Combat Economic Change: 4 Ways to Boost Practice Revenue While Spending Less

By Blakely Roth | May 8, 2023

To combat economic uncertainty, specialty healthcare practices are taking steps to increase patient collection, acquisition and retention — all to ensure steady growth. 

Costs are rising faster than profits for roughly 90% of providers, while top-performing practices are generating $138,522 more revenue per full-time physician. What are they doing right?  

Successful practice administrators and their board leaders use automated solutions to fuel practice revenue with less overhead spending.  

Why do successful healthcare practices lean into automated solutions? 

• To create accelerated revenue potential through patient collections, acquisition and retention. 
• To reduce staff workloads, therefore creating less turnover and hiring costs.  
• To minimize manual data errors, dropping claims rejections rates and resubmission costs. 
• To provide accurate insurance verification for quicker reimbursement and cash flow. 

Find One Solution that Automates Core Patient Revenue Activities

Find one automated solution that can help you achieve all of the above, so you can accelerate growth while keeping costs low. Here’s what top-performing practices look for in an automated and centralized solution.

1. Patient self-scheduling with a waitlist to fill gaps and maximize acquisition

Practices implement 24/7 online scheduling solutions to give new and existing patients a simple way to book appointments. With this option, your patients won’t have to make time during their busy days to book an appointment during business hours. At the same time, with online appointment booking, new patients can find your practice online and make an appointment on the spot, no more searching.  

Given that “ease of access” is a major factor for 89% of patients when choosing healthcare providers, the 24/7 scheduling option could make or break your acquisition and retention rates. 

Additionally, a real-time online scheduling solution gives your patients line-of-sight into your appointment openings, meaning as gaps open up at the last minute due to cancellations or rescheduling, other patients can see and book those appointments. This element is crucial to increasing your realized revenue per physician. You can even go a step further and provide your patients with the option to join a digital waitlist that will automatically reach out to them to book appointments that are re-released back into the schedule, due to cancellations/rescheduling. 

These patient self-scheduling solutions help practices successfully fill provider schedules, which is key in a changing economy.

2. Patient self-registration that collects payment at every check-in

In a changing economy, you can’t afford to solely rely on staff to ask and collect payment. Have a sure-fired solution to ensure steady collections at the point of service. 

Use patient self-registration to accelerate the payment process at check-in, making it simple, quick and private. Practices can see upwards of a 112% increase in point-of-service collections simply by prompting patients to make payments during self-registration.  

Ensure a significant increase in patient collections by automatically presenting patients with accurate co-pays and past-due balances and estimations. Even enable patients to keep their cards on file for seamless future transactions. This automation at check-in reduces staff’s need to ask for payment, saving time and awkward conversations while ensuring you capture your physician’s earned revenue.

3. Real-time insurance verification to accelerate reimbursement

Claims rejections and slow insurance verification create major roadblocks in your revenue cycle. High-growth practices don’t tolerate these roadblocks, especially in a changing economy. 

Use real-time insurance verification to decrease human errors and get paid faster.  

Not all insurance verification tools create the automation your practice needs to drive faster verification and reimbursement. To speed up payments, it’s crucial to choose an insurance verification tool that provides real-time and fee-free eligibility checks from 900+ payers. Additionally, your ideal solution should include a dashboard that allows staff to review primary, secondary, and tertiary insurance thoroughly. A smart dashboard will flag errors and issues, providing clear guidance on staff actions needed to ensure copay collection at check-in. Without this clarity and efficiency, staff may realize insurance errors too late or may not have a clear understanding of how to solve them, both scenarios mean you don’t get paid. 

Find a real-time insurance verification tool that will take the heavy lifting off your staff, while helping your practice streamline cash flow throughout the revenue cycle.

4. Communication tools built to bring in more patients

Considering that 52% of missed appointments result from patient forgetfulness and 30% of patients with one or more no-shows don’t return to the same practice – you could be losing more patients than you’re bringing in. While reminders are crucial to reducing appointment gaps and lapsed patients, appointment recalls are also an essential communication tactic that practices use to ensure steady patient acquisition and retention. When facing economic change, use your patient communications to bring in more patients. It may be time to find a better tool for your practice.

To keep patients coming in, find a patient reminders solution that lets you customize the message and how it’s sent, giving your patients the best possibility of seeing their crucial reminder(s). Beyond send frequencies, use your reminders to encourage patients to pre-check and pay for their appointments ahead of time, helping streamline in-office throughput and collections.  

To best support patient retention, ensure your recall messages keep your practice top-of-mind and make it easy for patients to book on the spot. Your patient recall messages should provide a convenient scheduling link, enabling them to book immediately, or even a phone number, for them to call if needed. Additionally, recall messages should automatically send at the most optimal times for patients to start thinking about their next appointment. Rather than a standard time cadence, a smart recall solution will enable you to configure a messaging cadence based on each of your specific appointment types. 

Effective patient reminders and recalls will help your practice drive steady cash flow in an uncertain economy, with fewer last-minute appointment gaps and lapsed patients. 

Implement One Automated Solution to Boost Practice Revenue

Face economic uncertainty and come out stronger. 

Do more without overexpanding your workstreams, technology stack or budget. Specialty practices of all sizes are accelerating cash flow by implementing one centralized solution to support their intertwined scheduling, registration, eligibility and communication needs — all to achieve core growth goals. See how Clearwave Core puts money back into your practice while providing a top-line patient experience.