Practice Data:

Do You have a Handle on Your Practice Data?

By Ramesh Leelasankar, RCM Manager

Have you ever felt miserable about a new haircut or annoyed about the new look of your kitchen after it was redesigned? After passing through the frustration, have you thought back on what went wrong?

Did you realize neither the kitchen nor the haircut was your original idea? Maybe it was inspired from a neighbor’s kitchen and from a salon brochure. It obviously looked awesome and compelled you to go for it, but was it the right fit? Was it a need at all in the first place?

Similarly, medical practices get fascinated about the kind of reports and analysis that they see in other medical practices. What if they end up in duplicating those reports/analytics in their own medical practice? The fascination towards colorful reports fades away and concerns start growing every month, concerns such as:

  1. Billing team not providing customized reports for the needs of the practice.
  2. Billing team not highlighting the key takeaways for the practice owners.
  3. Billing team not able to produce the right reports at the right time, as per the needs of the volatile healthcare industry.
  4. Practice owners not spending sufficient time on the reports, even when the key takeaways are highlighted.
  5. The same financial numbers, same infographics, same slides flowing month over month on boring decks.

End result – There is no more excitement for these reports and they end up in being shredded right away or stacked into admin folders of a storage room. So, what is the missing puzzle piece to make these reports engaging and efficient?

“Need of a collaborative effort”

The billing teams and the practice will have to work as a team on things such as:

  • Understanding the expectations, challenges and goals of the practice
  • Anticipating and adjusting to changes in the healthcare industry and what is needed for sustaining and growing the business.

The needs, challenges and goals of the practice might sometimes be outside revenue cycle management. It might be in improving the efficiency of the front office staff, hiring the right staff/clinician, managing payroll etc., This is where a Managed Service Organization plays a crucial role.

Addressing those needs, setting up action items, collaborating with other service providers and following up of the action items until they are achieved are all the responsibility of a successful MSO.

We have found that practices generally have had challenges with:

  • The billing team understanding the cultural differences within a medical practice – Many practices have an offshore team managing the revenue cycle management. Having an onsite staff member check into the practice once every week might bridge the gap in this situation.
  • The customized report that I need is not available in my EHR/PM system – This is one of the most common misconceptions and/or mistakes about analytics. Talking in the right language for the EHR/PM systems to prepare customized reports is the actual challenge – Most of these EHR/PM systems have two different teams, the development team and the billing (SME’s) team. Connecting these teams to run a customized report is a skilled task, which can be achieved only by a well-organized healthcare managed service organization like Saisystems Health who are equipped internally with exposure to both these departments.

A major benefit of collaborating with a Managed Service Organization involves a process of generating analytics and insights beyond the canned reports on any EHR/PM system.

Practices that participate in a monthly review / governance session with the MSO team gain value from these insights during open conversations. It’s here that the needs and challenges of the practice are identified, and courses of action are developed.

Outside this, self-service reporting allows the practice to generate standard reports whenever they need specific data. Open access to these pre-populated reports, saves time, paper and production efficiency of all the staff.

Saisystems Health MSO, employs its dynamic analytics tool navigatEHR, to deliver report customization and value-based governance presentation for practices of different specialties, location and size.

Interested in what navigatEHR has to offer?

Reach out to our expert team today for a consultation or demo.

Contact us at info@saisystems.com.

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