Managing multiple physical therapy clinics can be a challenge with an ever-changing healthcare landscape, policies, and industry standards. Decisions must be made that will help your business grow regarding finances, marketing efforts, and patient care. How do you decide what is right for your clinics, staff and patients? Do you have data, or another source of truth that you reference? Do you know what metrics you should be monitoring to make these decisions?
A comprehensive EMR can make all the difference. Custom reporting can change the way you look at data, and might even shed light on issues you were unaware of. Below are some tips, pivotal metrics, and more details on EMR reporting functions that can show where your practice stands, and what improvements can be made for continuous growth.
Therapist Productivity
Monitoring therapist productivity can reveal where improvements can be made with personnel, time management, and patient care. Most EMRs offer reports that show appointments broken down by appointments attended, no-shows, and cancelled appointments. With A2C Medical, which offers more than 200 report options, you can go further. For example, many owners often look at no show cancelation rates, but have you ever considered looking at no show / cancelation rates for established patients versus first visits? By diving deeper, you can see no show rates for patients that actually know the therapist which might tell another story.
Other important metrics to track with reporting include:
- Therapist working vs. idle hours
- Time spent on administrative tasks
- Time spent in meetings
- Patient appointments
- and more
- Average patients seen per hour for hours where a therapist wasn’t in meetings or other non-production activities
Financial Metrics and Reporting
Common financial reports can provide you with a clear view of your physical therapy clinic’s cash flow, trends and areas of missed revenue opportunities. Standard financial EMR reporting may show you a number that is supposed to represent payment amounts for a given period of time – perhaps by month. But is that number a true representation of what your clinics are yielding? In other words:
Are you getting a true payment per visit broken down by provider, not just an average?
A2C Medical shows you actual payment amounts made for individual visits, regardless of when they might have been collected. This is in stark contrast to other EMR systems that might only show an average of payments collected in a given month divided by the number of visits for that month.
Revenue
Revenue is almost always a metric at the top of any business’s reporting, and physical therapy clinics not only need to know what they are bringing in, but who is contributing to the cash flow. With A2C Medical’s EMR reporting function, we break down revenue by company, clinic, and therapist, showing decision makers how individual staff members are affecting the bottom line.
Billing and Collections
When it comes to physical therapy, services rendered are normally paid by patients and insurance providers – and most include a delay until the practitioner is actually paid. Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and aging health reports can show you the average time it takes your clinics to collect payments on patient services, and how you can improve. 30 days DSO is an industry standard, with a 15 day range being the A2C Medical gold standard. With dedicated billing specialists, A2C Medical can handle your billing cycle from intake and collections, with the goal of decreasing your DSO – getting you paid faster and keeping your cash flow moving.
A/R reports can also be helpful in helping you predict future collections, but do not capture past performance. A2C Medical offers another layer of account reporting with the Collection Score Card – which logs a snapshot of payments, adjustments and balances from the past. With this report you can see how your revenue has grown, where payments might be stuck in the revenue cycle, and use this knowledge to create incentives for billing staff to increase numbers by offering bonuses for meeting pre-determined increase goals.
Referrals
Since physical therapy is driven largely by referrals from doctors, it is an important metric to monitor. Many EMR systems only allow data to be entered into their system when there is an actual visit – meaning referral reports are missing data from other referrals. With A2C Medical’s referral reports you can track all referrals regardless if they actually attended their therapy session or not. This enables you to track referrals by physician and ask questions such as:
- Where are we missing referrals and why?
- Are we failing to follow up and schedule an appointment?
- Do we need additional staff?
- How can we work with physicians to better educate patients on the importance of therapy in their healing process?
Answering these questions can provide further insight into areas of growth for your physical therapy clinics. For more ways to enhance your clinics, check out our blog on Billing Services. Our team is dedicated to helping you develop physical therapy operational policies, understand your staff’s current productivity, and suggesting ways to constantly improve your therapy services.
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