So, your optical practice is running smoothly thanks to electronic health records, a cloud-based practice management system, and a productive staff. How do you grow from there? Your next step is scaling your business. That's where generating and analyzing reports can come in handy.

With the right solutions, you can quickly create custom reports using the large volumes of data you already have at your disposal. With these reports, you get more insight into your accounts, testing frequency, insurance claims, patient flow, and productivity. If you want to strengthen or identify your optometry practice's weak points, data reports are crucial. Read on to find out the most important reasons you'll want to analyze reports to keep your practice flourishing.

How Data Reports Can Help Grow Your Optometry Practice

The best RCM services have reporting tools to help you run operational, financial, audit, and analysis reports that identify unusual billing patterns or errors. They provide even more insight into productivity and revenue by analyzing things like claim denial rate, revenue reporting, and the threat of audits.

Transparency

Practices with a large staff need peace of mind that no big mistakes are going unchecked. Ideally, you'll want all of your accounting and finance reports to be in one system with your receipts and insurance claims. This can become a burden if you don't have a dedicated billing manager or a revenue cycle management service that generates automatic reports when data is entered.

Certain tools can generate insights on your insurance claim denial rates, claim processing times, overall income from insurance, and more reports that create transparency into your billing information. With this transparency, you can be completely aware of how much money is flowing through your practice as well as compare it to the state and national averages to see if you're on track. If you're making less money, seeing an increasing denial rate, or experiencing a lag in claim processing, you can generate more reports to find out why.

Lost Revenue

Efficient services like VisionWeb's Revenue Cycle Management can highlight errors, discrepancies, and gaps in your revenue stream. Fixing these issues as soon as they arise is possible when you are running weekly revenue reports, but more difficult if you only check your accounting reports every year. Make sure you're not losing out on money before claim filing deadlines pass by. Have your optometric biller or a member of your staff run analysis on your weekly income, comparing it week over week or year over year to see if you're making progress.

Productivity

For as long as your practice has been open, you've been collecting data on your medical testing, but how do you stack up when compared to your peers? Having access to a utilization report can help verify that all the tests you perform are based on medical necessity and align with the industry average. This way, you can see if you're more productive in terms of quantity of tests as well as which tests you perform more or less often than the average OD.

With anomalies highlighted, you can examine your test methods and avoid the potential of an audit. If you run the report and find you're using a single procedure more often than the national average, you can prepare responses for any notifications you might receive from insurance companies.

If you are able to generate digestible, comprehensive data reports with your existing platform, do you know how to analyze them? 

Download our eBook on the 5 Essential Insurance Reports below to see where you should focus your efforts.