November 2019 Pivot Tables
Today's BIG Ideas Podcast is a Pivot Table project I have been working on for a client in the Pacific Northwest. Their practice management system does not have a report that combines all of the revenue information they need to see in one place. Rather than multiple...
November 2019 Days Worked
Today's BIG Ideas Podcast is from my presentation at MGMA's 2019 Annual Conference in New Orleans on Patient Access. This orthopaedic practice monitors clinic days with this dashboard. Listen for why the practice administrator tracks office days, some of the logic...
October 2019 Patient Loyalty
Today's BIG Ideas Podcast is taken from the 2019 MGMA Annual Conference discussion about Patient Access. We did not have time to discuss this slide in New Orleans, so here is your chance. The idea is to measure how loyal patients are to the different providers in...
October 2019 Patient Tenure
This week's BIG Ideas Podcast is from last week's MGMA Annual Conference discussion about Patient Access. Practices spent a lot of time, effort, and money marketing their providers, but it can be tricky to understand how long a patient will stay with your practice. ...
October 2019 Unsold Appointments
Greetings from New Orleans where I am in town to speak for MGMA's Annual Conference. My Monday session is called Measuring, Managing, Motivating, and Mastering: Patient Access in Medical Practices. One of the ways to improve patient access is reduce the number of...
October 2019 Data Mine Clinical Data
I apologize for being a week behind on this blog post. I've had 6 speaking engagements in 6 weeks, plus 4 days onsite at a practice in Florida. The last of the 6 meetings in MGMA's Annual Conference next week in New Orleans. I have sessions on Monday and...
September 2019 Bill Duke
This week's podcast guest is my friend Bill Duke. Bill's a CPA who has run practices in different specialties. He and I have been working together for years and one of his powerful insights is to leverage SQL Server Reporting Services to email...
September 2019 Leeann Garms
This week's BIG Ideas Podcast is a conversation with Leeann Garms, the Chief Executive Officer of Raleigh Neurology Group in Raleigh, NC. Leeann discusses how to start and then gain momentum when mining your practice data. Listen for her insights into...
September 2019 Patient Access at AC19
Today's BIG Ideas Podcast is a sneak preview of my Monday morning session at MGMA's Annual Conference in New Orleans in October. The topic is Patient Access, and there will be an interactive discussion based on what the participants in the session want to...
August 2019 EM Coding Patterns
This week's BIG Ideas Podcast is based on a project I did for a non-surgical specialty practice last week. The initial concern was that some providers felt like other providers would see a patient, bill the 9920x series new patient code, and then refer...
August 2019 Trend Payer Mix
There are two ideas in today's BIG Ideas podcast based on a visit I made to a practice in the Southeast last week. First, their data was in the cloud, which often makes it difficult to get the reports you need. We used Excel's VLOOKUP feature to combine...
August 2019 Front Desk Exception Scrubber
A couple of weeks ago, the BIG idea was an appointment scrubber to catch problems with upcoming appointments. This week's BIG Idea is to scrub front desk exceptions. What kind of errors do you see at the front desk that prevent clean claims from going...
August 2019 E&M Coding Chart
I hope you can see the artwork with this podcast. It's an E&M Coding chart I did for a group recently, and is as close to art as you are going to get from this data guy. When was the last time you plotted your E&M Coding levels? What insights...
July 2019 CMS Provider Utilization File
CMS recently released the 2017 Provider Utilization File. That data provides an opportunity for savvy practice managers to get a sense of their market share, especially for Medicare patients. The data can also help practices see what their competitors...
July 2019 Canceled Appointments
How often does your office cancel patient appointments? More often than you would like? Listen to today’s BIG Ideas from the Business Intelligence Guy podcast for a way to quantify the cost of canceling patient appointments. I am not talking about the...
July 2019 Appointment Scrubber
You are probably familiar with a claim scrubber -- a tool used to fix potential issues in claims before sending the claims to the payer. Have you thought about building an appointment scrubber? The idea is to look at all of your upcoming appointments and...
July 2019 Patient Mix
You likely calculate a payer mix for your practice, but have you calculated a patient mix? How do you segregate your patients? By age? By zip code? Have you thought about bucketing your patients by how long it has been since their last visit? This...
July 2019 Conversation with Mona Reimers about Pre-Certification
Is your Pre-Certification department a hot bed of drama? Does it seem like there is always a crisis to get procedures approved? Listen to today's conversation with Mona Reimers, Director of Administrative Operations at Ortho NorthEast in Fort Wayne,...
Tracking Denials June 2019
Are you frustrated by the number of claim denials in your practice? You providers have rendered the service, your practice has borne the overhead, but now you are not getting reimbursed. Today’s BIG Ideas podcast has ideas on how to gather denial data...
Disaster Recovery June 2019
What would happen if you walked into the office tomorrow morning and your computer system is down? Whether it is a hardware issue, an internet problem, an upgrade gone bad, or Heaven forbid ransomware, what is your plan B? Today I built a series of...