5 Must-Know Metrics To Build A Thriving Medical Practice

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Managing a private practice can sometimes feel overwhelming because your role is both clinical and operational. You may choose Gentem Health since it’s what we do, but either way, here are the key metrics that will ensure success for your operation.

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Welcome to the 5 Must-Know Metrics for Thriving Medical Practice Guide: How to successfully monitor your practice efficiency and performance.

With this guide, you’ll learn how to measure performance in your medical practice. You will also learn what are the key metrics that inform your practice’s financial status  and how best to optimize them to support practice growth.

A proper medical practice KPI dashboard  is the first step to building a successful and thriving practice. This allows you to:

You don’t have to drive blind. These metrics ensure that you keep the most important goals in focus as you scale your practice.

97% of practices have experienced a negative financial impact directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.

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At Gentem, we support medical practices by reducing their cost to collect and ensuring that no money is left on the table. We understand the imperative need for cashflow to support a growing practice. And that’s why we’ve created the 5 Must-Have Metrics You Need to Know for Thriving Medical Practice. These are the major indicators that measure the financial health of your practice.

This document guides you through core metrics and considerations your practice needs to take in order to support the growth of your practice.

What are Performance Metrics in Healthcare?

Practice owners need to have control over the performance of each professional, the integration between internal processes, the speed of care, and the quality of care provided. This is done by using performance metrics.

Medical performance metrics are fundamental management instruments for monitoring and evaluating the services provided by organizations. They subsidize the formulation and scope of objectives, the identification of the need for changes, the reduction of costs, performance evaluations, and, in the last analysis, the fulfillment of the organization’s mission.

Metric #1:

Aging Analysis and Account Receivable (AR) Days

Improving your accounts receivables days is the most effective way to improve your practice finances.

  1. Identifies opportunities to improve cash flow; 
  2. Target areas that can produce cash based on payer and age criteria; 
  3. Determine where timeliness limitations (i.e. timely filing requirements) are reaching critical stages
graphic showing up percentage of better performing practices
  • Growth in the 31 – 60 aging bracket could be caused by an increase in revenue from baseline in the preceding month. It could also mean a delay in the billing and/or turnaround time of claims due to erroneous coding, rejection, or denial. 
  • Growth in the 61 – 90 aging bracket may indicate that the secondary insurance claims are not filed on time or that payer correspondence is not responded to in a timely manner.
  • Growth in the 91 – 120 aging bracket may indicate a slow down in follow-up routine or bad debt write-offs have not been processed.
  • As accounts roll over to the 120+ bracket, they tend to be neglected. Once an account reaches approximately 180+ days (6 months), it is worth around 50 cents on the dollar.
Pitfalls from not closely monitoring your AR days
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Metric #2:

Collection Rate or Net Collection Percentage

doctor receiving money in one-hundred-dollar bills

Collection rate helps you monitor your billing and collection efficiency

Pitfalls from not closely monitoring your collection rate
Metric #3:

Denial Rate

The denial rate is the percentage of claims denied by payers during a specific period of time. This metric quantifies and helps the practice understand how effective they are at submitting clean claims. A low denial rate translates to healthy revenue and cash flow and lower administrative costs (due to fewer resources spent on reworking the claims). Following guidelines like documentation, and proper coding for claims.

Pitfalls from not closely monitoring your denial rate

Looking for a way to implement analytics into your practice and get paid more, faster?

Metric #4:

Days Cash on Hand

doctor's coat with money and stethoscope

Cash is the lifeblood of any medical practice. 

Pitfalls from not closely monitoring your cash on hand
Metric #5:

Unbilled Days and Days to Submit

Time is money and if your claims are not being submitted efficiently, you are definitely leaving money on the table.

Pitfalls from not closely monitoring your Unbilled Day and Days to Submit

Take control of your medical practice by using analytics to define strategic objectives that put you ahead of your competition.

At Gentem Health, we use artificial intelligence and analytics to increase the visibility of your billing operations so that you can identify problem areas and make the right operational decisions necessary to grow your medical practice.

Our platform integrates across your information systems to create one source of truth that ensures that the correct metrics are always in view. We use powerful analytics to distill insights that your practice can use to get paid more, faster. Guaranteed.

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