As demand for private healthcare increases, what can you do to ensure your practice is ready to welcome more insured and self-pay patients and provide a seamless service? In this series, Product and Marketing Liaison and former practice manager, Desné Marston, breaks down the patient journey to look at how the admin side supports the delivery of great care and explains how we can help.
Reporting
Accurate, up-to-date and relevant information is essential for good healthcare and the same goes for your practice finances. Your clinical records are there to support diagnoses and treatment decisions (as well as learning and quality improvement) but how do you keep track of your business’s vital signs?
In the final blog of this series, I’m going to look at how you can utilise the info you’ve collected throughout the patient journey to create meaningful reports that tell you about the health of your business and help you plan for the future.
Making your data work for you
Data only has real value if you can make sense of it and put it to a practical purpose and this is much easier if everything can be found in one place. A practice management system (PMS) like ePractice Lite or Pro with integrated invoicing and payment tracking features gives you a single, consistent source of truth about your finances at each stage in the invoicing cycle. This is much better than trying to manage and reconcile different systems and processes – a time-consuming chore which increases the chance of mistakes.
A PMS should also give you the reporting tools you need to interrogate and analyse your data. This is important for several reasons:
Understanding your current financial position
Real-time data about your income and expenditure lets you monitor your cashflow position, probably the most important indicator of a healthy business. As I explained last time, insights like aged debt analysis are also really useful for credit control so you can prioritise which invoices to chase.
Financial planning
Accurate financial reports are also essential for cashflow forecasts (predicting your receipts and running costs) so you can budget for the short, medium and long-term. Businesses running on an ad hoc basis are generally more vulnerable to financial shocks.
Measure your performance
Reports can give you insights into what aspects of your practice are doing best and what need more attention which is really useful if you’re looking to grow the business or if you practice from multiple locations. For example, you could use a report to show which services or sites generate the most income, compare activity at two different sites, or set the date parameters to measure longer term trends (or contrast before and after a specific event).
Supports strategic decision-making
You probably had an instinctive grasp of what was best for your business at the start but that gets harder when your practice is growing and you really want to focus on your patients. Rather than putting yourself under pressure to make a snap business decision (and perhaps repenting at leisure), reporting tools enable you and your team to assess the data, discuss the risks and reach an informed conclusion.
Accounting
As well as being an essential tool for your business, financial records are required for filing tax returns. ePractice reports can be used for accounting purposes although you should remember to remove patient identifiable data before sharing these with your accountant.
What reports do you need?
ePractice Pro includes the widest choice of financial reports to help you run your business. Along with the aged debt analysis, the ones I’ve found especially helpful include:
- Banking – a list of all payments and overpayment credits received for the selected date range. It’s sorted by payment type (BACS, cheque, cash etc) and then by practitioner
- Invoicing lists – a summary of invoices for a requested date range by Invoice Date, Patient or Payor. You can refine to show settled or outstanding invoices and see cost centres and service details
- Summary accounting reports – shows what consultations or treatments took place within a particular date range, the patient’s name, a summary of the invoice, details of any payments which have been received and the balance still outstanding
- Appointment Lists – a list of all appointments by status (e.g. complete, cancelled etc) within the requested date range which can be sub-divided by practitioner. Includes information on the patient, the treatment site, service items, any notes that were attached to the appointment and whether the appointment has been invoiced
Contact us for more info about the reports available in your ePractice plan and how to use them.
Alongside these reports, it’s also really important to record legitimate practice expenses (such as subscription fees for the Clearing Service, the PMS, staff costs, room hire etc). I used to do this on an Excel spreadsheet but you can also use a commercial accounting software package.
Reporting frequency
How often you run reports depends on the type of report, its purpose and the size of your business.
For example, I used to run Banking reports weekly but large clinics might need to do this daily to keep on top of things while independent practitioners might only have the resources to do this fortnightly (I wouldn’t leave it longer than this, or you risk missing something important). On the other hand, if you want to assess the performance of a particular area, a daily or weekly report would probably distort the picture so it makes sense to leave a reasonable time between reports to see the monthly or quarterly trends.
The data generated during the patient journey has the potential to become a real asset, rather than forgotten buried treasure. With the right reporting tools, I think you can uncover accurate and relevant info about your practice that can help you understand where you currently stand, your strengths and weaknesses and how to take your business to the next level.
This is the last of our series on managing the business side of the patient journey, which takes you from pricing to reporting but you can see previous blogs:
1: Pricing
3: Managing the patient’s pathway
4: Invoicing
5: Credit control and collections
Discover More
If you want to learn more about how we can help you manage this and other aspects of the patient journey contact our Business Development team. If you’re already an ePractice user and want to explore the system, check out our guides or book a free 1-2-1 tutorial with one of our friendly experts at the Healthcode Academy.
About Desné
Desné worked in the private healthcare sector at various sites in London for over 30 years. She has extensive experience and skills relating to all areas of practice administration, having been a practice manager from the early 90s to 2019 when she joined Healthcode.
