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With healthcare reforms and mounting costs, hospitals have been faced with a lot of pressure to increase profitability without compromising on the quality of care. Add to it the need to stay updated and relevant with their patients. Hospitals and clinics have to constantly maintain the balancing act of consistently providing the best care without cutting corners while also growing profits and increasing revenue. However, this does not have to mean expansion, additional infrastructural costs or increasing resources. There are smart and effective ways that your practice can grow profitably.
Improve customer care to improve patient satisfaction
When a patient is provided with a good experience, they are likely to have a positive perception about the facility. This can be done by improving the process of registration – limiting paperwork, offering patients an option to sign up online ahead of their visit, having helpful staff, extending the option to book appointments online and receive reminders about their visit.
Of course, good bedside manner is important. This means providing relevant information to patients about their care, providing access to health records and allowing them to be involved in key decisions about their care. Collaboration, communication and increased accessibility go a long way in ensuring happier patients.
Reduce unnecessary testing and procedures
Patients have naturally come to be suspicious when advised a battery of tests or complicated procedures for seemingly simple ailments. Redundant and unnecessary testing could be costing your practice huge losses due to the use of expensive equipment and their maintenance. Studies have found that physicians can actually limit the need for unnecessary tests by talking to the patient more. Finding out relevant information about their patient’s health and medical history and having access to their health records can actually reduce the need for testing and perhaps even procedures. This could save your practice thousands of dollars every year.
Reduce hospital readmissions
High readmission rates are expensive to a medical practice. Many cases of hospital readmissions have been found to be preventable, according to the US-based Centre for Health Quality and Payment Reform.
Again, having adequate information about a patient’s health history and access to their health records can help physicians make more informed decisions about their care. This would reduce relapses and readmissions. Technology like EHR, wearable technology and remote home monitoring have helped collate patient-generated data to provide clinicians with health data that they had no way of obtaining previously.
Understand your practice’s revenue cycle
Track your revenue closely. Identify areas that are profitable and those that need improvement. This would save you time and improve productivity. Allocate funds and plan budgets based on strategies that have been a success. Do not ape your competition as it may not be the best utilization of your resources.
Create reporting dashboards and graphs to chart your revenue cycle. Identify obstacles and problem areas so that they can be resolved quickly without costing you. Make technology and analytics work more efficiently for your clinic. Clinic management software helps you track and monitor the multiple sources of income generated by your practice. After all, you cannot fix a problem without first identifying it.
Invest in technology
With patients becoming more technology-driven, it is only natural to move your practice in the same direction. Technology can help provide education to patients, help physicians make clinical decisions, improve resource utilization, increase productivity and reduce errors. For patients, this means improving health outcomes, streamlining billing, improving medication and treatment adherence and facilitating better communication with their providers.
Clinic management software, telemedicine, remote health monitoring, online consultations and online health records are examples of a few technology-driven healthcare services that have improved provider-patient engagement, customer satisfaction and opened up opportunities for medical practices to grow and generate more revenue.