KPIs to Improve Front Desk Efficiency and Revenue Cycle Management

Physicians today are tasked with so many external mandates that sometimes the patient — and physicians — gets short shrift. On average, physicians only spend about 27 percent of their office day on direct clinical facetime with patients, according to a recent study by the Advisory Board, while nearly 50 percent of their day is taken up with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and other desk work.

It is easy for a medical practice to get caught up in paperwork, insurance claims and compliance with important laws and regulations, and neglect the reason why they went into medicine in the first place – the patients. One could argue that if a practice puts patient care first, almost everything else should fall into place.

Many medical practices would like to increase the amount of time they spend with patients if they knew with confidence that other aspects of the practice — especially the front desk and billing/revenue cycle management — were humming. One way to accomplish that is to identify and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in those areas.

KPIs for Your Medical Practice Front Desk

Front desk KPIs typically include metrics dealing with patient contact and paperwork conducted before the appointment, the waiting room experience, and check-out procedures after the doctor appointment. Some of the most important KPIs include Patient In-Office Wait Times, Schedule Density, and Employment Confirmation and No-Show Rates, all of which affect patient satisfaction and a practice’s bottom line.

Medical Billing Key Performance Indicators

When it comes to billing and revenue cycle management, there is no shortage of KPIs to track. Medical billing and coding is one of the most time-consuming tasks handled in a medical office. It is also where many costly errors are made.

Some important KPIs to consider tracking include:

KPIs are powerful because they take complex business factors and represent them as numbers over time. Once something is measured, then it can be managed and improved. For a deeper look at these KPIs and others, and how they can help improve the efficiency and profitability of your practice, download Top 5 KPIs to optimize your practice and bolster patient satisfaction.