What Single Change Has Made The Greatest Impact On Your Practice?
Sep 29, 2021
There will always be additional ways for you to improve your medical practice. But some will carry more weight than others. We collected advice from various doctors and organizations surrounding the major changes to implement to make a significant impact on your practice.
Provide Flexibility
Offer After-Hours Virtual Visits
“It just makes sense – you can fit more appointments into a day, compete with nearby practices that are only open 9 to 5 pm, and keep patients in your practice with convenient scheduling options.”
– eVisit
With after-hours virtual visits, you not only allow for more flexibility, but you also increase your practice’s earning potential. Some patients may schedule appointments less frequently than they truly need to because your normal office hours coincide with typical business hours. Not everyone is able to get days off from work easily. After-hours virtual visits are an achievable way to cater to these patients without requiring your office to be open later. This also curbs the costs associated with keeping your physical practice open for additional hours.
Improve Operations
Consistent & Regular Internal Communication
“Functional Unit meetings: having a meeting of everyone who works in a unit from receptionists and medical assistants to NP’s and MD’s, at frequent enough intervals to facilitate consistent things happening, consistent messages to patients, and becoming acquainted with one another at a different level from usual.”
Getting your internal team together for regular meetings allows for a more seamless flow in daily operations. Keeping everyone updated and on the same page about changes will prevent mishaps. Beyond smoother operations, having consistent internal communication with your team will result in happier patients. Patients can tell if your team doesn’t communicate properly as it often results in hiccups in their path to treatment.
Identify Improvement Opportunities
Collect & Analyze Data
“If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it. The first step to improving the quality of care at your organization is to analyze your existing data to understand where opportunities exist. You should analyze both your patient population and your organizational operations to identify areas for improvement.”
– Proactive MD.
Making changes requires knowing what needs to be fixed or improved upon. To do this you’ll need to collect and measure data. Analyzing data from your practice can help you to identify where improvements can be made. While collecting and analyzing data alone won’t automatically change your practice for the better, it highlights the areas where you could make a change to improve your practice.
Stand Out From Competitors
Offer Unique Services
“Offer them something that other nearby clinics don’t. Like convenience of tests at the same premise or a generic medical store or a dietician or psychologist or physiotherapist, depending on your specialty.”
The unique services you are able to offer will largely depend upon your practice’s specialty. Standing out from competitors is important when you all offer essentially the same services. To set yourself apart from the rest, consider what you can do to draw patients in. This may be anything from offering a dietician or a generic medical store.
It’s a hassle for patients to manage appointments at various clinics for their different medical needs. The more you are able to reasonably offer in one location the more attractive your clinic will be to existing and new patients.
For informational purposes only.
"My husband and I have a small practice but we were looking for a medical billing company to consult us. We originally started with a local company with some satisfaction. However, our biggest problem was that they wanted us to change our existing EMR to software that they worked with. Quest National Services worked with our existing software so that we didn’t have to make expensive changes to our infrastructure. That saved us a lot of time and headache. I would definitely say that was one of the main reasons for why we switched and why we continue to work with Quest. As a small practice, they helped us without draining our resources."
Adriana C.
