What is a Monthly Health Check?

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Read the transcript:

Jason: Let’s start over. Welcome, everybody. I hope everyone dug out of the storm and has able to remain warm at least here on the East Coast from Kentucky up to Massachusetts. I know buried is just the right word to use as far as snow is concerned, buried. I know we dug out from nearly two and a half feet of snow here. And so I hope for those people who are only able to make this webinar today because they weren’t able to open their business doors, I hope that you find it useful and I hope we’re able to give you some information that you can act on here in the future. So just to give you an idea of who I am, Jason Barnes, I’m the Chief Operating Officer, and I’ve got Jessica Pancoast with me, who is the head of our Help Desk and Training teams. And we usually tag team these weekly webinars, bringing useful information to everyone today. We’re gonna spend 15 to 20 minutes on monthly health checks, answering questions like, “Why should I have a monthly health check? What is a monthly health check? How can a monthly health check help me with a member of our coaching staff?” And then we like to open it up for any other questions that you might have at the end of it, so while we stick around to see how we can answer any other questions.

So first answering a question of, “When somebody looks for a new software package, what are they looking for?” Well, that ranges from one office to the next with what types of problems that they’re going to solve and what kind of solution they’re looking for. Yes, it would be hard for me to say, “I know where the right solution for every single office out there.” But I know we do have something for everybody. And just like people use personal trainers to get the most out of a gym experience or workout experience, I know that we have people who can personally train and apply the tools in our gym, meaning the software system, to help practice owners, office staff really get the most out of what they want to accomplish. So today we’re gonna be talking about teamwork and how we can use our coaching staff to help identify what the issues are in your practice and then at least supercharge it, make it as efficient as possible. And so I want to fast forward all the way to the end of what you’re supposed to be getting out of working with our coaching staff. When most practices come on board, we take a snap shot, take a snap shot of what their practice performance was.

How many visits they have, how many patients they were seeing actively at any given time, and what their per visit reimbursement rate was, and then what their overall office collections. And then we compare that after six months for a random subset of those clients, and we found that in each and every situation where those offices were having monthly health checks with our team, we were able to see pretty stark improvements after a six-month time frame. So, if you’re wondering, “Well, you know, how would working with somebody help me achieve those types of results?” That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So, to answer that next is, what is a monthly health check? The first thing a monthly health check is is a prioritization. Your office can be working on 20 different projects at once. I can start listing off things that you could be working on. You could be working on implementing new no-show, no future appointments. You could be trying to get a business within the business off the ground, trying to put together e-commerce or selling more point of sale items. You could have a problem with hiring associates, training staff members.

All of these things are important. Everything I listed is super important. But while that’s happening, you don’t have some of these credentials. While that’s happening, you don’t have the ability to realize that temptations, you know, didn’t show up this week and they’re never coming back again. So what we like to do during monthly health checks is, first of all, create a table in which we know what is urgent, what’s a necessity, and how on earth we should approach triaging, the things that need to be done in your practice. Are we able to do this for everything? No, but most things that are under the umbrella of good, solid best practices of practice management, we’re gonna be able to provide solid insight. We put together this graph and this decision making tree to help really coach providers in a situation with what should I be focusing on first, right? So the urgent, not urgent, managing and focusing. Patients are the lifeblood of your office. They’re always the first thing that we have to make sure… If we’re not paying attention to them, we know that every other metric in your practice is going to start suffering.

It doesn’t matter if you’re able to collect on 100% percent of the visits if those visits are only 10 date [SP]. So we make sure that we are coaching you guys to focus on the right things, all right? We then move from left to right here to focusing on the patient experience. Once we know the patients through the door, are they having a good experience while they’re here? If we know that they are and then the rest of this stuff comes down to, “Are we billing out visits? Are we making sure that every visit has a note?” We have to have a hierarchy in the order of which we’re looking at things. So the first thing a good coach will do is take you down a list of all the projects that need to be reviewed and then together you’ll agree on those lists of priorities. During a good monthly health check, you’re gonna have one of two experiences. Either you’re getting clarity and direction as to what the next steps of your office are based on a good assessment of your practice or you’re gonna find that it’s a complete and total utter waste of time.

