What are some best techniques to improve your medical practice?

Improve the way you run your medical practice. From your hiring processes to market your practice. Know what you need to do to optimize your processes, increase patient loyalty and help your business grow and succeed.

On the first installment of our Best Practices webinar series, "Best Practices Part 1: For the medical practice", Caroline Balestra, Business Process Analyst at Health Prime, reviewed some aspects you can implement on your practice to improve your processes in the medical office.

In the webinar, Balestra explained some best practices you can follow to manage your practice more effectively. Starting with hiring, training, and supporting staff; create loyal patients; reduce HIPAA risks, marketing your practice and asking for help when you need it.

Hiring, Train & Support Staff

Hiring

Finding great people can be a challenge. When hiring new employees for the front desk or any other position in your practice, it's important to thoroughly vet them. The review of all incoming applications or resumes to check their experience in previous position is essential.

“Putting a standardized plan for the interview process (questions and answers for example) can be key to an effective and simplified hiring process. Using the same template of questions and answers for each candidate can help you quickly identify key skills for any potential employee”, Balestra said.

To determine how well the candidates work with others you can check the answers to some scenarios and questions like: Describe a time when you disagreed with a customer, supervisor, or coworker. What did you do to resolve the conflict? What was the outcome? Be aware that sometimes you'll get more candid feedback from prior employers about this situation.

Training

When training staff it's important to remember that:

• Everyone learns differently and at different paces.
• Cross-Train ALL staff members.
• Hands On Development.
  
  

Support

Continued support is what retains great employees.

There are some key items to remember if you want to support your staff efficiently:

• Provide tools and resources they need to do their tasks in the best way.
• Professional growth and development: evaluate what are they interested in learning and how that would be beneficial for the medical practice as well. It will be a win-win for both parties.
• Communicate with your staff about career development: Helping your staff with their professional path is far more than checking off the boxes in a performance development plan. Talk with your staff about the opportunities they have to enhance their skill set and grow within the company.
• Provide and open-door concept: it means that every manager's door is open to every employee regardless titles and positions. This set a precedence for your office culture allowing interaction on multiple levels, open communication, and feedback about any matter of importance to an employee.
  
  

Create Loyal Patients

Reduce HIPAA Risks

Healthcare offices and their business associates must comply with the HIPAA privacy, security and breach notification rules and implement reasonable safeguards to prevent violations. “Even with controls in place, violations and data breaches can still occur. Most breaches that occur are unintentional but still represent a serious issue that can bring major consequences”, Balestra explained.

How can medical practice employees prevent HIPAA violations?

• Never disclose passwords or share login credentials: Every employee is provided with a unique login, through which they will grant access to sensitive information. Those login details need to remain private.
• Never leave portable devices or documents unattended: Healthcare employees must never leave devices or documents containing Protected Health Information (PHI) in areas where they can be viewed by unauthorized individuals, picked up by other healthcare workers, or seen by other patients.
• Do not text/email PHI: If you must send ePHI, only do so through approved channels such as secure, healthcare designated text platform or encrypted emails.
• Don't dispose of PHI with regular trash: HIPAA requires to be rendered unreadable, indecipherable, and unable to be reconstructed when it's no longer needed.
  
  

Remember to never access patient records out of curiosity, don't take medical records with you when you change job, don't access your own medical records using your login credentials and make sure to report potential HIPAA violations at your work. If you want more information on how to prevent HIPAA breaches and establish a risk aware culture, you can go to the U.S Department of Health & Human Services website.

Market your Practice

When marketing your practice its helpful to begin by establishing what your goals are and how your patients will benefit. Establish your skills, target audience, and how your skills will benefit your audience. Inform your patients and develop your reputation as an excellent healthcare provider.

Some helpful things to focus on that will improve your marketing strategy are: 

Ask for Help

It is important to know when its time to ask for help in your practice.

Turning to a professional, experienced practice management and billing service such as Health Prime can offer you the following benefits:

1. Free up medical office staff for more patient-centered tasks. Let someone with extensive billing experience take on daily billing tasks.
2. Improve documentation and coding accuracy prior to claim submissions to get paid quickly and correctly.
3. Accurate, timely submissions which can mean fewer denials caused by staff who can often be distracted by other office and patient-related duties.
4. Faster follow-up within resubmission deadlines on any claims that may have been denied. You will have a better chance of capturing reimbursement for those claims.
5. Fewer denied and/or rejected claims by focusing your staff on front office duties and allowing HP to help scrub and submit claims.
6. Add-On Solutions such as certified coder assistance, scribe transcription services, eligibility and benefit verifications, outbound calls to confirm appointments and more.
7. Analytical and practice optimization tools offered by Health Prime can provide you insights into your daily, weekly, and monthly performance allowing streamlining and improvement of office and billing processes. Datalytics focus on insights that other medical billing solutions neglect allowing you to monitor the overall health of your practice at a glance.
   
   

If you have any question or want to know more about how Health Prime can help you improve your medical practice, feel free to reach out to us at marketing@hpiinc.com. Subscribe to our Health Prime blog to stay tuned on our upcoming installments for our Best Practices webinar and all the latest updates to run your medical practice better so you can focus on what matters the most: your patients.