4 Major Reasons Your Medical Practice Is Losing Revenue

Running a medical practice can be hard work. Not only do you have to focus your attention on treating your patients, but you also have to worry about administrative demands; from payment collection to sourcing and onboarding new patients. It can be incredibly demoralizing if you find that your practice revenue has plateaued, or worse – is losing you money. Here are 4 major reasons your medical practice is losing revenue:

Patient Collections Methods

All medical practitioners should have a standard procedure for collecting payment from patients. Having a process that is efficient and simple to implement instead of messy and unstructured can go a long way in ensuring a better cash flow. Sometimes, patients even require different methods of collection according to their needs.

To further streamline the process, you may consider hiring a third-party service like KR Billing Solutions to collect for you, which lowers the risk of a missed payment and ensures that you are making the revenue you are supposed to.

Competing Against Urgent Care

Across America, urgent care and retail clinics are becoming increasingly popular. This could spell trouble for your business as the patient pool gets directed to these clinics instead for non-serious health problems. Although this may mean that you have more time to focus on your existing patients, a lack of new patients would definitely hurt your revenue in the long run.

One option to combat this is to offer patients telemedicine services that deliver care to a patient at a distant location. This mitigates the trouble of the patient having to travel for a walk-in appointment and can increase the range of area for your service.

Your Staff is Overworked

When your staff is exhausted from having to work long hours, they are, understandably, unable to perform at full efficiency. This may blow a hole in your revenue as the quality of your service decreases. Do an assessment of your staff’s performance at work and spot any unequal distribution of workload or schedules which need to be fixed. Perhaps you need to hire more staff so your team does not become overburdened.

You may find it beneficial to outsource some parts that are not central to the medical practice. One such example is handing medical billing to a third-party service, which will surely take the load off your team. This can result in a much healthier work environment and boost efficiency.

Follow-Up Complications

It can be tough to keep up with follow-ups of patients, especially when they reschedule appointments, make late cancellations, or just simply do not turn up. However, follow-ups are vital, and it is a good idea to take the responsibility of conveying their importance to your patients.

Set strict deadlines for appointments and ensure that your patients keep to them by incentivizing them. For example, offer discounted visits or additional complementary resources. If your patients have trouble coming in for appointments, try suggesting a telemedicine option that would save them time and save you the worry of a last-minute cancellation.