Things Your Medical Practice Needs to Do Every Year

Running a medical practice is complex, with regulatory challenges and high standards of patient care. With the challenges facing clinicians day-to-day, it is often difficult to maintain a view of the bigger picture.

The success of a medical practice depends just as much on strong leadership, organization, and engagement from management as it does on the expertise of its clinical staff. Besides the every day, there are several things that your medical practice needs to do every year.

To keep your medical practice in peak condition, here are the assessments that your medical practice needs to do every year.

Monitor Financial Health

Monitoring financial health should be done more regularly than once per year, but every year it is a good idea to set aside some time to review and compare annual performance. Month-to-month revenue streams will differ as seasonal influences dictate clinical responses.

Still, understanding those variations with regard to revenue streams and cash flow can help with financial stability over the longer term. Keep an eye on your annual tax return and compare it with previous submissions.

• Review and action any outstanding claims or insurance accounts.
• Review and action any outstanding vendor invoices or returns.
• Review and action any outstanding patient collections.

Maintaining and monitoring the financial health of your medical practice will likely help you to deliver improved patient care and better outcomes.

Effectively Manage Insurance and Contracts

To maintain a stable and efficient financial foundation for your medical practice, it is important to manage insurance and contracts properly. Check your policies annually before renewal to make sure you have adequate coverage, in the case of liabilities, claims for malpractice, or other potential problems.

Renegotiating in advance with providers can yield discounts and other favorable terms that may benefit your practice.

• Review and compare licenses, insurance, and payor contracts.
• Review and compare supplier contracts.
• Check service contracts for the best value.

Making sure your contracts are up-to-date and compliant with current and signposted legislative changes may help to protect your practice’s income streams.

Evaluate Marketing Strategies and Tactics

Marketing return on investment (ROI) is sometimes difficult to determine. Online advertising often comes with supporting analytics that tells you when and where inquiries come from. Still, it may pay to experiment with other ways of reaching potential customers.

• Identify a popular local sporting or other active event that you can sponsor.
• Target opportunities for community outreach, i.e. involvement in exhibitions, or health campaigns.

Partnering with a local industrial company, an educational establishment, or a religious center could be another sustainable long-term marketing strategy.

Plan Marketing Initiatives

Reviewing the year’s activities in depth makes it possible to identify areas that deliver the most profitable returns. You can use this information to plan marketing initiatives to strengthen your presence in that part of the market and boost your income stream.

• Targeted marketing always works better than a generalized, broad-brush campaign.
• Review the referral providers and sources through the past year.
• Review the practice website and social media accounts to ensure they are up to date.

Another benefit is that there might be a particular clinical area in which your team has great results with high levels of patient satisfaction. As a longer-term growth target, focusing on and marketing the areas of expertise in which you excel, has to be a winning strategy.

Prioritize IT System Reliability and Security

The regulations governing the security of patient data and information are rigorous. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the backstop that guarantees the security of all the care, treatment, and prescription data your practice will have on file.

• Review and compare IT protection and support services.
• Review password protection policies, especially for shared IT platforms.

An annual review of the software and protections that your practice has in place will help protect you from privacy breaches, threats of disclosure, or safeguarding issues.

Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Regulatory compliance is an area that is neglected at a medical practice’s risk. It may seem like a chore but taking the time to ensure that compliance procedures are put in place will protect you from problems year-round.

• Review responsibilities for regulatory compliance. In a smaller practice, sharing tasks makes compliance less of a burden.
• Everyone in clinical practice has at least some responsibility when it comes to demonstrating adherence to the regulations.
• Review how it can be made accessible while remaining secure.

If a compliance task can be streamlined, it’s more likely to get done. Collect feedback and understand how it can be made as easy as possible for team members to comply.

