Michelle Tohill

In today’s world, patients have many options for picking a general practitioner, no longer restricted by proximity. If a doctor has an excellent reputation, a high score on zocdoc.com, or come recommended by a neighbor, people will travel.

For that reason, it’s important for physician practices to pay attention to customer satisfaction and how it can positively or negatively impact the health of their practice. After all, a medical practice shares many goals with any other business -profitability, consistency, and customer service.

Here are some steps you can take to get new patients and keep them happy:

Asking questions about how a patient is doing can be scary, but it can make a huge impact on their satisfaction. One way is to initiate patient satisfaction surveys. Don’t wait until the patient has left the office, have patient satisfaction surveys at check-in, so patients can fill them out during their visit. This will give a good picture of the overall visit from beginning to end. Patients can finalize their survey at check-out, so they can provide feedback while the visit is still fresh in their mind.

By having surveys, patients are also more likely to point out potential issues or bottlenecks. Do you know the average wait time in your waiting room? You’ll be surprised at the things patients notice and what matters to them. It also gives you an opportunity to reach out to the patient and thank them for their feedback or address their concerns. Either way, they will know you’re listening.

Keep in mind that every one of your patients has an opinion about your office. Of course it’s great to think about them bragging about how great you are, but if they have any issues, it’s better to be able to hear their feedback directly than to wait for them to complain to other patients, neighbors, friends, and relatives, which will damage your reputation and chances of attracting new patients.

Happy employees lead to great customer service. Positive reviews of staff and physicians should be shared! Create a wall in the break room where staff can see the positive comments from patients - it’s a small thing that goes a long way to increase morale.

Also, employees (particularly your front-office staff) can spend a lot of time listening to complaints and general dissatisfaction issues, so be sure to provide them with tools and support to reinforce their ability to manage any complaints thoughtfully. Even the most caring doctors will lose patients if the front-office staff is grumpy and dismissive.

Having online appointment scheduling, payment options, refill requests and even a store where patients can purchase those insoles that they bought a year ago will create an environment of convenience for them. Ideally, your practice should have a patient portal that enables easy access to these items.

Happy patients are loyal patients and patient turnover can be costly to practices. Keeping your current patients happy and satisfied and coming back costs way less than spending time and money trying to get new patients. Strengthening your patient services through technology is a relatively easy way to keep patients on board.

• Pay attention to potential referral sources

Every physician practice experiences natural attrition - patients move away and pass on. That’s why you need to put some attention into getting new patients. It’s important for managers and physicians to reach out to potential referral sources. If a new physician refers a patient to your practice, send them a handwritten note thanking them for the referral. And, of course, if a patient refers a friend or family member to you, your office staff should add a small note to your PMS or EHR system to help you remember to thank the patient for the referral.

Identify potential referral sources within your affiliated hospitals and in your local area, too. Giving nurses and office staff your practice information with a pamphlet about your services as well as your social media presence can go a long way to attracting new patients.

From referral sources to the patients themselves, potential marketers for your practice are all around you. Make sure you give each of them the attention and gratitude they deserve.

Michelle Tohill is Director of Revenue Cycle Management of Bonafide Management Systems and oversees all billing programs and processes. Her specialty is conducting AR audits to expose inefficient billing practices that fail to fully reimburse physicians for their work. She conducts AR audits and provides Bonafide customers with training and consulting on how to improve every aspect of billing and practice management to maximize revenue.

Articles

In order to improve customer satisfaction to attract and retain patients, practices can take these three basic steps. 

Keeping and Growing a Patient Base

At this time each year, people become zeroed in on their resolutions and goals for the new year ahead. This optimism for the new year is something medical practices and businesses can embrace too - a time to reflect on what can be improved, what was successful, and where future changes can be made to increase profits in the coming years.

Your practice should examine the following areas when focusing on the year ahead: 

Be sure to analyze your company’s billing process at the end of year. Whether you are outsourcing or do it in-house, take a hard look at your billing system performance. The majority of billing departments spend most of their time on simple claims, leaving little time for the more challenging claims that ultimately never get reimbursed.

You should also consider the billing software your business utilizes. Check if you are consistently getting updates from your software vendor and make sure your software effectively allows you to get reimbursed in a timely manner. If not, update or change your billing vendor. Improved cash flow should always be the end goal.

Evaluate your inventory optimization processes. Determine which products were overstocked and understocked since both result in decreased profits. Although inventory analysis is time consuming, it can greatly have an effect on your bottom line. Also, make sure your inventory software is adequate or if additional information or features might be beneficial.

Although your taxes are not due until April, now is the time to brainstorm ways to streamline your tax return process. Review how much large purchases benefitted or jeopardized your business. Research your depreciations and write offs. Billing and inventory software should make determining your tax returns simple. If this is not the case, make updates and changes accordingly.

