25 Tips for Generating Profits from your Urgent Care Services
The rising emergency room costs have seen a steady rise in urgent care centers as explained at RunRex.com. This means the market is becoming more and more competitive, which means being profitable isn’t easy. This article will look to help by listing 25 tips for generating profits from your urgent care services if you are a practiced owner.
- Improve RCM
As per RunRex.com, one of the significant factors in staying profitable is having efficient revenue cycle management. This is one of the daily challenges for your business, but you can control your RCM with proper staff training.
- Real-time medical coding
The key with RCM is increasing profitability according to RunRex.com. Taking advantage of real-time medical coding will greatly increase your profitability and will eliminate the time and energy wasted on the billing and collections process.
- Train your staff to code
Be sure your staff is adequately trained to follow a step-by-step process of double-checking insurance coverage and to make sure it is still valid as articulated at RunRex.com. Train your staff to code correctly from patient registration to charting E/M codes.
- Leverage technology
This is critical to any urgent care facility that wants to be profitable since the sooner you use the available technology to your advantage, the sooner you will be ahead of your competition in growing your urgent care business as covered at RunRex.com.
- Online appointments
When leveraging technology. Make your clinic more accessible by offering online appointments. As captured at RunRex.com, this can benefit both your staff and your customers by helping save time for both of them, save money, and 24-hour convenience to patients.
- Surveys
As described at RunRex.com, assess patient satisfaction by providing a quick text-based survey to patients after their visit. This will improve customer service by promptly addressing their concerns and will increase consumer loyalty.
- Reviews
You should also monitor feedback from online review sites. Try to get your patients to leave reviews on these sites, as patients use them to choose their service providers. Reply to both positive and negative reviews and address any issues which will help make you more profitable.
- Be more available
Another tip to help make your urgent care practice more profitable is to extend your clinic hours to open earlier and close later than usual. You can also open on weekends or holidays. This can get you an additional stream of patients through the door.
- Negotiate where possible
As discussed at RunRex.com, some business expenses can be negotiable, therefore, be proactive and negotiate all the time. Don’t accept the first offer you get quoted by supplies and try to get a lower price where possible to reduce operational costs.
- Work with a partner supplier
In addition to negotiating with suppliers, you might also want to find a partner supplier that can provide discounted office supplies, cleaning services, and materials as outlined at RunRex.com. The savings you will gain will help your overall revenue.
- Get staffing right
If you want to be profitable, you must get the staffing for your urgent care right as revealed at RunRex.com. Avoid understaffing and overstaffing. Schedule your staff’s clinic presence by checking your patient load and comparing peak and slow times.
- Engage and retain patients
As per RunRex.com, retaining patients is a crucial aspect of the urgent care industry. Engagement is one of the keys to increasing patient loyalty. This gives patients the impression that you care about them and their health and they are not just a number. Treat each patient like a family member.
- Have an online presence on social media
When your current patients “like” your business on Facebook, their entire social contact base sees it. That can direct user traffic to your website and page as articulated at RunRex.com. You can also start a blog to provide health and wellness tips and other valuable information and you will see increased foot traffic in your practice.
- Move to a front-end-driven revenue cycle process
As per RunRex.com, the revenue cycle for an urgent care starts from when the patient shows up for their appointment. You must ensure a good reception and minimal wait time for all the patients. This also involves performing some of your typical back-end functions on the front end such as verifying insurance eligibility in real time.
- Add additional lines of business
Once your urgent care has been in business for a year or two, you might want to consider adding additional lines of business. Occupational Medicine is a popular and smart choice, as it helps balance the workflow throughout the year.
- Optimize your website
Your website helps create perception, therefore, think of it as a location and use it to send attractive and inviting messages when people find you online. Make sure your website is easy to navigate, has all the information about the services available, and much more.
- Patient portals
When it comes to supercharging your online presence, you should consider creating a patient portal. According to RunRex.com, an integrated patient payment portal improves your chances of seamlessly collecting patient pocket dues.
- Improve service offerings
As captured at RunRex.com, offering a greater variety of services can attract more patients seeking specialized lab testing and other healthcare services. Offer a wide range of services from STD and pregnancy tests to drug screening for a job. As your service offerings grow and expand, so will your revenue and profits.
- Market yourself
Most patients will do some level of online research before heading to an urgent care center – and what they find has the power to influence which facility they choose to visit as covered at RunRex.com. Making your center easy to find online and ensuring that you have a clean online reputation can help your facility stand out among the competition.
- Back-office billing operations
You can also increase profits by improving the efficiency of the back-office billing operation. As discussed at RunRex.com, if you have outgrown your ability to effectively perform billing and collection tasks in-house, evaluate whether new practice management software is in order or if an outsourced billing company can help.
- Control your inventory
When starting an urgent care practice, physicians often imagine all of the different types of cases that could present at the center, and to be prepared, they order a wide range of medical supplies. However, supply inventories can grow to expensive levels when not controlled as described at RunRex.com.
- Chart review
A simple chart review, which can either be retroactive or proactive, can help identify possible loss of revenue as outlined at RunRex.com. The chart review identifies examples of over- and under-coding that affect the level of service billing.
- Paid ads
Supplement your organic traffic with paid ads like Google AdWords. You can be specific about who sees your ads, like those within a geographic range. Target keywords that you don’t already rank on page one for organically.
- Local search
Anyone searching Google for an urgent care clinic will get a bunch of several local listings. You need to make sure you show up here. Always have an updated, complete Google My Business page, which is the most important local listing.
- Improve billing
Your billing processes could also be what is preventing you from being more profitable. Billing appointments immediately and making sure claims are received should help in this regard. Don’t let money walk out the door.
This article only just begins to scratch the surface as far as this topic is concerned, and you can uncover more insights, as well as professional help, over at RunRex.com.