If you watched Moneyball without marveling at how much weight Jonah Hill had lost since then, this article is for you.
Oh, and if you’re a doctor who wants to know how to protect your medical practice from best practice myths that seem too good to be true, you should probably click the ‘continue reading’ button below.
The premise behind the Moneyball-inspired line of thought is simple enough to state: how can your practice achieve better results without spending more money, and preferably cutting back on costs overall. It’s a bit tougher to put into motion, as anyone with a debit card and a fixed salary knows.
Still, when there’s a will there’s a way. Check out a few Moneyball tips to help you do more with less.
Evidence Based Medicine
Evidence based medicine (EBM) is perhaps the most literal translation of the Moneyball line of thought in the medical setting.
Trisha Greenhalgh and Anna Donald define EBM as “the use of mathematical estimates of the risk of benefit and harm, derived from high-quality research on population samples, to inform clinical decision-making in the diagnosis, investigation of management of individual patients.”
EBM seeks to examine the evidence of risks and benefits and diagnostic tests, helping you predict whether a treatment will do more good than harm to a patient. Evidence can be judged based on the strength of the source, and you evaluate performance to circle back and bolster the procedure.
The more precise the treatment for a given condition becomes, the more likely you are to retain a patient, as well as create more time for you to acquire new ones.
Looking Up to Health IT
Implementing an EHR is an easy way to do more with less money – you save money on extra staff, waste less paper and you’re able to see more patients.
Purchase an EHR with an integrated practice management system and you’ll keep your office working smoothly. A revenue cycle management system will help you on the medical billing front by unbundling bundled payments, essentially.
Furthermore, implementing a system with business intelligence capabilities, analytics will drive your practice to implement cost-efficient strategies to streamline your workflow.
And not only do you know where your business stands at any given moment, but data-driven practices enhance a switch to evidence based medicine.
Performance Based Value
Using metrics in evidence-based medicine at your practice will help you look towards value-based approaches to healthcare delivery, taking analytics metrics and other recordable numbers and evaluating the performance of specific therapeutic strategies.
Not to mention, since evidence-based medicine has come to symbolize the most rational side of practicing medicine, standardization and reimbursement benefit from cold, hard facts, so to speak. Anecdotal authority suddenly takes a backseat.
Don’t think you’re compromising your values, now. If you believe you’re committing a crime against the humanism inherent in the medical profession, think again. Demanding evidence of value in medicine and demanding attention to numerical logic doesn’t place contextualized medical judgment at risk.
Have you watched Moneyball yet? If not, check it out and let us know what you think.
