There are two approaches to improving the financial health of your medical practice. One is to cut costs and the other is to increase revenue. Cutting costs will only get you so far on the road to better financial health. You must generate more income as well. If you aren’t sure where to start, look over these six ways to increase medical practice revenue and see if any of these approaches will work for your practice. You may find one or all of these ways to increase revenue are right for your medical practice.
#1 Nurture the Front Office
Your front office is literally the public face of your practice. You should pay close attention to how your office staff interact with patients. Remember, a happy front office staff translates into happy patients.
Hire personnel with more than just skills, look for those with a heart to serve. Then give them a comfortable working environment, training necessary to do their job well, personal time off, and positive feedback for a job well done.
Pay close attention to online reviews. Often dissatisfaction with a practice begins with dissatisfaction with the front office. When a positive review mentions a staff member by name, celebrate it!
Take a look at the waiting rooms as well. Make sure it is a comfortable temperature and that you provide ample relevant and recent reading material. Offer secure wi-fi and post the password so patients aren’t required to ask staff this question. Pay attention to the outside of your building as well. New patients begin to form their opinion about your office before they arrive at the front office.
#2 Find a Niche and Fill It
Survey the competition and the marketplace and look for niches. Then fill them. One of the best ways to increase medical practice revenue is to offer services when others won’t.
If your community is populated with providers that offer services Monday through Friday from 8 am to 4 pm, be the practice that’s closed on Thursdays and Fridays and open on Saturday and Sunday. Even if you offer only 1 week-end a month, you can increase your revenue.
Worried that evening or weekend appointments will affect your own work-life balance? Remember, you don’t have to do this alone. Employ a medical extender such as a physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner to help you extend your hours and your services to increase the revenue in your medical practice.
If your community lacks concierge medical services, explore the demand. Concierge medical care provides a stable source of revenue, and you can bill on a monthly or quarterly basis.
#3 Monitor No-shows
If your medical practice is plagued by no-shows it’s time to investigate the reasons. Do your patients have transportation problems? If you know transportation is a problem, then staff should discuss this with the patient when the appointment is made and again when it is confirmed. Look for solutions. Depending on the state in which you operate, Medicaid may offer a transportation assistance program.
Are your patients Gen X and Millennials? Replace confirmation phone calls with texts to confirm. Supply a link that lets the patient add the appointment to their iPhone calendar, Outlook, or Google Calendar with just a click.
And don’t forget to bill for no-show appointments. Under the current guidelines, you are allowed to bill Medicare patients for no-show appointments provided you treat all no-show appointments the same. In other words, if you’ve been billing patients with private insurance for no-shows, you can now bill Medicare patients when they fail to appear for an appointment.
#4 Change Collection Practices
Make sure you receive every dollar you earn. Collect co-pays at the time of the visit.
Make it easy to pay for your services. Instead of setting up a conventional payment plan for your services, partner with a medical financing company such as Carepayment or Care Credit.
Instead of bearing the costs of these receivables, you transfer them to the financing company. Some companies offer marketing services and patient incentives such as low-interest rates.
When you make financing available, you remove the cost barrier to performing services or procedures. Middle- and lower-income patients don’t have the financial resources to pay for procedures and services, and thus put them off. Or, when it becomes unavoidable, they may be faced with decisions such as paying medical bills or rent or utilities. Unfortunately, medical bills always lose out to housing, heating, or food.
But, by creating a partnership with a medical financing company, you provide patients a path to the treatment they can afford.
#5 Offer Complementary Services and Products
Another popular way to increase medical practice revenue is to increase the services you offer.
For busy patients that need monitoring, offer telemedicine services. Even audiologists, who traditionally have relied heavily on face-to-face interaction, are practicing tele-audiology, adjusting hearing aids, and performing diagnostic assessments remotely.
Many patients can benefit from nutrition counseling services in their quest to improve their health through an improved lifestyle.
You may consider adding medical-grade supplements to your practice. This increases the possibilities of patient compliance, assures you the patients receive high-quality supplementation and improves patient care and outcomes. And you increase revenue.
#6 A Medical Practice is a Business
You entered your healthcare field out of a desire to help other people. However, healthcare is a business. To be successful you need more than great medical skills, you need to understand marketing, how to control costs, and how to improve the amount of revenue coming into your practice. Then you can optimize processes for maximum profits. Increasing medical practice revenue is just one part of building a financially healthy practice.