Seeing multiple patients who share the same or similar conditions at once can lead to a variety of benefits. First off, people sharing the same or a similar condition often find solace in congregating with others who are in the same or similar situations. As the Internet has evolved, medical sites often scare people into believing that they are alone in suffering from various conditions or diseases, and this can lead to the worsening of a condition or the development of unforeseen conditions, such as depression or anxiety.
If you take on too large of a group, or if you disclose personal health concerns regarding individuals in the group, your practice may be in trouble.
By bringing together a variety of people who are seeking answers, your practice can calm people and elevate their mood. Likewise, group visits can reduce costs as it may only take an hour or less to address the concerns of a number of people, thereby making your practice more profitable. In a nutshell, group visits offer patients the ability to feel welcome, to address their concerns, and to receive solid advice and treatment prescriptions from your medical practice.
The Disadvantages of Group Visits
Of course, group visits are not without their challenges, and it will be up to you to determine whether such an approach is right for your patients. While group care can provide support for patients experiencing a particular condition, it may also lead to problems related to privacy laws. If you aren’t managing group visits properly, your practice may find itself facing lawsuits over the disclosure of personal details of patients. As such, group visits should never involve individual details regarding history or conditions, but instead, should be educational in nature and offer information that provokes changes in the group as a whole.
PracticeSuite Can Assist in Group Visit Billing
The end result of group visits can affect the bottom line of any medical practitioner who is participating, so it only makes sense to take advantage of group visit coding practices as well. In doing so, you should consider cloud-based services, such as those provided by PracticeSuite, when deciding upon your provider. PracticeSuite offers top-level free and enterprise medical billing software to help you manage individual patients and groups in order to maximize revenue, reduce costs, and provide the best in patient care.
Andrew Rusnak is an author who writes on topics that include healthcare technology and business development.
