The catalyst for this shift is obvious. As you move from 1 location and 1,000 patients to, say, 10 locations and 10,000 patients, you cannot possibly look in the mouth of every patient, review every chart or personally resolve every insurance filing discrepancy. And, just as clearly, you cannot be in every office on every operating day. If you want to maintain your same role as before, either have a strong manager to run the business side or be prepared to hear an analogy about Nero and Rome burning. Yes, information is vital and you know how we feel about the importance of it.
Right from the start, you need a methodology to monitor your operation on a larger scale. Keeping track of individual payments in a one office model is very doable. In a group practice, it is nearly impossible. You need to look at summary numbers and exceptions to determine whether or not a problem exists and what you should do to resolve the problem. In sum, quality information and reporting becomes vital to the life of your business.
Without it, you will potentially miss a problem and get buried underneath the rubble from the avalanche it creates. If you recall our history post, a doctor trying to build a group practice in Florida did not have good collection information, got robbed and had to give up the practice. In another, a doctor in Colorado ignored the information that told him that consultations were in steep decline in one of his offices. Current collections were just fine because he had a solid existing patient base, but he did not see the crash in collections looming on the horizon when the existing patients finished making payments and new patients were not there to replace them.
If you are going to have a successful group practice, your reporting needs to have the following characteristics:
It needs to be timely
Daily or weekly updates are a must. If you wait until the end of the month or quarter, you may have missed a key problem that could have been solved with some updated data. In some cases, we’ve seen practices with data as much as 6 months delayed. By that point, conditions have changed to the point that using that old data to make current decisions is a pointless task.
It needs to be simple
We’ve all seen the standard reports from the practice management software out there. Lots of numbers and lots of detail – collections broken down by type, past due reports, etc. And, that is very, very useful when you need to drill down on a problem and analyze results. But in a group practice setting, you don’t have time to generate reports, review them, ferret out the problem areas and start solving those problems –and you don’t need to spend the money to pay someone to do it. Rather, your reporting should focus on contracts (and the components of selling those contracts) and collections. Generation of the numbers should already be done for you.
It needs to note the exceptions for you
Even summary numbers can take time to interpret. How do the numbers look in the absolute? How do they compare to the same period a year ago? How do the numbers compare to the other offices in your system? Wouldn’t it be easier to have a system that does the comparisons, flags the problem areas and points them out to you? With that, you can wake up in the morning, grab your cup of coffee, fire up the internet machine (or check your phone for text messages) and be directed to areas of concern. Before you finish that coffee, you know what needs to be handled and, with the right knowledge base, how to handle it. The rest of the day can be focused on implementation of solutions, adding new patients and other productive tasks.
Beyond that, there are a number of other things you should seek from your reporting. Integration between your practice management software and your financial accounting software give you a deeper understanding of issues facing your practice. Customization to analyze any specific problems with each office or handle one-off events like incentive programs should be includable.
Normally, at this point, I’d try to give you references to entities out there that have done this well. But this is different. Reporting is something that was crucial to building OCA and it is something that we do today. We constantly seek ways to get better, more useful information from our system to assist us and our doctors in building the best practices that they can build. The picture included in this post is an actual report from one of our offices (some areas blacked out for confidentiality purposes). Note the red items that point out problem areas. Also note the simplicity: key values, a few trend graphs and that’s it. We know what issues this practice has and how to solve them.
In other words, we have done this for a long time. Because we are heavily involved in the data end of group and individual practices every day – from the individual transaction level on up-- we know what numbers have meaning, how to generate them and what makes a number worthy of your attention. Unlike outside accountants, we have the day-to-day involvement and expertise in this practice. We also do not have a cost associated with us. Practice management software companies will certainly tout their reporting capabilities, but again, they are not involved in managing the offices on an operational basis. Again, there may be a cost involved with that software company that exceeds ours. Heck, we've dug so deep into data that we can rather easily transfer our reporting services to any kind of business enterprise.
Even if you are nervous about providing us with access to information, at least let us take a no cost look at your reporting and provide you with some guidance. In a lot of cases, I really think we can help. Please feel free to contact us.
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