Inspect Biomedical Equipment and Schedule Maintenance

Biomedical equipment in daily use should be included in a register of regular inspections to make sure it is properly maintained. Inspection logs and regular scheduled medical equipment maintenance should be kept up to date, and checked at regular intervals. A biomedical engineering staffing agency can help you find the right talent to keep your equipment well-maintained,

• Review biomedical device maintenance logs to ensure that contracted attendances are being performed properly and delivering value.
• Review maintenance providers and warranties to ensure equipment is kept in good order.
• Review and update janitorial contracts to make sure that the medical practice expectations are being met.

Regularly Assess the Staff

Annual performance assessments are often seen as a chore, but they are a great opportunity to check in with staff and assess the development of your team. The best reviews are 180° and deliver feedback on the management too.

Keep a check on common staffing issues:

• Do you rely heavily on agency staff?
• Are there issues with regular absenteeism?
• Do you struggle with temporary cover during holiday periods?
• Are there issues with staff turnover, or burnout?
• Check compensation levels are competitive.

Keeping good members of staff can be difficult in a competitive metropolitan district. Checking in with key people regularly can help to avoid loss from burnout or stress.

Schedule Required Continuing Staff Education and Training

Medical science is always developing, innovation is the watchword. Things are done differently today than they were ten, or even five years ago. Staying on top of developments isn’t always easy, but it has to be addressed if you want your team to stay ahead.

• Review your team member’s goals and set targets.
• Review training on software systems and updates.

Update your employment manual with any fresh developments so that new hires are up to speed with the practice processes.

Review Policies and Procedures

Policies and procedures should be reviewed every year to ensure that they reflect current standards and regulations. Any medical practice with ambition should work to update and improve these to enhance patient care.

• Ask staff who are required to implement policies and procedures and how they may be improved.
• Sometimes even a minor change can make a big difference in efficiency.
• Annual, or six-monthly reviews, remind those working with policies that they are important, ‘live’, and subject to change.

Sometimes a regulatory change will make a policy update an immediate requirement. An annual review will help determine whether any relevant documents have been left behind.

Assess and Update Emergency Plans

A lot can happen in a year with staff changes, new services, and treatments, maybe even an extension to or change of premises. Some plans will require immediate updating if there is a simple change of personnel.

• Review and update your emergency plans to encompass any practice or organizational changes.
• Are you and your staff aware of safe means of escape for evacuation of staff and patients?
• Review procedures for disaster recovery if your clinic loses power, or access to IT services, i.e. during severe weather or seismic activity.
• Review and check phone contacts for out-of-hours staff or services.

Analyze Patient Feedback

Patient feedback is important to improve the care and services offered. Reviewing responses to surveys, and inquiries logged can help a medical practice decide potential directions to improve patient care in the coming year.

• Follow-up surveys are commonplace and can be an interesting window into what went wrong (more frequently than what went right).
• Survey responders are often in the most engaged sector of your patient base.
• It is a truism that satisfied clients are less likely to let you know than patients whose expectations were not met.

To counter this, try setting up a system whereby your team is encouraged to engage with patients at every stage of their healthcare journey.

From initial booking and first consultation through treatment to aftercare, each stage offers a unique opportunity to deliver in-person feedback on quality of care.

Plan Inventory Needs

A basic stock check is essential to optimize valuable storage space and identify out-of-date items that will either need to be returned or destroyed. Sorting through inventory should help prevent over-ordering and identify stocking errors.

• Review and develop a procurement schedule so that your medical practice is prepared for seasonality.
• Reduce the risk of stock not being available when it is required.

Implement a first-in first-out stock rotation system to minimize wastage of short shelf-life items. Regular annual system reviews should soon pick up whether they are working properly.

Final Thoughts

Making time to review the state of health of your medical practice is not solely for your benefit, since any conclusions are certain to improve the delivery of patient care and other services. It might look like a lot to unpack, but you don’t need to do it all in one sitting. Plan a series of short meetings with the relevant staff and stakeholders.

When you can review your medical practice effectively, risks and opportunities will be easier to identify and manage. Medical practice is constantly subject to change, knowing where your strengths lie, and which areas require improvement will minimize disruption.

Regularly checking in on your medical practice to keep it in peak condition will boost your reputational ambitions and build trust in patient care.