Provider utilization is often mismanaged in surgical practices, resulting in inefficiencies and missed revenue opportunities. The efficient scheduling of providers and ORs is crucial for ensuring this doesn’t occur, but it requires a thorough understanding of the practice. For example, a practice may be unable to develop appropriate schedules without knowing key metrics like no-shows and cancelations.
Importance of Scheduling
Scheduling is always important for maximizing a surgical practice’s revenue, regardless of the number of providers and patients it has. Each empty appointment slot represents a loss of revenue that prevents a practice from realizing its revenue potential. Analyzing provider utilization can simplify the scheduling process by creating more efficient standards for the practice.
Limited Pricing Flexibility in Healthcare
Healthcare practices generally don’t have the luxury of adjusting the prices for their products and services in response to customer demand, as most businesses do. They usually receive reimbursement according to a fixed fee schedule they’ve previously negotiated with insurance payors, preventing the practice from changing prices later. Improving provider utilization is thus the primary means for practices to increase revenue.
Challenges to Efficient Scheduling in Surgical Facilities
Many factors can reduce a practice’s efficiency in scheduling patients. It often occurs when a practice becomes so busy that office staff cannot schedule effectively, especially when no single person is in charge of this task. Another common problem is when a practice lacks a clear understanding of metrics like patient cancelations and no-shows, making it difficult to account for these events when scheduling.
Metrics To Analyze
NexGen analyzes the following metrics when assessing provider utilization:
- Patient scheduling
- Clinic utilization
- Average revenue and collection per patient
- Missed revenue potential based on schedule
- Cancelations
- Patient wait times
- Gaps in patient scheduling
- Medical appointment time bottlenecks
- Wave scheduling
- Last-minute appointment slot planning
NexGen performs a comprehensive analysis of a surgical practice’s scheduling logistics and financial metrics like average revenue per patient encounter. This data allows us to develop the best schedule for each provider and track their utilization to identify areas where the practice is missing out on revenue.
We take metrics such as cancellations, no-shows and visits for new and existing patients to determine the proper adjustments needed to utilize all the providers. These capabilities benefit providers who lack the time or experience to manage their practice schedules adequately.
How Efficient Scheduling Increases Revenue
Medical practices don’t always have enough appointments to fill out the available time slots. Even in these cases, it’s important to implement standards that will allow the practice to properly manage patient scheduling and provider utilization when patient volume does increase. This step is crucial to managing a busy practice schedule because it eliminates the need to redesign scheduling standards while simultaneously handling a full patient load. It also ensures the staff is well-prepared to minimize patient wait times while providing exceptional care. NexGen has the knowledge and experience to implement these standards, so you don’t have to worry about removing scheduling inefficiencies from your practice.
Partner With NexGen Surgical To Achieve Efficiency and Value in Your Surgical Practice
Achieving a business’s financial goal is generally difficult. Still, healthcare is especially challenging due to its complexity and regulatory compliance requirements. NexGen works with surgical facilities to increase their profitability while allowing them to focus more on patient care and less on business operations. Let us use our knowledge and experience to analyze your provider utilization and take your practice’s financial success to the next level.
Contact us online or call 844-592-0802 today to learn more about improving your provider utilization!