On Wednesday, we held a webinar on recommended strategies for expanding your group practice. In case you missed it, you can participate any time through our free on-demand webinar site.

We’ve created a whitepaper on this topic packed with guidelines, graphs, examples and other valuable information but here’s a preview of our seven strategies:

To drive successful growth, bring on new providers without major capital expenditure.

It may sound obvious, but the less capital you need to expend in order to grow, the better. Installing, maintaining and upgrading a conventional, software-based electronic health record can be a significant expense: more than $46,000 per physician over the first year, according to a recent study.

An alternative to consider is the cloud-based service model, where there are no upgrade costs and your investment in hardware and IT maintenance staff is significantly reduced. With the cloud-based services model, all providers access a single instance of software, on a network that’s fully maintained and regularly updated—for free—by the service provider.

You’ll learn what’s pushing the growth trend, why you need to establish an efficient workflow, how to steer around common pitfalls and why cloud-based EHR services make implementation scalable to your expansion plans. Register now to check out this on-demand webinar.

No one—no one around here anyway—goes out for lunch anymore. It seems like as soon as phones stopped ringing a few years ago and everything went to email, a relaxing lunch with co-workers at some neighborhood spot went out the window too.

So if you’re going to choke down a turkey sandwich over your keyboard, you might as well learn something while you do it. And we can help.

On October 18^th at 12:15 p.m. EST, tune into athenahealth for a webinar on the sustainable model we’ve developed for care coordination, a model that benefits everyone in the order cycle. Think of it as “closing the loop” on patient care.

athenahealth’s unique, cloud-based approach to effective care coordination provides a model that can boost efficiency and reduce costs. Register today for this webinar and see how our model for care coordination can work for your practice and your community.

We know about the frustrating administrative tasks that practices must tackle every day. Helping ease that strain, and making sure care givers can focus on patients, is central to what we do at athenahealth.

An important aspect of taking on that work is enabling easier channels of communication, especially patient communication with providers. We do that with athenaCommunicator, our live, automated and online services that strengthen that physician-patient connection beyond the exam room. With tools like appointment reminders and operator services, we help practices improve their bottom line. But an online patient portal goes even further by empowering patients to take control of their health care via website access.

A patient portal is a secure site, branded for the practice, that enables patients to log in and manage any number of tasks, from asking a medical question to viewing a lab result.

We’re finding a growing demand for the benefits of a patient portal. And we’re not the only ones. A survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions found that nearly 80 percent of patients were interested in having access to their health information via their physicians.¹ And Intuit Health determined that 72 percent would like an online tool to pay their bills, communicate with medical staff, make appointments and get lab results.²

The plusses for patients are clear and we’re thrilled to provide practices with a comprehensive patient portal as part of athenaCommunicator services. In general, engaged patients experience greater value and trust in their care, and are more accountable for their own well-being.

But what about the specific benefits for practices? There are plenty.

• Online bill payment can boost self-pay collections
• Online appointment scheduling reduces staff administrative work
• Patient access to medical information reduces errors
• 24/7 secure messaging increases patient loyalty, trust and satisfaction
• Convenient access to test results, prescription refill requests and health history improve service quality to patients

At athenahealth, two of our most valued patient portal tools speak directly to the transparency of health information and the sanctity of the patient-provider relationship—both of which we strongly encourage and promote.

The first is the ability for patients to access lab and procedure results online, securely, from the comfort of their own homes. The second is the convenience that comes with being able to send a message, ask a question, or request a prescription refill, anytime, 24 hours a day.

We look forward to making the patient portal easier to use and even more aesthetically appealing. And in the coming months,  we expect our portal to offer patients online check-in, saving them time once they arrive in the office.

A patient portal should be just part of a full suite of patient communication services. To learn more, check out our whitepaper Communication That Counts: Boosting Engagement and Practice Revenue with Integrated Technologies.

1 Deloitte 2008 Survey of Health Care Consumers. Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. Accessed Sept. 21, 2010

 2 Intuit’s 2010 Financial Healthcare Check‐Up.

These days, patients are being required to pay more in the form of higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments. This can put medical practices in a tough position: Not only are self-pay balances higher than ever, but collecting puts staff in the often-uncomfortable position of having to ask patients to pay what they owe. In many instances, a long-standing personal relationship or connection with a patient can make for an even trickier situation.

The problem is not insignificant, as studies have shown that up to 50% of self-pay balances go uncollected. So if you are trying to manage a medical practice, that’s money you most certainly need. Yet given how awkward it can be to have to collect these funds—especially from those long-time patients—how do you do it?

We have a few helpful tips for you in a free on-demand webinar on the seven ways to help your practice collect self-pay balances. For instance, we strongly recommend developing and communicating a specific self-pay policy. This helps you deliver a clear message to your patients, and one that stays consistent regardless of the staff member that’s conveying the information.

That’s just one consideration to get more from self-pay collections. Our webinar also explains how medical practices can change workflow, follow-up with patients and use various patient communication tools and services to ensure money owed is money paid.

Until then, what has your experience been when it comes to self-pay? Any tips you can share with colleagues?

OK, OK, it’s not Meaningful Use. It’s not even about EHR. It’s not sexy at all. We know that. We get it.

While we write quite often in this blog about health information exchange and electronic health records, this company still exists to make sure medical practices, no matter the size, get paid for the care they deliver. Doing that means filing clean claims for our client practices through our medical billing service, athenaCollector. By all accounts, it works great, thanks in part to our co-sourcing model that dictates we don’t get paid unless our clients get paid. Some call that ‘having skin in the game.’

Just like any business, a medical practice needs to get paid for the services it provides. But we have clients who have also used athenaCollector to grow their practices. Having athenahealth teams taking care of the back-office work has allowed physician practices to not only survive an often hostile business environment, but to thrive.

Take Hudson Headwaters Health Network, which serves 60,000 patients in the Adirondacks. In late 2007, they were on the financial brink and in serious need of help. George Purdue, who grew up in the area and serves as chief administrative officer at HHHN, looks back saying, “We realized that our practice management system was crippling us.” To make a long story short, they began using athenaCollector in April 2009 and, by the end of 2010, had dropped days in accounts receivable by 26%, and were no longer fretting about making payroll.

Then there’s Rosedale Infectious Diseases outside Charlotte, N.C. Practice manager Dale Pierce says they were able to grow their practice once the efficiencies of medical billing through athenahealth became apparent:

When we opened the practice in 2006 and found this building, we were at one third of the size that we are now. Being able to take the support that we’ve gotten from athenahealth and our increased revenue streams, we’re able to expand the building not only by 66%; we’ve increased our patient base. We’re adding a new provider this spring, a new medical provider, a physician’s assistant to allow us to see more patients.  We’ve added more general clinical staff, support staff, administrative staff and pretty much all of that was based on our increased ability with collections. If we didn’t have that revenue stream and if that wasn’t made possible through athenahealth, we would still be back in a four-room building with the four staff and I probably wouldn’t be working here right now because I would have lost my mind by then. 

We have more stories like these and we’ll keep telling them. And just know the guy at the top is all about medical billing too. Back in April 2011, Jonathan Bush made a point of writing about the importance of getting the revenue cycle part right. You should see what he had to say.