The beginning of a new year is especially calm for an eyecare practice in comparison to a busy holiday season. After your patients have spent the remainder of their HSA/FSA accounts, there might be a lull in January that could worry you.
In order to help you avoid losing revenue, we're going over how you can start the year off strong and fill your time productively. From implementing new processes or software to rethinking your strategies, we'll cover a few revenue boosting methods that might help you in 2022.
Jump Start the Beginning of Your Year
Space to breathe
Low foot traffic in your practice means your team can catch up on resubmitting denied or rejected claims and complete other administrative or inventory-related tasks. Down time was useful for Dr. Robin Szabo's practice because she switched her EHR software. The more relaxed pace of learning the software and the reduced patient flow helped her. “With the lower-than-usual patient volume, we have some downtime to work on the conversion more,” she says. The practice purposefully added lots of breaks into the daily schedule, knowing that team members would need time to adjust.
Prepare for audits
We know you want to avoid an audit, but it's better to just be prepared if one arises. Start by making sure you're explaining costs and benefits to patients thoroughly both before and after appointments. Check your insurance payers policies to see how often they perform audits. Another way to prevent audits is by using a clearinghouse or an outsourced billing service that can check whether you're within the normal parameters of utilization. Keep your documentation thorough and consistent throughout exams; you'll thank yourself if an auditor does come knocking.
Necessary updates
Have you noticed that some of your medical equipment, paper forms, or patient communication tools seem clunky to use or just out of date? January is a good time to research new solutions and update them because you'll be able to work out the kinks of a new process and start afresh. Especially if you're implementing new software, you'll need a bit of extra time for training and migrating any data over.
There's no time like the present to make a Five Year Plan. Here's a guide that can help you.
