Operating a small business in today’s economy is difficult. Small, privately owned physician practices must have their financial house in order to provide high-quality medical care. The truth is most physicians are ill-equipped to survive in a very tough business environment. We spend years training to take good care of our patients, but have no idea how to balance a budget or run a practice effectively. How can we best improve practice management, delivery of care, patient communication, financial health… all at the same time?

What’s required to make it all work?
A stable practice needs to do two things: Control costs and maximize revenue. Obvious, right? But it’s true.

Controlling costs is difficult but manageable—and with the right staff, it can be done. I’d like to discuss that second part, but with an added challenge: Maximizing revenue while simultaneously improving care.

In today’s ever-changing economic environment, small practices must continually look for ways to increase revenue stream. The system demands it.

Reimbursement rates are, to some degree, out of our control. We can negotiate but are often left with whatever insurance companies or the government is willing to pay. Since most of us still operate within the fee-for-service model, the vast majority of our revenue comes from office visits. Some practices can try to charge for additional services, but most fees aren’t reimbursed by major payers and end up falling to the patient. This is a pattern we’d like to avoid.

So, with fixed reimbursement rates and overhead, how can you increase your bottom line?
With schedule density. By increasing patient flow through your office. There are two ways to accomplish this: 1. Gain new patients; and 2. Increase the number of visits from current patients. Word-of-mouth is the best way to achieve that first goal, but growth doesn’t happen overnight. That second goal is what’s really worth focusing on. And it’s more beneficial for everyone.

Seeing patients more often can be not only financially rewarding, but it also promotes better care—it is far more cost-effective to keep people healthy than to treat them when they’re sick. Insurance companies know this and will often reimburse better for a health maintenance exam than an acute illness visit.

Let’s get healthy patients into the office and keep them healthy.
And let’s get patients with chronic illnesses into the office so their illnesses can be managed. This approach can cut overall costs, improve the general level of health across a population and result in better financial success. It is a classic win-win.

How can we get this done?
Our office has found that athenaCommunicator, athenahealth’s patient communication solution, can be a great driver of both health and revenue. By using athenahealth’s reporting features, our pediatric office has been able to sort through our population to identify patients who have not been in recently for well-child exams, and contact those with chronic diseases such as asthma.

We started by running reports and placing “ticklers” into the computer to have athenaCommunicator call and e-mail families, to remind them of any routine health maintenance visits. We also used the patient communication system to contact all asthmatic patients during the fall, to encourage them to come in for their flu vaccines.

With these two automated actions, we both increased our schedule density (to just short of capacity) and did “the right thing” by improving care for a specific at-risk population—and our patient population in general.

The next step—to enable us to see patients more often—occurs on an ongoing basis. Here’s how we do it: When a patient checks out, if their next appointment is not made on the spot, a tickler is automatically placed into athenaCommunicator to remind the family of the next recommended visit.

For well-child care, this is timed to call and e-mail the family in 10 months, so they can set an annual-visit appointment. For asthmatics, that reminder is set for every 6 months.

We use a similar process for other acute illness states and well-baby exams. In the two years since we started this process, open appointment times at our practice are rare, and we’ve received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from our families.

Good care and financial stability, together. What a novel concept. It may sound cliché, but the athenahealth message is true: Our practice really is “Better Now.”

Dr. Drasnin is an athenahealth client specializing in pediatric medicine at Englender, Sper, Drasnin, MDs, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

What’s the best way to disrupt the status quo in health care IT? Make some noise!

That’s exactly what four MIT engineers did to share their product, one that improves an important element of practice management. And today, they’re working with us at athenahealth to pilot that product to one of our largest clients.

Christopher Moses, CEO of Smart Scheduling, and his three co-founders, identified a major frustration providers face today: Patient no-show rates and late cancellations. These result in an inefficient use of time and resources within practices and often lead to blind overbooking, a strategy that just adds to the problem.

To address this issue, Chris and his team set out to create Smart Scheduling, predictive analytics software that would deliver providers insight into the likelihood for patient no-shows and tardiness, similar to the types of algorithms used for airline seating today. The program would ultimately provide practices with guidance and decision support for intelligent overbooking.

Chris and his team tapped a multitude of resources to launch Smart Scheduling, participating in the inaugural class of the MIT Founder’s Skills Accelerator, and later joining the Healthbox Accelerator Program. They also exerted a ton of effort into researching the field, going from clinic to clinic to learn more about particular pain points, uncovering practices’ underlying needs, and designing each element of the Smart Scheduling software based on interviews and informal conversations. During one visit with a clinic administrator to learn about scheduling policies and no-show rates, clinic staff were ready to escort Chris right out of the building–until the admin was kind enough to call them off, thankfully.

The Smart Scheduling team also tapped athenahealth via our More Disruption Please (MDP) program, attending both our annual MDP conference and our sponsored hack-a-thon, Hacking Medicine, this past year.

But how exactly did Smart Scheduling land a pilot with athenahealth? They went out there and drummed up demand from one of our largest and most beloved clients.

Here are the details: While part of the Healthbox Accelerator Program, Chris went to his mentor at Blue Cross Blue Shield with one major request that almost every HIT start-up puts at the top of their wish list: access to providers. After repeated efforts from the team at Blue Cross, Chris landed a golden opportunity just three days before the Accelerator Program ended, meeting with the COO and VP of Practice Management at Steward Medical Group, who just happens to be one of athenahealth’s largest clients. After Chris delivered the pitch, Steward loved the idea, and approached athenahealth to devise a way to integrate.

