Revenue Tracking: Is it Important?
Intro & Relation to (MD Efficacy)
MD Efficacy aims to maximize physicians’ efficiency and effectiveness. To achieve that, approaches to increase efficiency were discussed previously and shared in the published book, No Work After Hours, and I will continue to tackle them in this blog down the road. In addition, having an in-depth understanding of various revenue models and working on improving income is another goal for physician effectiveness. In this post, I’ll focus on revenue tracking.
Our education through medical school and training programs didn’t focus on financial education, billing and coding, or reimbursement models. I believe that this is a big problem. Even worse, there was a taboo around these discussions, ashaming them as if doctors shouldn’t focus on their income. On the other hand, many career paths, including residency, fellowship, and possibly alternate career paths, frequently have income as part of the choice. My personal belief is that this may be a big reason for physician burnout because the physician picked a suboptimal career choice, not based on passion, gifts, and talents, but on income or lifestyle.
My goal in this series is to tackle these topics and dive deeper into them while working on keeping them simple. Frankly, they are not rocket science, and are much simpler than what we studied during our education and career paths.
What is Revnue Tracking?
Tracking is to keep detailed data about your revenue. For example, the levels of charges for all your patients, data about those who didn’t show up, and how much white space (empty slots). How much do you make every clinic day? Do you have the data for different months and years? Can you see trends? This is what I mean by keeping track.
Why Revenue Tracking?
I believe that tracking is crucial for successful revenue optimization. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. If you have the gut feeling that your no-show rate is high and you decide to implement some change to your workflow to improve it, how will you measure the effectiveness of the change? If a month was off, is it an outlier or a trend? Data is powerful.
When you review your data, you can develop ideas for improvement. May be your billing can improve, filling the white space is inefficient, there is a high no-show rate, or your new/established patients’ ratio can improve.
How to Track your Revenue?
You may argue that you don’t have the time to keep track of that as it is a lot of work. I will partially agree; yes, it takes time. It will be overwhelming if you decide to sit down once a week or once a month to do that. This can take forever to dig into each day and chart. On the other hand, if you can develop the habit of logging the charge or status after every visit, it will take a few seconds for each visit to log the needed data. The key here is that you want it to be second nature, comparable to finishing the note and placing the charge. It takes time to develop, but once it is there, you will have achieved an efficient way of increasing your ability to control your revenue.
I used a spreadsheet to save my data; it took a bit of time to optimize it and have suitable formulae in place. Since then, it’s been working great. Excel, Numbers, and Google spreadsheets work great. You can create a database sheet if you’re a sophisticated programmer, but I wasn’t eager to spend the time or effort. For me, simplicity is the way to go. You can have all the charges, calculated daily and cumulative revenue sorted out and automatically calculated for you. The formulae in these spreadsheets are bright and user-friendly.
Please keep this file in a secure location, preferably related to your electronic health record. I won’t be eager to have such data on my personal computer. Issues can happen, and I don’t recommend having protected health information, mainly patients’ names, on your personal computer.
See Revenue Trends
Make the Most Out of your Tracked Data
I trust that you want to make the most of your work time so that you can dedicate the after-hours to what matters most outside of work. Making the most out of this time can involve different things:
- Being efficient, you finish your notes and charges on time
- Maximizing your revenue during these work hours
Basic descriptive statistics are simple to perform and interpret. We review clinical studies all the time, and I trust that you are comfortable interpreting mean, median, standard deviation, frequencies, and percentages. You can do these calculations easily in spreadsheets or statistical packages if you wish. If you are not interested in doing it, others will be glad to help you with that. The most important thing is to have good, well-organized data.
Once you have this information over several months or years, you can see trends. You can also assess the effects of different interventions you implemented by comparing the pre-and post-intervention data. Some changes can take months to start seeing an impact.
