Revenue per visit is flat or decreasing. Costs are escalating. Seeing one more patient per day can help solve these problems. This article provides valuable insight into implementing a Plus 1 Strategy.

The ability of seeing one more patient per day should not be overwhelming to initiate or achieve. Simply making some minor adjustments on the way you manage your schedule and your patients will help you achieve this goal.

Those adjustments can lead to multiple benefits:

• Improve practice financial health.
• Increase provider access for your patients. 
• Improvements to community health and wellbeing.

At Health Prime, we consider Plus 1 (One More Patient Per Day) as the amount of additional revenue to the practice if each provider added one kept appointment per day throughout the year. In Health Prime's Datalytics dashboard, you will be able to see this value-added feature not normally captured on your typical billing company dashboard.

If you want to be able to see one more patient per day, there is no need of any additional marketing or advertisement. By doing some adjustments on your medical practice, you will be able to see an extra patient per day without any difficulty.

How can you see one more patient per day?

1. Make sure your front desk is managing your schedule efficiently

Are they filling every available slot or are they leaving some slots vacant that they could have fill? When people call and they want to be seen. Does your staff routinely offer the first available slot even if it's today or within two hours? Is your front office staff a barrier to patient access? By asking yourself these questions, you might be able to determine if your staff is scheduling and managing your patients properly.

There are times when the staff doesn't want to schedule one more patient per day. Maybe it seems like too much work. The more patients they have to check in and check out, the more the work. Smart people who want to design a job that works for them will find they can manipulate your schedule in a lot of ways to make their lives easier. This practice is not in the best interest of the patient to be told they have to wait to be seen. Neither for the doctor, who is able to see an extra patient per day but doesn't know their staff is turning them away. 

2. Reduce your No Shows

Monitor your average No-Show Rate and set some realistic goals to reduce this metric. One way you can reduce your no-shows is by doing appointment confirmations. This way you can confirm if the patient will show up to the scheduled appointment. By reducing your number of no shows, you will be able to see one more patient a day easily. 

3. Set up appointments for preventative care

Every patient can go once a year without any medical symptom for a routine check-up and preventative care. Insurance companies are required to pay for these annual check-ups for all their subscribers without applying deductibles or copayments. Insurance covers 100% of the allowed amount.

Investigate how many of your patients have not set an appointment for that regular check-out in the last year. This is good for your patients because they can find something that could save their lives. It is also good for the providers because they will have an extra revenue that is covered entirely by the insurance company.

4. Optimize your medical practice

Are you seeing as many patients as you could/should have? Are you too busy? If your answer to this last question is Yes, then you need to optimize your practice and determine the reasons behind why you are so busy.

Are you doing paperwork tasks or spending time documenting in your EHR? Analyze potential problems that you might have within the processes in your office and reach out to an expert if you want to implement some ideas on how to optimize your medical practice.

Benefits of seeing One more Patient per Day

$20,000 - $30,000 PER YEAR

Health Prime can help you achieve your goals!

If you want to see one more patient per day, Health Prime (HP) offers you different solutions: 

• Access to your One more patient per day metric: At HP we have Datalytics, the RCM platform you need to know about. Our platform focus on insights that other medical billing solutions neglect. You will be able to see how your practice is doing at first glance, including the +1 patient per day metric, our value-added feature not normally captured on your typical billing company dashboard. 
• Monitor your No-Show rate: if you focus on reducing your number of no shows per day, you may be able to see one extra patient per day. At HP, we calculate your No-Show rate dividing your number of no-show appointments by the number of expected appointments for that same period. 
• Appointment confirmations: At Health Prime we have a department that can help you call your patients and confirm if they will show up to your appointments. Engage our department for a trial period and see how we can help you reduce your number of no shows. 
• Scheduling appointments: Calling your patients to schedule appointments may seem like a tedious task. We can do it for you. Schedule regular appointments or appointments for preventative care. Find slots in your schedule that will allow you to have additional appointments. If you want to do the calling, we can give you the list of patients you can call. 
• Get a shopper: If you want someone to be a shopper (person who pretends to be a potential customer, when they actually are gathering data) you can reach out to us. Arrange someone to call your practice 2-3 times a month to see if they can make appointments. Find out what kind of process your office has. If your patients can make their own appointments online, we can help you check if it's working properly and if it matches up and syncs with your schedule. For HP clients, there's no extra charge and it's usually done once every quarter.  
  

If you want more information about how you can fit in one more patient per day and improve your medical practice by doing it, feel free to email us at marketing@hpiinc.com. Set up a meeting with us to discuss how Health Prime can help you get your practice back in its prime.

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