A few years ago, PT clinics could get by with their billing entity doing an 80% job. Revenue per visit was good enough that it didn’t matter too much if claims were paid late or a few line items weren’t paid at all.
However, times have changed. Revenue per visit is going down. In addition, many economists are predicting some pretty significant inflation at some point in the future. Not to mention the spectre of a government mandated minimum wage hike. All of these forces leave the private practice owner squeezed between rising costs and shrinking reimbursement.
There is no longer any tolerance for a billing entity doing an 80% job. They have to perform at 100%.
In fact, I feel that to really serve PT owners well, they need to perform at 110%. I will explain that at the end of this article.
There is some good news, by the way. Over the next eight years the demand for our PT services is expected to grow at 4 times the demand of the average industry. That’s huge! Clinics that do a few things right should have plenty of patients to fill their schedules. But once again, if their billing entity isn’t performing well, that could just mean greater losses.
How do you know if your billing entity is performing well?
There are a few statistics that you should track. I won’t go into details about all of those here. But reach out to me at matt@star-mgmt.com if you would like those metrics.
However, the most important one is:
Is your billing entity taking action every 30 days on each unpaid line item?
How do you determine this? Really strong billing companies do their own internal analysis. They should know if their designated staff are following their protocols. Simply ask them to share the results of their own monthly internal analysis with you.
If they won’t do that, then they either aren’t doing this analysis or the results are too poor to share with you. In either case, you probably want to consider interviewing other PT billing companies.
At STAR Management Company, we do this analysis on every billing client, every single month. And we are glad to share the results of that internal analysis with you. Even on those rare occasions that we find we missed something.
Reach out to us if you would like more information about our Billing Processes and how we perform at 100%.
Now about that extra 10%. What does a billing company have to do to be at 110%?
We feel it is important for your billing company to give you information about what you can do to increase revenue per visit and per case. At STAR Management Company, we analyze every client’s data every month to see where they can make more money.
It isn’t uncommon for us to recommend changes that increase revenue by 48%. Do you wonder if there are changes that you could make in your clinic to generate 48% greater revenue per patient?
Drop me a line, I’d love to talk about that with you.
Matt Slimming, PT, DPT
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