Increasing Revenue per Encounter
There are options here. You can look at ancillary services that make sense clinically and that increase revenue. The key is making sure that any ancillary products or services that you add not only increase revenue, but increase patient satisfaction and improve outcomes. A doctor friend of mine said the biggest challenge of attending annual meetings for his specialty was “separating the pearls from the highly polished fecal matter”. The pearls that you find can be worth the search if they meet these criteria. You have to be continuously searching for new products and services that can help you accomplish the triple goals of increasing practice revenue and patient satisfaction while improving outcomes. At The Southern Medical Associates Group, we are constantly looking for products and services like this. We try to pick out the pearls for our practices.
You can review coding for your most frequently occurring diagnoses. You may not be coding specifically enough or in a way that supports the best follow up.  Improved follow up can increase the revenue per diagnosis as well as improve patient satisfaction and outcomes. The coder with whom I work tells me that, in over 25 years of doing chart audits, she has never found a practice that didn’t represent some coding opportunities for either better protecting the practice in the case of an audit or creating an opportunity for better care.
You can increase the degree to which the patient is engaged in their care. Communication is the key. Are you doing everything you can to make sure patients are aware of everything they need to do to manage their condition. Are they coming into the office every time they need to and are they getting everything done they need to get done when they are in. I helped one practice increase revenue by over $6,000 per month just by making sure they were doing all the recommended steps for every patient diagnosed with Diabetes.
You can also increase revenue per patient encounter by improving your payer mix. You can selectively target market to patients with better insurance and increase the percentage of patients the practice treats that have this kind of coverage. You can also increase revenue per patient encounter by making sure your insurance contracts are up to date and that you have negotiated the best rates you can. It has been surprising to me that more practices aren’t doing this.

Decreasing Costs per Patient Encounter
This is a slippery slope. You can reduce the cost of seeing the patient by decreasing the time of the visit, but there is a good chance you will negatively impact patient satisfaction and patient retention. This may also lead to increased rates of physician burnout. Both patients and doctors want the same thing; they want to spend more quality time with each other. Your best bet here is making sure that you are utilizing physician extenders like Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners as wisely as possible. You can also make sure your schedule is as efficient as possible. There are little things that can have surprising effects. In one practice the Medical Assistants were stocking and preparing patient rooms when  they came in in the morning. This delayed the time when the first patient could be seen and generally caused the practice to start behind. We changed the job descriptions of the MA’s to require that they clean and stock the patient rooms before leaving the practice in the evenings. This way, they were able to see the first patient sooner and they were able to do a much better job of staying on schedule. The practice saw more patients per day with the same staff which increased both revenue and profitability.
Depending on your state, you can explore Telemedicine. A physician can do more telemedicine encounters in a day that physical encounters and in some states the reimbursement per encounter is the same for telemedicine encounter that it is for a physical encounter. There are many instances when a telemedicine encounter can give the clinician all the information they need and be much more convenient for the patient. Telemedicine is a great tool for increasing practice revenue and profitability when focused well and used appropriately.

You Can Increase the Number of Patients You See
Once you get efficient and believe you have optimized your cost per encounter and revenue per encounter, you just need to see more encounters. Marketing is the key. But not just any kind of marketing. You need to market to ultra-targeted segments of the patient population around your practice. Your marketing message needs to help patients see what differentiates you from your competitors and show off how much your patients appreciate the kind of treatment they receive at your practice.  You also need to make sure you can track your Marketing ROI as finely as possible. The deal is not how much money you spend on marketing, it’s how much what you spend makes you.
We can help you do all of the things mentioned above and we can help you plan which should come first based on ROI and cash flow. The Southern Medical Consultants Group believes the best way to decide what to do and manage the process is to create a strategic plan that sets out a series of achievable strategic goals that are tied to specific behaviors for each member of the staff. We can help you create just such a plan.

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