Practice Management Hack #1: Benchmarking Your Practice For Efficiency And Growth
Benchmarking is used in almost every industry in order to monitor and measure performance. At its core, the process involves an initial measurement or measurements of data that establish a benchmark to which all other efforts must meet or exceed in order to be considered successful.
In the healthcare industry, especially when it comes to coding and billing, benchmarking is crucial in ensuring that not only are your patients being billed correctly, but also that cash flow is improved month over month, year over year. With a benchmark in place, you can then see where certain aspects of your operation are not hitting the mark, thereby giving you valuable insights that can be used to make corrections, streamline your practice or healthcare facility, and provide greater care to patients at lower costs.
How to Establish a Benchmark
Among the factors that are involved in creating a benchmark, costs, time spent, and quality delivered are among the top three. This means that you will need to measure such aspects of your practice over time, typically monthly, in order to see where everything averages out. When making comparisons, you’ll also want to compare your benchmark testing against industry averages and even your competitors if possible.
In order to create an accurate benchmark, pay close attention to things like denials and rejections for insurance claims and payments, time spent completing paperwork and office visits as well as patient satisfaction surveys and reports. Software will likely make the establishment of a benchmark easier, faster, and more cost-efficient.
What to Do After You’ve Identified a Benchmark
After identifying a benchmark, or standard, you’ll then need to carefully analyze the data used to identify it in order to find out why the benchmark was achieved and how to continue to achieve or surpass it. You should then measure changes or potential changes to your practice’s coding and billing system against the benchmark. This can sometimes be done using models or estimates prior to a change being made, but in the end, if you implement a change, it needs to be measured against the benchmark.
If something isn’t meeting the standard, you’ll then have the chance to investigate and make changes accordingly. In order to make this process more efficient and effective, you’ll likely want to use management software for your practice that allows you to create benchmarks and measure against them.
Contact PracticeSuite to Learn More About Medical Software Solutions for Benchmarking
PracticeSuite offers a range of solutions to assist medical practices and facilities with benchmarking their current and future goals. Through PracticeSuite’s cloud-based practice management software, you can easily identify what is and is not working at your practice by tracking and analyzing coding and billing trends. In addition, PracticeSuite’s software solutions offer additional functionality to better manage other aspects of your practice, including training for annual changes in the ICD-10 coding standard. If you’re not currently using software to benchmark your practice’s medical billing and coding standards, contact PracticeSuite today to learn more about the benefits of medical billing software.
More on Benchmarking | What To Measure, How To Measure, and When To Measure
