Too many physicians wait for their accountants to tell them if they had a good or bad year. All year long they have been busily practicing medicine, being busy means you’re doing well right?  Not necessarily.

The end of the year is not the time to find out that your practice needs some administrative work.  You need to continuously monitor your practice status, so you can change direction and modify or pivot your strategy if you find that you need to take action. The year-end is not the time to learn you can’t take home the anticipated payout.

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You need to have ongoing information about your practice’s performance by way of regular and routine reports. “Too busy to do” actually means, “too bad, so sad”.

The practice environment is changing, and if you don’t know how it is impacting your practice until year’s end, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. It also means neither you nor your practice administrator is doing the job.

Identify the key measures of performance for your practice and specialty. Use information from your specialty society for benchmarks to compare with. Monitor on a monthly basis to understand if there is a trend that is good news or bad news and if bad news, dig deeper to understand why.

Related: 6 Simple Ways to Reduce the Administrative Burden in a Practice

Reports can be overwhelming when providers don’t know which ones to read. Fortunately, specialty societies can help direct your practice to good ones, so start by focusing on some basics: patient volume by pay source; new patients’ vs existing (Is the practice attracting new volume?); the mix of diagnoses and distribution of visit types. Financial reports are particularly important, such as payments per CPT by the payer; and receivables. Has your practice measured the impact of the growth of patient financial responsibilities on your receivables?

Don’t be too busy to review such reports with your practice administrator monthly. Set a time to review, ask questions, understand changing trends, and if the trends are not what you want, dig deeper to get the answers.

Practice Administrators and Physicians, if your practice, the source of your livelihood/income is in jeopardy, consider using web based medical billing software.