Benchmark and Give Your Practice a Distinct Competitive Advantage

As an administrator, you juggle countless priorities. While it may be easy for urgent matters to overwhelm the important, taking time for some non-urgent analysis and data entry can pay significant long-term dividends for your practice. Three practice management experts explain why.

Derek: Ann and Sue, why do you spend time entering your practice’s data into the online Academetrics benchmarking survey? What value does it bring your practice?

Ann: Using the benchmarking survey data helps me educate myself and my doctors about how our practice is doing. The comparative benchmarks give context to the data from our practice and help us know how we are doing.

By nature, doctors and practice leaders are a bit competitive; it helps us all try a little harder to bolster those areas where we may be weak and shine a little in areas where we do well.

Sue: Each February, I have a meeting with my doctors at which I present our practice results from the previous year. The graphs I’m able to generate from doing the Academetrics benchmarking survey show how we compare to similar practices. Academetrics does all the work, but showing those graphs in our meeting makes me look like a genius!

The trends graphs help us see how we are progressing. Areas where we have concerns are the springboard to helping us think about how to improve our results.

Ann: I use the benchmarking data in many ways, and I’ll discuss some of those in the webinar. For example, I’ve used patient-encounter data to raise discussions in our practice about scheduling templates, the number of techs and other staff we need and physician coverage of various offices.

Sue: And as I’ve looked at our staffing benchmarks, it has caused me to ask questions such as, “Can we automate some tasks?” “Do we need to change the delegation of some tasks?” and “Do we need more billers to keep up with the growth in our practice?”

Derek: Benchmarks for ophthalmology practices are a lot like the “vital signs” that doctors measure when examining patients – they give an indication of the health of the practice and can point to areas of concern so those can be addressed. I hope you will join us for the webinar on March 28!

Learn to analyze your practice using the most important key performance indicators during our March 28 webinar, Benchmarking: Use KPIs to Improve Practice Profit and Efficiencies.