4 Ways Medical Practices Lose Money

Small Business

Your practice might feel busier than ever before, but your revenue or profit margin might have become stagnant. If so, you might wonder where you are going wrong and how you can improve your practice’s profitability.

Rather than allowing the financial issues to spiral out of control, you must look for ways to decrease outgoings and increase its net profit. Identify your potential mistakes by reading about the four ways medical practices lose money.

  1. Poor Billing Practices

Poor billing practices can lead to unnecessary losses. It is vital to review financial processes and data to identify silly mistakes, incompetence, or misbehavior. A little research could help your practice discover if a receptionist isn’t verifying a patient’s presented insurance card or if they are sending claims to an incorrect address.

Pinpoint potential billing issues by reviewing the practice’s monthly charges, collections, and adjustments. Also, browse the billing office drawers at the end of the day to ensure checks and receipts correspond with accounting records, appeals, or unprocessed claims

2. Losing Patients

It is easy for medical practices to lose patients. After all, a patient might forget to organize follow-up appointments, avoid calls, or fear attending screenings or check-ups. Unfortunately, losing patients can cause your practice to lose money and may even result in a patient’s health deteriorating. This is the last thing you want.

Improving engagement can prevent patients from becoming lost or overdue, which will protect their health while improving your practice’s profitability and productivity. Brevium can provide a custom-fit patient engagement solution to reactivate patients, as it could increase engagement via text, auto-calls, email, postcards, and live calls. Invest in this to help your patients and your practice.

3. Exhausted Employees

Tired, stressed-out employees will slow down your practice’s efficiency and lower internal standards, which can impact its annual revenue. Despite a backlog of patients, you must ensure your employees don’t feel overwhelmed, stressed, or too tired to function in their roles.

Care for your employees by assessing your team and their performances. If they work too much overtime, have a heavy workload, or shoulder many responsibilities, you might need to outsource tasks, encourage breaks, or delegate jobs to other employees. A healthy, relaxed workforce will lead to improved productivity, better patient outcomes, and greater financial stability.

4. Excessive Overtime

Staff overtime could cost your practice thousands of dollars per year. As you will need to pay your staff time-and-a-half for every hour of overtime, it can quickly drain your practice’s profit margin. Your loyal staff might have the best intentions when staying late to ensure each patient visits a doctor, but you must find ways to reduce this expense.

Prevent overtime by optimizing employee schedules, such as introducing 10-hour days or split shifts. Also, organize for only one member of staff to remain at the practice at the end of the day to assist the last few patients. It may even help to pre-approve all overtime requests to protect the staffing budget. You can then use the money saved to secure the practice’s lifespan and improve medical standards.