The Administrator’s Desk: Avoiding the Report Quagmire
How often and which practice reports should you deliver to your group’s physicians? The wrong answer could cost you big.
By Shelly K. Schwartz There were no obvious signs of trouble at the infectious disease group practice in Houston. Patient volume was strong, the physicians were managing a rigorous schedule, and reimbursement claims were more than enough to offset expenses and produce a tidy profit. So it came as a shock to everyone when the group’s coffers suddenly ran dry.
“The physicians were working very hard, but the staff had not been posting charges consistently,” recalls Belinda Ratcliff, director of client services for Global Healthcare Alliance, a medical billing services company retained by the practice to get its financial house in order. “By the time the charges made it into their system, they had exceeded filing limits for some of the health insurance companies, which have very tight submission deadlines. They missed their window of opportunity.”
It was an expensive lesson, and one that could have been easily prevented by regularly monitoring the group’s performance measures. “Physicians should not find sticker shock at the end of the month when they get their bank statement and say, ‘What happened?’” Ratcliff says. “They should be able to tell with weekly monitoring what money is coming in and what charges are going out so cash flow stays consistent.”
Too much or too little?
But in the information age in which an endless flow of financial data can be automated with a single keystroke, it’s not always clear which reports you should generate, how often you should review them, and which ones you should present to physician shareholders to keep them in the loop. Continued...
