Practice Management Alert

Data may sound boring, but it’s the key to unlocking some solid boosters.

You know your practice is unique, but do potential patients? You have all the information at hand to identify your practice’s individual strengths and shore up any weaknesses, but unless you’re really looking at the facts, you may not be making smart decisions surrounding the business side of your practice.

Find some inspiration from these tips from MariaRita Genovese, CPC, director of business operations and revenue, and Jordan Goldberger, MBA, director of financial operations, at MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper in Camden, New Jersey, to shed light on which attributes your potential patients need to know about. They spoke at AAPC’s HEALTHCON 2021 in Dallas.

Spotlight What Sets You Apart

At this point, a lot of healthcare businesses advertise the medical equipment that their patients can access for state-of-the-art diagnostics and care. But a lot of patients — or potential patients — care more about the rapport they can build with their healthcare team. Genovese and Goldberger work at a cancer center in an area with a lot of people who speak other languages besides English. A cancer diagnosis is particularly difficult for patients, so Genovese emphasizes the pains she takes to make sure patents will feel comfortable, which includes emphasizing diversity when hiring.

One major aspect: Hiring staff who speak other languages beyond English, and then making sure potential patients know that they’ll be able to communicate with a provider directly in their preferred language.

“That can actually pull in patients because we offer services that they would not normally get elsewhere,” Genovese says. “Language is important. We’re not a cookie-cutter society, we have to mold things to where we’re at,” Genovese says.

Another aspect of staffing that can help patients feel more comfortable is their ability to see a provider of a particular gender. Genovese mentions their breast cancer surgical decision and how some patients call and say they only want to see a female provider.

Don’t forget to include how trans and nonbinary patients will perceive your practice and how to make sure they’re comfortable seeing providers, too.

Make Your Services Serviceable

If you’re trying to boost and retain your patient numbers, make sure you’re doing what you can to eliminate any barriers to care.

“You have to be honest when you talk about your weaknesses. You know you really have to take a step back and just say we’re not hitting the mark here, for whatever, and you have to think about why. And that’s where, sometimes, it’s difficult, because institutions don’t want to say that they’re not good at something,” Genovese says.

One example: If a patient calls to make an appointment and is on hold for over an hour, the experience can leave them extremely frustrated and, if their insurance allows, they may look for care elsewhere. This means you need to be aware of the larger market share, too.

“It’s these types of things that we have to deal with and figure out: How do we break down those barriers, where do we go from a root-cause analysis standpoint?” Goldberg says.

Figure out whether such a situation could be fixed with staff education — like if a patient calls to schedule a time-sensitive test, make the act of scheduling a priority. But the staff member taking the call needs to know which situations require that kind of prioritizing. This kind of education can be an investment that pays major dividends in patient satisfaction and, thus, good word-of-mouth advertising.

Showcase Your Flexibility

Get creative with your systems. Genovese and Goldberg describe how they established a cancer-focused call center that has extended hours (6 a.m. to midnight), a nursing team for triage, and the ability to call patients back when calls are dropped.

In their experience, patients started talking about how great these services were, and the center was able to further differentiate itself from other institutions in their region.

Extended hours may seem hard to swing, especially from the personal perspective of staff, but it’s an accommodation that is really just common sense.

“People don’t get sick, generally, during bankers’ hours, right? Nine to 5?” Goldberg says.

If you can make these kinds of changes and execute them effectively, you can start marketing the accessibility.