Western Pennsylvania Healthcare News

Covering healthcare news in the Pittsburgh region and beyond.

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5 Ways to To Boost Your Practice’s Efficiency and Profit

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Running any business is stressful, but when you are running a medical practice, the consequences of your management decisions can have serious consequences. It’s a fine balance between being cost-efficient and being able to deliver a quality service that your patients deserve. Increasing your practice’s efficiency not only boosts you and your staff’s job satisfaction and morale but increases patient retention too. Here are 5 ways to grow your practice.

1. Technology to help

Entrepreneurs outside of healthcare would instinctively say that to boost your practice’s efficiency, you need to see more patients; however, this simply does not work within the medical profession. Doctors and healthcare providers will soon burn out and the quality of the care will slip if this is just thought of as a numbers game. The key is to reduce administrative inefficiencies.

Spend time reviewing where administrative inefficiencies are occurring. Outdated technology is one hurdle to optimizing productivity. A recent report found that manual transactions that could be made autonomous costs the dental industry up to $9.4 billion per year. This means that time is being wasted performing tasks that could be completed at a fraction of the time with the introduction of appropriate technology.

Everything from instantaneously retrieving a patient’s medical records to sending patients reminder texts of their appointment time can be streamlined to increase the efficiency. It’s not about technology replacing the human element of attending your clinic, rather it is about using technology to support the service that you provide. [Read more…]

How to Double or Triple the Size of Your Urgent Care Practice

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By Luis de la Prida

You probably got into medicine because you wanted to make a difference in the world.  You recognized that urgent care fills a gap in the healthcare market.  You get to interact with a diverse range of patients, fulfilling your own vision of how healthcare should be done.

Now that you’ve been up and running for a while, the administrative burden is keeping you from what you love: practicing medicine.  It’s time to decide whether to hold and maintain or grow. How do you take your practice to the next level?

Growth takes risk and thinking strategically. If you find yourself at the point of wanting to grow, but not quite sure how to do it, then you’ll want to read further.

Current Landscape for Urgent Care Practices

Before figuring out how to create a growth plan or implementing an acquisition strategy, it is important to know the lay of the land.  Knowing who’s buying and why is an important step toward effective negotiating.  Knowing why practices are selling can position you to make an attractive offer that beats out your larger competitors. [Read more…]

Easy Access for Patient Appointments

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A long time grumbling point for patients has always been getting a doctor’s appointment scheduled, according to Mark Kissinger, executive director of Genesis Medical Associates, Inc., the largest still independent primary care physician practice serving the Greater North Hills.

“We have taken the necessary steps through technology to make same day appointments easy,” said Kissinger.

Genesis patients, he noted, can simply go on the new Genesis app and schedule their appointments.  No muss, no fuss. They also have the option of just walking in at our new Wexford office located at the Allegheny Health Network Medical Pavilion on Perry Highway.  Now, only in its second month of operation, we been delighted with the initial patient response.  All Genesis physician offices also have same day appointment hours.” [Read more…]

Why Are Physicians So Burned Out, Anyway?

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Nine Factors That Are Keeping Today’s Doctors Stressed, Depressed, and Disengaged

In his new book, Healing Physician Burnout, Quint Studer lays out the avalanche of  industry changes that are crushing the life out of physicians. The good news? When you can understand what’s causing the problem, you can take the needed steps to address and alleviate it.

By Quint Studer

Survey after survey proves it: Physicians are feeling exhausted, dissatisfied, discouraged, helpless, and hopeless. Burned out, in other words. Statistics indicate that one out of every two physicians is, has been, or soon will be suffering from burnout. And in some specialties, this estimate is too low.

 As a nation and as individual health systems, we can work with physicians to solve the burnout crisis. In fact, it’s even better than can—we will solve it. I believe the recent changes in healthcare have created the sense of urgency we need to finally put the needed energy behind the issue. The key is getting physicians aligned and engaged with the organizations they work with and for—but first we need to understand what’s causing them to burn out in the first place.

Healing Physician Burnout provides a solution to health system leaders and for physicians themselves. A good portion of the book is devoted to explaining the pressures that squeeze physicians from all sides. [Read more…]

Lead and Grow Your Medical Practice through the Power of a Peer Group

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Bill Reed copyBy Bill Reed

The merits of peer-to-peer collaboration have long been heralded, with global groups promoting a formula for leadership success and life enrichment for nearly six decades.

At the core of the peer group leadership experience is personal growth, shared learning and accountability, access to new perspectives and the opportunity to receive wise counsel from leaders in a variety of professions and industries with a wide range of life experiences.

While the peer advisory group model is conventionally associated with chief executives and owners of technological, industrial, manufacturing and hospitality companies, doctors and those who head healthcare facilities can also reap the rewards of this winning paradigm.  Ultimately, all business owners and chief executives share the desire to become better leaders, grow their company’s revenue and profitability, enhance their decision making skills and achieve better results.  And as human beings they all share the desire to enhance their lives.

[Read more…]