From there, Chris progressed quickly within the MDP program, working closely with athenistas to package and pilot his solution to Steward with levels of athenahealth integration. Chris and team say, “MDP represents a network of like-minded entrepreneurs and investors who believe in the democratization of technology creation in health care. Through a collaborative culture and a shared vision, athenahealth is shaking up the space by accelerating the build-measure-learn loop for these young companies, bringing rapid innovation from the bench (or laptop as is often the case in health IT) to the provider or patient’s doorstep.”

We’re proud that Chris was repeatedly amazed at our efforts to dedicate athenahealth resources to nurture his team’s efforts as they grow into a new force in health care, solving a key inefficiency crisis in patient scheduling.

The bottom line is this: Once you have a great solution, get people excited about it! Don’t wait for others to beat the path to your door after you build the better mousetrap; you get out there and yell about it. To whatever extent possible, get the customer on your side.

One of the things that gets us excited at athenahealth is when we hear of proven demand (and even better, proven adoption) of an innovative idea. So go out there and disrupt!

To get started with our More Disruption Please (MDP) program, sign up at the MDP website and follow us on Twitter. As part of the MDP community, you’ll receive updates on our annual conference, upcoming events and news from the innovation front.

athenahealth User Conference 2013 is rapidly approaching and as with previous years, we’re really looking forward to seeing our clients all in one place! For those not familiar with the UC, it’s a great way to get connected, be guided by our experts, gain valuable new insights and then bring home a clear strategy for ongoing performance improvement.

The theme for this year’s User Conference is “Get Better”: better practice performance, better care coordination, better technological convenience for clients. Given all the change in health care today, we want to help athenahealth practices and medical groups become better at those things that will improve their experience, and their patients’ experience.

With the User Conference approaching, our reduced Early Bird registration fee is set to expire soon. So now’s the time to register; in addition to a lower rate, Early Bird registrants will also get priority access to classes, includes those offering CME credits. See more details and register now.

If you’ve already signed up, great! And if you’d like to let us know what’s important to you at the conference, please take a minute to complete our Get Better Survey.

We look forward to seeing you in Boston!

Got plans for April 24-26? Of course you do! You’re coming to Boston for the 2013 athenahealth User Conference!

If you’ve already attended this annual conference on all things athenahealth, you know how much you can learn from our jam-packed curriculum. If this year is your first, prepare to be blown away!

Our annual User Conference is an excellent opportunity to up your game when it comes to managing your practice. Sessions hosted by athenahealth experts bring the latest knowledge to our clients but you can also learn from colleagues who gather here from all corners of the U.S.

So on top of all the teaching and learning, the User Conference is a great opportunity to network with counterparts from across athenaNet.

The theme for the 2013 User Conference? Get Better. We’re committed to helping our clients continually improve practice performance, help them get better at coordinating care, and get better connected to the community. In short, we want to help our clients get better at all the things that will help them, and their patients, thrive through the changes in health care today.

Last year, best-selling author and surgeon Dr. Abraham Verghese delivered a crowd-pleasing keynote address and this year we promise another insightful speaker. Finally, User Conference is a chance to have some fun at various social events, during Casino Night or on one of the many excursions in and around Boston.

So sign up now to qualify for early bird pricing and get ready for our best User Conference yet!

Today, athenahealth earned three Best in KLAS Awards in the research organization’s Software and Services category.

First, we won for our athenaClinicals EHR in the 1-to-10 physician segment. Then our athenaCollector practice management services took the prize in both the 1-to-10 and 11-to-75 physician segments!

That raucous surge of sound that made you look up suddenly around 8am EST? That was a few thousand fist pumps, high fives, and woo-hoos coming from athenaNation once the KLAS press release hit. So, what’s the big deal with this Best in KLAS stuff?

KLAS is an organization that independently monitors vendor performance by surveying and interviewing thousands of health care organizations. Their rigorous survey methodology and attention to impartiality, accuracy, and honesty make KLAS one of the most respected information sources for health care IT buyers.

The Best in KLAS Awards report is a summary of KLAS performance ratings gathered over the past 12 months (or 18 months for select services), for health care IT software and services vendors in 111 market segments. While we survey our entire client base twice a year, we’re always looking for other indications that we’re living up to our mission of being care givers’ most trusted business service. Vendors and service providers can monitor their own KLAS scores, but there’s precious little you can do to change them… save for doing a better job.

And that’s the beauty of delivering a service through a cloud-based network: We can do a better job at improving the experience for thousands of physicians, clinicians, practice managers, billers, front-desk folks, and other practice staff. We have the knowledge and flexibility to be able to release better features, look for nuggets of insight into financial and clinical performance, and just do more things to help make our clients better. All this pushes up our KLAS scores and this makes us all very happy. 

That’s not to say we help practices so we can win awards, but when you’re trying to build the nation’s health information backbone, and you get a little tired of explaining that athenahealth is not an insurance company, every little bit of recognition helps.

So, to all of our clients everywhere—thank you. We are humbled by this recognition and we will keep providing (and improving) our service to you.

For the official account, here’s the press release.