Articles

Even if you’ve mastered the intricacies of medical billing and have honed the practice of billing insurers and patients to an absolute science, that’s not enough to effectively manage your business’s cash flow. While efficient billing is key, it’s important to look beyond billing to the overall picture of your business’s cash flow so you can maintain a healthy level of working capital.

On any given day, dozens of sick people stream through reception areas and exam rooms of medical offices carrying millions of germs. Fortunately, there are many different ways in which medical practices can modify their policies and environment to maintain a healthier practice. Protecting employees from workplace illnesses ensures that the practice continues business as usual, even during flu season or periods of high pollen and other allergens found in the outside environment.

Since healthcare providers rely considerably on insurance reimbursements for their income, it makes sense to develop good relationships with payors. Admittedly, dealing with insurance-company policies can be tricky and even cumbersome for busy medical providers, but there are some surefire methods to create stronger, better payor/payee relationships and make the reimbursement process a smoother, faster one. Read on for expert tips on how to do so.

In Part II of the series, MOT explores how different demographic groups choose a physician, and how patients’ methods for choosing are evolving over time. Turns out, gender and age do matter when it comes to choosing a physician. Understanding these differences can help you hone your marketing efforts, from augmenting your referral network to learning the various interacting styles of different demographic groups.

The Internet, social media in particular, is an effective tool for medical practices to recruit new employees because that’s where your target audience spends a lot of time. Traditional networking strategies such as association luncheons and industry cocktail parties are taking a backseat to online networking. Today’s healthcare job seeker is using the web and social media channels to find job opportunities, connect with potential employers and network with colleagues in new ways.

HIPAA regulations were designed to provide patients with privacy about their medical conditions and personal records – not to bankrupt practices that are struggling to comply. But it’s easy to see how you could spend a lot of money unnecessarily while trying to follow the letter of the law. Here, MOT offers a bevy of tips to save you money while complying with HIPAA.

All medical office practitioners should familiarize themselves with the accessibility requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Rehabilitation Act. Since we last wrote about this topic in 2010, the regulations implementing the accessibility requirements for newly designed and constructed and altered facilities have been revised.

Patients can easily tire of standard methods for gauging satisfaction, such as written surveys, which can be time-consuming on both ends and not necessarily revealing. Also, patients may not be completely truthful when these methods are being used. So how is a busy practitioner supposed to know how he or she is doing in the minds of patients? MOT spoke to healthcare providers and experts in determining patient satisfaction levels to discover fresh methods for figuring out what patients really think. Here, the methods they use with success.

In the 1980s, the auto manufacturing industry embraced 5S methodology, which is based on the philosophy that untidy, cluttered work areas are not productive. Although automotive assembly seems far removed from your medial office, the introduction of 5S methodology is actually a natural progression into the healthcare environment and is very applicable since workplace organization is of utmost importance when dealing with patient care/treatment, and the overall patient experience.

Every day, 90 million Americans are stumped by seemingly simple information passed out in healthcare-related environments just like yours. Follow up instructions and appointment slips, facts regarding a new diagnosis, and details about upcoming tests or procedures. The ability to improve health literacy in the population groups you see starts with you and the efforts you make to ensure they comprehend what is happening around them.

Employees are no longer spending the majority of their working years with one organization. Job hopping, while still somewhat taboo, is certainly more commonplace than celebrating 25 years with the same company. For medical practices, that means providers will come and go, even physicians who have a stake in the practce, so  it’s important to have a plan in place. Here, MOT offers five steps to help you handle this situation.

Ideally, all your employees and outsourced personnel would have a strong enough moral compass to keep personal information such as patient records, payment information and other sensitive data private and only used the way it was intended. The reality is that back-office fraud happens more often than you might think, and it can seriously damage your practice in more ways than one.