Four Pillars for Building a Healthy Practice

The pandemic has hit many business sectors hard. Many businesses and medical practices in 2022 faced near double-digit inflation, labor shortages and continuing supply chain constraints.

Recovery and growth from the pandemic has been uneven and slow for medical practices. Many are experiencing lower patient volume and rising practice costs. If this sounds like what you are contending with in your medical practice, take time to review all areas of operations to ensure you are being cost efficient and capturing revenue as quickly as possible to bolster cash flow and reinvest in your practice.

What are the 4 pillars?

According to a framework devised by Waiting Room Solutions, these are all interconnected:

1. Quality Patient Care
2. Patient Satisfaction
3. financial Health
4. and Efficient Use of Time and Resources

There are important disciplines you can master in each pillar. These key performance indicators (KPIs) help you to establish a baseline and track improvement over time.

In this month’s guide, we highlight The Top 10 KPIs to Maintain a Healthy Practice, breaking it down and taking a deeper look at the importance of each pillar and offering corresponding KPIs to help track performance and improvement. Let’s take a top-line look at each pillar and why each is so vital to a healthy practice.

• Quality Patient Care. Patients are healthy and feel cared for by physicians and staff when they have engaging conversations with their physician who takes time to answer questions. The front desk staff also plays an important role – when they are organized and efficient, patients see their doctors in a timely fashion and all paperwork and preauthorizations are completed in advance. 
• Patient Satisfaction. When patient’s are pleased with their care, a practice will receive 4- and 5-star reviews. By increasing positive word-of-mouth, you attract new patients to your practice.
• Financial Health. This area of your practice has the most trackable KPIs, but it is easy to get lost in the data maze and lose focus on what is most important to your practice by chasing too many KPIs at once. Without question, tightening up even a few performance areas will directly impact the efficiency and profitability of your practice.
• Efficient Use of Time and Resources. While the most critical resource in an independent medical practice is the physician, don’t lose sight of the critical importance the supporting staff plays in optimizing the efficiency of a medical practice. When a practice operational tasks are automated or conducted by supporting staff, this enables the physician to do what he or she does best – clinical patient care.

While some of this may sound like a pipe dream, it is not. As you review the KPIs we have outlined in our guide this month, look at them critically and ask yourself which are the most important to your practice. Perhaps your biggest weakness is in billing and revenue cycle management, or maybe it is reputation management. The weakest aspect of your practice is the area you should focus on first and foremost, and build from there.