Examining your employees productivity and how they affect your business is difficult but well worth the attention. Review which departments are not producing and check for redundancies. In some cases, more training is required, so make certain that your employees are constantly updated on new procedures and technology - it can have a huge impact on future success. 

After you analyze personnel and decide that your employees are still not improving or producing at the levels necessary for growth, it may be necessary to consider performance reviews.

One of the most important reasons medical practices exist is to help patients with their general health. The overall satisfaction of your patients plays a huge role in determining your practice’s success. However, any business owner should never be complacent when it comes to customers and should always be striving to improve the services they provide. So it is imperative that your patients feel satisfied, listened to and they can trust any concern of theirs will be dealt with appropriately. Making sure your patients are paying their bills on time is also important. They need to be held accountable when they miss payments and the systems you have in place for billing have to be effective. Sometimes creating a streamlined billing process is as simple as storing credit card information for co-pays, outstanding bills or late payments. This allows your business to save time and money while still improving upon the relationship you have with your patients.

 is Director of Revenue Cycle Management of Bonafide Management Systems and oversees all billing programs and processes. Her specialty is conducting AR audits to expose inefficient billing practices that fail to fully reimburse physicians for their work. She conducts AR audits and provides Bonafide customers with training and consulting on how to improve every aspect of billing and practice management to maximize revenue.

With the new year underway, now is the time to zero in on what areas of your practice can be improved. Here are five areas you should consider. 

5 Focal Areas to Ensure Medical Practice Success in 2016

As you know, when it comes to getting paid in your medical practice, it's never as simple as providing a service and getting paid the amount you deserve in return. In fact, getting paid is so laborious and riddled with so many obstacles that many practices remain chronically under-reimbursed.Here are 10 tips on getting paid by the two main practice revenue groups: patients and payers.In the end, there are two critical factors that will help you get paid what you deserve in your practice. First, ensure that you have the right software products running your office to maximize efficiency and accuracy. Second, make sure that your entire team is regularly trained and keeps up with protocol so that they minimize costly mistakes and oversights.To view the slideshow in PDF format, click here.Â 

Slideshows

Patients and payers are your two main practice revenue sources. Here's how to collect more for the work you do every day.

Ten Tips to Getting Paid at Your Medical Practice

It seems pretty obvious: You do the work, you get paid. But unfortunately for many in the healthcare business, it’s not always that black and white.

There are so many obstacles to proper payment, including: complex and confusing billing systems; patients unable to pay their office copay, co-insurance, or deductibles; high outstanding accounts receivable; improper coding vs. documentation; etc. All this and more can lead to outstanding bills and ultimately low cash flow for the practice.

Here are some tips to make sure your practice gets the compensation it deserves:

With the new ICD-10 rules taking effect Oct. 1, it’s imperative that your practice management software and EHR are up to date and that the billers in your practice are trained and ready to go. Improper documentation at some point in the chain of work can lead to a deficit in your bottom line. Make sure that your software is ICD-10-ready.

Doctors, office managers, and certain staff should be able to access at-a-glance details and have the ability to generate reports if they are employing an efficient billing system. Every doctor should be able to easily access the following data:

• Average daily and monthly revenue categorized by HCPCs and insurance

• Number of outstanding accounts receivable

• Cash value of outstanding accounts receivable

• Outstanding revenue by HCPCs and insurance

If you are a doctor in a private practice and can’t access this critical information, then at a minimum, you should require a weekly billing report from billing staff or your outsourced billing service. This weekly report should cover the items listed above and will allow you great insight into the "health" of your practice.

At the very least, verify patient's benefits before they leave your office. It sounds fairly obvious, but many practices don’t get the patients’ copay 

 they see the doctor. This could be rectified as easily as keeping patients’ credit cards on file, so it can be the default if the patient fails to bring cash to their visit. Better yet, utilize a practice management system that seamlessly updates you with this information so that you can easily charge in the office. You’d be surprised how something so simple can increase practice cash flow.

Make sure your billing staff is diligent about following up on denied claims. Making sure your billing staff or billing service has the right codes can significantly improve this denial rate, but when it does happen, don’t let it go. There should always be follow up on denied claims, but ideally, your billing staff or service should try to catch coding errors before they’re made. Catching coding errors is often better handled by a sophisticated, outsourced billing service - just make sure it offers a transparent view into billing success.

 is director of revenue cycle management of Bonafide Management Systems and oversees all billing programs and processes. Her specialty is conducting accounts receivable (A/R) audits to expose inefficient billing practices that fail to fully reimburse physicians for their work. She conducts A/R audits and provides Bonafide customers with training and consulting on how to improve every aspect of billing and practice management to maximize revenue. She can be contacted at 

Make sure your practice is getting paid what it is owed for the work you perform with these four tips.