1. Patient satisfaction. Hire a third party to conduct objective online surveys for patient satisfaction and then benchmark those numbers against competitors or other providers. The practice also has in-house patient satisfaction surveys that assess the patient’s overall experience and whether expectations were met. Ask about the patient’s experience with the front desk staff, in the waiting room, nurses and the physician. You can also ask questions about how well-kept or clean they found the facility. Use the surveys to assess areas where surgeons and the practice are excelling and portions of the process that can be improved in the future.
2. Patient flow. Benchmarking patient flow involves a number of different things, including measuring where patient flow is most frequently backed up and how long delays are drawn out in the practice. When there are several physicians seeing patients in multiple rooms, there will be delays unless the physician is kept on time. The key behind benchmarking patient flow is determining specific patterns and finding the cause of throughput problems.
3. Revenue cycle management. Keeping track of the efficiency of your revenue cycle management process and comparing you numbers to other practices can help ensure you are on top of your game. One common benchmark is the percent of billed dollars that remains uncollected after 120 days. Another benchmark is how quickly your receivables are turning over, or the average length of time between rendering the service and being paid. If the practice’s measurements are higher than either of those benchmarks, it will need to make improvements.
When physicians have collection problems, they tend to focus on the old bills, the ones that are 120 or more days outstanding, and not on the original bill submissions, the front end. However, often the reason there are so many outstanding bills is because something went wrong on the front end. Therefore, the front end of the process needs to be examined. One very simple problem is that demographic and insurance information has not been clearly and correctly entered.
4. Employee salaries. While national data on employee salaries can be a helpful tool, local market data is essential to ensuring competitive salaries for employees at your practice. She says this data can be acquired from national surveys that break down data into regions. Set your salaries at a competitive rate to ensure employee attraction and retention. When you’re interviewing a new employee, you will probably find out quickly if your proposed salary rate is too low.
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