Thomson Reuters found that the medical industry wastes $700 billion annually on avoidable, identifiable issues. How much of that comes from your practice every year?
The only way to pinpoint wasted spending, or any other area of weakness, is to consistently monitor and track business performance data.
Power Your Practice understands the financial challenges medical practices are facing and is here to help. Every week during our A/R Best Practices series, we’re describing the must-have features managers need to look for in practice management systems to manage and collect all of their receivables.
Reporting, Analytics, and Business Intelligence Have Major Benefits
Making the right decisions for a medical practice requires access to complete, easy-to-understand sets of data. Real-time news feeds and ubiquitous access to practice information through web-based software allows for early trend recognition.
It’s important to be able to mine data for billing and collection trends to figure out where the practice can improve. The only way to do that is to have all the data in one place electronically and use a system with robust reporting and analytics capabilities.
The best systems allow you to schedule reports to be created at certain intervals for ongoing analysis, as well as generate custom reports on the fly when specific information is needed quickly. It’s also important to find a system that allows those reports to be shared with all the people who need to see them.
The top reporting engines create reports in a variety of formats (for example, HTML, PDF, CSV, etc.), automatically send them to distribution lists, and allow multiple users to view the reports online, comment on them, share their perspectives and ask questions, all within the system.
Choosing a system with strong reporting capabilities offers several benefits for practices:
1. Better decision making – Allowing key reports to be easily created – as well as easily understood – helps make sure all the necessary data is digested before important decisions are made.
2. Higher productivity – Generating and sharing reports automatically means practice staff members no longer have to spend time gathering data, printing reports, and distributing them by hand.
3. Catch underpayments and other mistakes – Advanced reporting capabilities make it easier to audit payments received against the practice’s payer contracts, so the practice can make sure it’s being paid according to its contracts.
How do you aggregate and analyze your data?
Next week, we’ll highlight how electronic remittance tools can help ensure full, accurate payments.
