Reporting metrics might not make the world go round, but they can help you track where you’re going based on where you’ve been.
Having a good grasp of a few key pediatric therapy clinic metrics can let you know if you’re well on your way to growing your practice and helping more kiddos, or if there’s some room for improvement in how your practice is running.
But, which metrics should you be tracking as a pediatric therapy clinic owner?
Here are a few ideas to help you get started:
1: No-Show Rate
Most of the time, the parents of patients that you see on a daily basis have set up appointments well in advance. You plan your day and the days of all your staff around these appointments.
So, when there’s a no-show, the impact is pretty severe. In fact, according to research by Purdue University, “no-shows wasted 25.4% of scheduled time in a family medicine clinic and costs clinics 14% of anticipated daily revenue.”
Although this issue might be a bit less pronounced for a pediatric therapy practice than a general family care facility, it’s still a major issue that should be addressed. By tracking your rate of no-show patients and which parents/children have the highest no-show rate, you can improve how you plan out your appointments and incoming revenue.
If you find that you have a particularly bad problem with patient no-shows, you may need to establish some criteria for what happens if the parents of a kid fail to bring their child in for an appointment without calling ahead to let you know.
Try encouraging parents to call ahead if they cannot make an appointment. This could allow you to rework your schedule around the gap—avoiding lost time and productivity so you can help more kiddos and increase profitability.
2: Billing Claim Denials
Billing claim denials are frustrating in any therapy practice. Handling these denials takes away valuable time and energy from the real task of helping kids. Worse yet, excessive denials can introduce a worrisome amount of financial instability.
However, every practice owner needs to track the rate at which their billing claims are being denied and which payer organizations are making the denials. Tracking this information is the best way to prepare for future denials (and potentially lower your billing claim denial rate).
Side-note: If you’re experiencing a lot of frustrations around denials, take a look at Fusion Web Clinic’s Assisted Billing service. It might be able to solve your problems!
3: Net Monthly Revenue
Tracking your gross revenue each month is nice, but tracking your net revenue after expenses and adjustments is nicer. Knowing how much you’re taking in each month and not just what you’re billing is critical for tracking the financial health of your practice.
If you’re not collecting enough money each month to cover your expenses, then you need to make a change fast.
On a side note, you may also want to track which payer organizations make up the largest parts of your monthly revenue and compare that to the list of payers with the most billing rejections.
4: Patient Satisfaction
How happy are the kiddos (and parents) who receive treatment from your practice? This is something you’ll probably want to know, as happy patients (and happy parents) are more likely to come back for future visits.
However, this can be a tricky metric to track accurately. For the most part, you probably have to rely on the patients and parents to fill out satisfaction surveys about their visit so you can learn how happy they are and how you could improve your practice.
High scores, such as a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale typically indicate a very satisfied patient/parent combo who are unlikely to drop treatment or switch pediatric therapists. Mid-range values from 5-8 indicate that the patient or parent is ambivalent about the treatment results, and is more likely to drop treatment or look for a new clinic. Anything below a 5 expresses explicit dissatisfaction—meaning that the parents aren’t likely to bring their child back for more therapy.
However, it’s important to remember that any score given is subjective, so not every person will give the same score if they’re satisfied to the same degree. Basically, not every 10 is really a 10, but neither is every 5 really a 5.
By tracking this, you can make some modest projections of how likely you are to retain certain therapy patients or even identify issues that might be affecting your relationships with patients and/or parents.
For example, when you look at your patient satisfaction scores, are there any commonalities between the high-scoring and low-scoring patients, such as a particular therapist or business procedure? If so, then you could work on improving things so that hurdle to patient happiness is made smaller.
5: Patient Progress
Aside from measuring patient happiness, it’s also important to accurately track overall patient progress for each kid you’re trying to help. Here, it’s important to use only relevant metrics for each patient, such as time, trials, degrees, etc. to be able to have demonstrable progress you can share with parents, payer organizations, and other practitioners to evaluate.
Being able to show consistent, reliable progress for meaningful goals not only helps make sure you can bill payers and keep parents happy, it can help reinforce to the kiddos that they’re improving—building patient confidence.
These are just a few of the metrics that every clinic owner should be tracking. I know this can seem like a lot to keep track of, but there are tools out there that can help you monitor your pediatric therapy practice and stay on top of your day-to-day operations with less time and effort.
Need help keeping track of your practice? Fusion’s built-in pediatric therapy reporting tools can help you keep track of these metrics and more to save you time and frustration.