Michelle McNickle, New Media Producer
5 ways to leverage your EHR and increase topline revenue
July 17, 2012
According to one recent report, the future looks unsteady for small primary care practices with 10 doctors or fewer. In fact, more than a quarter of those surveyed could foresee themselves closing up shop within the next year, according to the survey from MDLinx.
"Declining reimbursements and rising overhead costs, as usual, are to blame," said Steven Ferguson, patient management officer at Hello Health. "So what is a doctor in a small independent practice to do? One place to start looking for solutions is their in-practice technology stack – starting with their EHR.
"Yes, the EHR," Ferguson continued. "Long considered to be that unfortunate cost center that doctors have had to grin and bear, or try to avoid completely. But what if we changed that paradigm? What if we turned a cost center into a revenue center? Most doctors don’t believe us, but it’s something we’ve been doing successfully in a growing number of practices."
Ferguson outlined five ways to leverage your EHR and increase topline revenue.
1. Patient subscriptions. According to Ferguson, doctors and their front office, back office, PAs, and billers all have access to the EHR. "In fact, it's required for them," he said. "But what about the patients? Aren’t they kind of important in this circle of care? Shouldn't they be connected to the practice as well? Wouldn't it make sense for the practice to communicate with them using today's tools?" Ferguson added that there is a way to both achieve this and generate new revenue for a practice. "Doctors, after all, are to provide a new service with new benefits, so patients won't mind paying a few cents a day – and voila, new revenue."
[See also: EHR adoption still a top concern for physician practices.]
2. Referral to specialists. "Primary care doctors are, in many ways, the gatekeepers to the larger healthcare system," said Ferguson. "They make a lot of initial diagnoses and then refer patients to specialists for everything from glaucoma to gout." The referral process, he said, places an administrative burden on the referring physician. "If the correct information doesn't get into the correct hands, then more work has to be done to get all the information squared away," he said. A solution, he suggests? Having the ability to share referral information in a timely manner. "The benefit to the specialist is a cleaner hand-off when new patients are referred into the practice, which means less administrative back and forth with the referring physician's staff."
Showing 2 Comments
Randy Haynes say: Leveraging your EMR
July 18, 2012 | 12:42 PM GMT
Michelle, We recently launched ChartSwap.com to address your third point. Physicians receive millions of record requests each year from business requestors for things like underwriting, litigation, claims and payer audits. Health information exchanges and EMR portals aren't designed to provide the access or workflows to support these transactions. Despite adopting EHR, physicians are still printing and mailing records to fulfill these requests, which is expensive and inefficient.
ChartSwap was launched to disrupt the paper based record retrieval model with a focus on the transactions that fall outside of the HIE model. Our platform is HIPAA compliant (built on the Force.com platform), is 100% free to physicians and has integrated all of the necessary workflows to support these transactions, including payment and electronic signature.
To your second point, ChartSwap also offers providers free provider to provider sharing and referrals. We are hearing from physicians that the direct project offerings, while useful for communication, aren't being used in the referral process. Direct email is only accessible by the physician, not the records person that is actually responsible for record exchange. ChartSwap has multiple user types, including the custodian of records and/or records management staff.
One final way to reduce cost is to respond to Medicare audits (RAC/ZPIC, etc) electronically as opposed to printing and mailing records. ChartSwap also offers a free certified esMD gateway that will reduce the cost and time involved in Medicare audits.
Mike Barnard say: 5 Ways to Leverage Your EHR...
"Doctors, after all, are to provide a new service with new benefits, so patients won't mind paying a few cents a day – and voila, new revenue."
While I understand the point, personally I'd be quite irate at my provider for charging me to have online access to *MY* health records. It wouldn't be the first time a business failed to recognize that such use of technology is *saving* them money rather than costing them money, and that they should *encourage* customers to switch to it by using financial incentives rather than dis-incentives.
Any practice that keeps records online already will benefit via reduced administrative costs if they make patient records directly accessible, because their staff no longer has to print or transmit records for the patient, a cost savings they can pass on to the patient in the form of *not* charging for that access.
A good example is a toll road in my city. Many years ago they installed an automated fee collection system using RFID cards in cars and on-the-fly readers at the toll stations. Initially, the toll road authority charged a one-time fee for the RFID badge, plus a surcharge on every toll occurrence. They viewed it as a convenience for which regular commuters would be willing to pay extra.
The adoption rate remained extremely until they saw the light, dropped the one-time fee for the RFID card, and instituted reduced tolls for those who used the system. Drivers jumped at the chance not to have to stop at toll booths, while also eliminating the need to keep rolls of quarters in the car, or (yes it happened) write a check for 50 cents.
Today all the toll roads operate strictly on a non-cash basis. Cars either have a readable device that's scanned at normal highway speeds, or the systems reads their license plate and send the bill to the address associated with the license plate. There isn't a human staffing a toll booth anywhere. It saves the toll authority countless dollars annually, while also making it easier to enforce tolls.
Health providers should recognize that not only can they save administrative costs, they can also make it easier for patients to participate in monitoring their records for inaccuracies, while also more readily facilitating access to those records when a patient sees another provider (such as visiting an emergency room).