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Let me ask you a question, how much revenue has your private practice lost due to simple revenue cycle workflow mistakes? After 12 years of auditing private practices, books, operations, and systems, I’ve found a trend of private practices leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table on an annual basis.
Worse yet, I’ve seen pediatric therapy private practices leave over $50,000 in lost revenue.
The bottom line is they don’t realize the money that’s getting swept under the rug based on a lack of transparency in their numbers.
Now, let me be clear. I’m not finding $10,000 under one rock. I’m finding $50,000 under a hundred thousand rocks. I’m finding a dollar here and $10 here and $13 here, and I see the same mistakes happen over and over again.
Often there’s a lack of systems, a lack of checks and balances, and a lack of responsibility in ensuring that they look under every single rock of revenue.
I’m here today to unlock five strategies to optimizing your private practice billing and collections process so you’re not losing $50,000 annually due to compound mistakes.
First things first, I am picking on pediatrics today. Why? Because I find they tend to leave the most amount of money on the table due to simple reoccurring mistakes.
True fact, I made these mistakes. I suffered from them.
My private family practice suffered from these mistakes because we outsourced our billing and didn’t have checks and balances put into place. Fortunately, I fixed them over 12 years ago, and I am here today to help you resolve any billing mistakes your practice is having.
So I want you to know why these mistakes frequently happen in private practice revenue cycle management.
The first reason is I find private practice owners fear anything related to finance. They hate confrontation pertaining to money. They don’t want to collect it, and they’re afraid to ask for it.
In most cases, they contract someone else to do it. Therefore, they often give up responsibility and control for their bottom line.
Another reason that I see is that pediatric private practices don’t create detail-oriented workflows. They’re hiring in volume, but they have no checks and balances.
They rely a hundred percent on the technology to spit out and tell the person what to do. We’re dealing more and more with bodies in the workforce instead of people thinking on their toes and taking responsibility for the bottom line.
I was recently running a report for a private practice client.
Two weeks ago, we were doing some payroll numbers for them. And I found an error in one of the variables of the report. The report was literally calculating billing units by an extra 0.25, and they didn’t catch it.
If I had not caught this, they would have trusted the data, and they would have paid out tens of thousands of dollars annually based on overpayment to their staff.
So we must catch these discrepancies by understanding how data may be misrepresented due to human error or misfiring in data calculations. You can then build a workflow that ensures that every T is crossed, every I is dotted, et cetera.
I want you to fight and confront the finances. Ultimately don’t give up your responsibility. Harness that data and that responsibility and understand this is so important.
Are you ready?
I’ve heard it before. Brandon, this sounds hard, but it’s not at all. All you have to do is break down the key areas of collections.
You need to understand your productivity, and measure your cash flow, and your profitability.
Every team member should be measured in that process to get an outside perspective of your revenue cycle management reports.
Don’t simply trust in house.
Whatever it may be, but you have to make sure there are no camouflage holes in your reporting. It is worth its weight in gold to develop a financial modeling habit to ensure that numbers are within 1% of your forecasting.
Create your patient portal and automate your collections process. Don’t let someone input the wrong data. It’ll make a world of difference for you.
This sounds so generic, so simple, but it’s so true. Every office I go into, I look at their documents, and I look at their process.
And the number one mistake they make is there’s no forecasting of expense to the patients. There’s no understanding of what’s my responsibility.
It’s kind of like, “Hey, you know what? We’ll bill your insurance, and we’ll find out well when that bill comes, whether it’s $25 or $85”.
It’s ten times harder to collect when your patients don’t know what’s coming their way.
So be proactive, give them the different functional milestones of what they may be responsible for on a financial level.
My name is Brandon Siegal, and I’m the president of Wellness Works Management Partners. I spend my day in and day out coaching, consulting, and partnering with private practices just like yours. I’m on a mission to change the world one private practice at a time.
If you’re a private practice owner and want to maintain autonomy in your business while pushing for more growth, a Healthcare Management Service Organization (MSO) may be the solution you are seeking to optimize efficiency, find the right people, increase revenue, and reach new patients.
