May 2020 Measuring and Monitoring Telehealth
This BIG Idea is based on a couple of recent projects to add telehealth visits to dashboards. Assuming reimbursement continues, telemedicine is likely to be with us for some time, so these practices are tracking telemedicine on weekly and monthly dashboards. ...
April 2020 Rethinking Patient Appointment Slots
Today’s BIG Idea podcast is based on some projects I have worked on recently for practices thinking about reopening or ramping up existing schedules. Even as practices reopen, some practices are limiting patient appointment volume to maintain social distancing and...
April 2020 Dashboard in Excel
Today's BIG Idea is a project I'm working on for a savvy practice manager who wants to be able to maintain his own dashboard in Excel. The trick is that his practice management data lives in the cloud, so we needed to build a way to access the data, manipulate the...
April 2020 Weekly Dashboards
Today's BIG Idea is based on a project I did last week and another project I'm working on this week. In normal times, a monthly dashboard to providers may work just fine. With all of today's uncertainty, some practices are moving to weekly dashboards. I'll discuss...
April 2020 Filled vs Unfilled Appointments
Today's BIG Idea is a project I did last week to analyze filled vs unfilled appointment slots for a group that is trying to adjust their appointment templates in response to coronavirus. The practice is trying to rebalance their templates in the short term to make...
March 2020 Business Intelligence for Coronavirus Part 3
Here is a third BIG Idea podcast about coping with coronavirus. There are four ideas in today's podcast. Listen for suggestions on finding potential telehealth patients, whether you are trying to increase or ration the number of telehealth appointments. Hear how a...
March 2020 Business Intelligence for Coronavirus Part 2
Here is another BIG Idea podcast about coping with coronavirus. The focus of today's podcast is cash flow. As many practices slow down seeing patients, we need ways to maintain cash flow going forward. Listen for ideas on mining A/R data, getting charges entered...
March 2020 Business Intelligence for Coronavirus
Today's BIG Idea is a quick podcast for busy medical practice managers dealing with coronavirus. I've described several suggestions that might help, particularly around data mining appointment data to see what we can of the future. Can you quickly find patients over...
March 2020 Billing Office Productivity
The BIG Idea for today is from a practice that wants to allow employees to work from home, but at the same time wants to keep an eye on productivity. I have built some SQL queries over the years to let them see the amount of charges, payments, adjustments, and notes...
March 2020 More Appointment Utilization
Today's BIG Ideas Podcast is two ideas that data mine your appointment data to look for opportunities and potential problems. The first idea comes from an orthopedic practice that co-owns an orthopedic hospital with the local hospital system. The hospital used to...
February 2020 Track Room Utilization Data
Here's a short BIG Ideas Podcast based on a visit the week before last to a group in the Midwest. The practice wants to increase patient access and thinks there are providers and nursing staff to support the change. The question is room availability. Fortunately,...
February 2020 3D Maps
Today's BIG Idea is to visualize your data, especially with Excel's 3D Maps feature. I did this for a group in the Southeast the week before last. If you haven't seen your Excel data in a map, here's a way to get started. The group I was helping did billing for...
February 2020 Pivot Tables
This BIG Idea is based on a webinar I did for MGMA the week before last on Pivot Tables. If you haven't seen your data in Pivot Tables, in some sense you haven't seen your data. Pivot Tables make it easy to analyze, trend, and understand your data in ways...
February 2020 Challenge Billing Assumptions
Today's BIG Ideas podcast is based on a project I am working on for a client back east. The practice gave me a copy of their fee schedule, downloaded from the practice management system, and asked me to write code to compare the standard fee schedule to what has been...
January 2020 SQL Server Integration Services
Today's BIG idea is a tool to get data to analyze when that data is hard to access or work with. I'm working on two projects. The first project is for a group that has data in Epic. Given the structure of their practice and the control of Epic, the main access to...
January 2020 Prescriptions
Today's BIG Idea is a combination of several projects I'm working on to pull prescription data into a dataset and Pivot Table. If you had all of your prescription data from the current year and the prior 2 years, what would you be able to see? Opioids prescribed on...
January 2020 Billing Audit
My friend David Zetter and I have helped a couple of practices with payer contracting questions lately. In the process of analyzing their billing data to look for payer contracting issues, we have found significant issues with unpaid claims. When was the last time...
January 2020 Report Physician Comp Metrics
Happy New Year! If one of your practice's new year's resolutions is to increase physician productivity or if you have recently changed your physician comp plan, this BIG Ideas podcast is for you. Too many practices take too long to report back to providers on basic...
December 2019 Payer Contracting Analysis
Today's BIG Idea is from a project I am working for a group back east. The group is considering a merger and wants to see how their payer contracts will perform before and after the merger. Listen to the process we went through to gather existing data to validate...
December 2019 Payer Contracting Without all of the Data
Today's BIG Ideas podcast is based on a project I am working on for a client in the West. The practice administrator is relatively new. He knows he needs to work on payer contracting, but the practice doesn't have all of the contract information readily available. ...