Shrinking the "Event Circle"

You may not realize it, but every time you see a patient, you create more than 20 events that must be completed before you get paid for that visit. (See the list at right for some of the most common events. Your practice may have others as well.) Any one of these events may take only a few seconds to complete, but taken as a whole and multiplied by every patient you see in a week, they consume much of your staff’s time.

The "Event Circle"

These 20-plus events must be repeated for every patient you see, much like a runner completes laps around a track. Thus the name "Event Circle." If you can shrink the size of that circle by eliminating or streamlining events, you decrease the time it takes to complete a "lap," which in turn increases your staff productivity.

Your AppointmentsPRO system can help you shrink the Event Circle, not only by streamlining the scheduling process (you already know about that) but also by automating many other tasks. Here are some specific suggestions for your practice...

Automating Patient Communications

When you schedule a patient, your first task is to create an appointment reminder. Many offices still use a small card for this, which can lead to several extra steps throughout the patient care process. First, your office must field calls from patients asking about your cancellation policy, appointment requirements or other common questions that can't be answered on such a small card. Even worse, the card is often misplaced, leading to a no-show. It's also not uncommon to accidentally write in the wrong time or date on the card, which not only costs you revenue, but patient satisfaction as well.

By using the AppointmentsPRO reminder letter, you create a more informative, high-impact document that will cut the number of calls and no-shows you experience. You can customize the letter to answer any question your patients might have. (Click on Data > Patient Reminder to create as many different types of letters as you need for your practice.) Printing these letters requires just one click in AppointmentsPRO, which saves time over handwritten reminder cards.

As the scheduled visit approaches, your staff probably makes a reminder call and/or sends out a reminder email. (If you’re not taking these steps, you are almost certainly experiencing no-show rates that are higher than necessary.)

These calls and emails can easily take an hour or more of staff time each day. AppointmentsPRO gives you back this time with its Telephone and Email Reminder modules. The modules generate these communications automatically each day, with no human contact required. The Telephone Module can send the calling data either to a teleservices company like CallPointe, or to an in-house phone system like AppointmentCall. This payout plan shows just how much money you can save with the Telephone Reminder Module.

Streamlining Office Communications

You not only have to communicate with your patients, but with your fellow staff and practitioners as well. AppointmentsPRO can help here, too. To keep your practitioners up to speed, consider SpectraSoft’s PDA Module, which syncs each office PDA automatically and eliminates the need to provide each practitioner with a separate daily schedule.

When paper communications are required, the AppointmentsPRO Reports function can save you time here as well. You can print schedules for each room and practitioner, create reports for open times, notify staff about changes to the schedule and more, all by clicking on Reports > Resource Reports.

Eliminating Data Re-Entry

Once you see a patient, the results of that treatment must be entered into your billing and documentation systems. In many cases, someone in your office is retyping mundane data like a patient’s name, address and treatment codes two, three, even four times per visit.

AppointmentsPRO can eliminate much of this needless typing by sharing data with many leading billing and documentation products from companies like BMS Reimbursement Management, ReDoc, PTOS, MediNotes, DBC, MDeverywhere and more. If your practitioners enter the correct information into AppointmentsPRO during treatment, this information can be exported in the correct format, eliminating hours of needless of re-typing.

Outsourcing

One of the best ways to streamline workflow in the digital era is to outsource complex tasks to specialists. We’ve already discussed how AppointmentsPRO can automate the outsourcing of reminder calls to an outside teleservices firm. It can also automate the outsourcing of billing and data backup.

By outsourcing tasks, you not only save hours of staff time, you also profit from the expertise of specialists. Billing is one such area where many practices can not only shrink their Event Circle but maximize their revenue.

"Some practices may lose up to 24 percent of their potential revenue because they use incorrect codes, lower-paying codes and make other preventable billing mistakes," says John Wallace, VP of Client Services at BMS Reimbursement Management. "Then they can spend as much as 12-14% of the revenue they do get trying to run their own billing and collections operations."

Based on those numbers, it’s easy to see how outsourcing the billing function makes sense. AppointmentsPRO is able to automate this entire process by transferring billing data either in real time or at regular intervals to a billing service. In many cases, this happens automatically, without your staff lifting a finger

Data backup is another task that often makes sense to outsource. Not only do backups take up valuable staff time, they can also be technically demanding. HIPAA requirements in essence require most practices to store backups off-site, yet have them available at a moment’s notice. That and other documentation requirements make SpectraSoft’s DataHealth Backup Module an obvious choice. Your data is transmitted each day to a secure, offsite location, even while you work. The entire process takes place behind the scenes, allowing your staff to focus on more important functions.

Conclusion

You may find it helpful to use the list above as a starting point to chart your practice’s "Event Circle." By analyzing each step in the patient care process and creating new ways to streamline or eliminate steps, you will find many other effective ways to "Shrink the Circle." Let us know how you’re doing and if this article was helpful by emailing PMN at newsletter@ssoft.com.