When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, it marked a new chapter in health care. Since then, there has been a significant move towards a payment model that focuses on patient outcomes rather than charging patients for each individual service or treatment which could easily lead to price gouging. This shift has left many practices confused as to how to remain profitable while their enter business structure changes.
With value-based care, healthcare providers are encouraged to offer preventative and proactive care to patients while reducing unnecessary or excessive healthcare spending. In order to achieve this, there are a few different strategies that a practice can adopt to help track patient outcomes and secure favorable contracts.
Increase efficiency within your practice.
One of the easiest things to do as a business owner to increase profitability is to eliminate unnecessary expenses and increase efficiency. This has become even more important as businesses across the country are constantly struggling with staffing issues and rising costs.
With value-based care, there is a major emphasis on treating a patient from start to finish. However, this doesn’t mean that the same amount of resources needs to be provided throughout the entire patient cycle. Instead, patients generally need a higher amount of care after a traumatic event or health issue and this demand on resources will start to decrease over time.
As a business, it is important to monitor patients’ overall health closely not only to provide the best care possible but also to be able to better understand when and to whom resources need to be allocated. This will help you create workflows that can improve efficiency and ROI.
Build partnerships with other providers
It is extremely important to know a patient’s health history when your profit is directly linked to their health outcome. This means knowing what other healthcare providers they have seen as well as having strong professional relationships with other providers to who you can refer patients.
Having these relationships can help ensure that you are providing the best medical care possible to patients. They can also help you scale your business faster in the future and enable you to find alternative strategies for maintaining business growth in the future.
Invest in staffing and technology
The key to successfully transiting to value-based care is having a talented team to support your business as well as the technology that they need to support them. Your team is your front line in terms of customer service while technology and automation can make their jobs faster and easier. We understand that it may feel risky to invest more money in your practice; however, this investment can have a major impact on patient health outcomes and their overall customer satisfaction.
Develop new evaluation systems
As you start to create a bigger network of partners and have a growing team of talented individuals, you need to ensure that you have an evaluation system in place that can accurately monitor their success based on a value-based care model. This information can be used to identify opportunities and gaps and adopt better care models that can help lower costs while increasing profitablity.
How can Orchard Medical Management help?
Companies like Orchard Medical Management can help you manage your administrative, revenue management, and HR tasks to allow you to dedicate your time to providing excellent service for your patients. Give us a call today to find out how we can help you optimize your revenue management cycle and reduce the burden of unpaid medical bills.