I’ve never had anybody who has had a middle of the road experience with a monthly health check while they’ve been working with our organization. We want to make sure that we provide that quality information so you can start making great decisions. This document that I am looking at right now, I’d like to point out, is available to you guys in our websites. So we have a section for e-books, and if you get done and you would like this 30-page document on how I should be conducting monthly health checks, we’d be happy to share it. Just send us a note in the feedback at the end of the webinar with, “I would like to get a copy of the e-book,” and we’ll make sure it’s sent out to you. Next thing that you’re gonna do on a monthly health check. Here’s a fish bone diagram. Man, it looks like a mess. Doesn’t it, Jess? It’s all over the place. It’s meant to be messy. You guys ever feel like when you get in to the practice, “Oh gosh, what am I supposed to do first? How am I suppose to go about it?”

Well, if low collections on one end of this lead to low income, there are so many factors that affect that but we have to be able to track them. You have to be able to find a linear connection between one and the other. And so we’ve done that. We know which items to look at. So we help you organize and then figure out where along the line of this web of things that need to get done in your practice are going wrong. So a good coach can take a problem such as, “I have low collections, which is leading to low income,” and help you trace back to where the root cause of that has happened. I got a great, for instance, I had a fantastic provider where I had the chance to speak with today. Few weeks ago he came to us and said, “I am getting under paid.” There are only two ways to manage collections, we were able to say, “All right, all your visits are getting paid so you must not be getting the right amount per visit.” And this particular concern was based on a comparison with another office in his state, one in which he was very, very friendly with.

And so this person also happened to be using our system, which is not the luxury that everyone has here, and we were able to take a very, very similar approach to going through each one of these different lines that you can take to figure out where collections could be going low and we were able to figure out that he was not getting under paid, except for his health [SP] codes. It was concerned. Everything else though was getting paid. So we’re able to take an enormous concern and boil it down in to just a priority that needs to be focused on so we can get the health codes, you know, paid correctly. A good monthly health check should be able to take a concern like low monthly income and collections and help you devise a plan, which everyone agrees upon, to go fix that. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen perhaps the way you might think it’s going to because the person who’s conducting the monthly health check is not going to be an expert in anything and everything that you would like them to be.

They’re gonna utilize a team of people and it’s gonna go through a process in order to figure out how to get there. And so I would like to talk about that team of people and that process that you’ll go through in order to solve that problem. So we have to make sure that, you know, what the architecture is for a practice that is going to run smoothly and ideally. Am I right? So what kind of knowledge base, what kind of information do you need to have access to? In the system, you’re gonna have access to almost any type of information, but how do you access that information and how do you interpret that information is the most important. Actually, I take that back. The more and more I deal with practice owners, Jess, a lot of them ask me, “What metrics should I even be looking at? What things should I even be focusing on to make sure that I am running optimally?” And we’ll get into that in just one second, but we know that one practice profitability coach is not going to be able to know everything that each one of these teams represents.

As I mentioned, Jess is on the call today, and she’s the head of our Training team and our Help Desk team. We got a billing SWAT team, we got a product development team, we have a building team, the QA team, and a tech support team. There’s no way this one person will be able to encompass that knowledge that all of these people have. However, as they are experts at measuring your practice productivity, they will be able to identify which resource or resources they need to gain access to to get you the answers to those, right? You have the system which has your building knowledge databases, and so that system can learn as we program it to do the things that you want to. So in a monthly health check, if you’re not collecting the right amount of money or you’re not retaining the right amount of patients, we can use the system to identify where that’s happening and what’s falling off the plate and then teach it to…actually give that work or that assignment in any situation to an individual in the practice to actually do.

So together, you, as the practice owner or office manager, work with the coaching team to gain the knowledge through all of these team members that we need, teach this system, and then bring it to the staff, who ultimately will interact with your patients to create that patient experience and retention that you need. All of these has to come together with the two core factors, being the practice owner and the coaching team, working together to identify what part of the big network here that we’re gonna access in order to solve the problems. If you don’t have access to this, that means you have to rely on either getting third party consultants or allowing a problem to persist and pervade that could end up really hurting your practice overall. We have to know which resources to get to, and a monthly health check is where you identify those areas in which your practice is falling down. So that monthly health check will include all sorts of data and actually 17 data points that it will go over for each and every monthly health check. We can go over more than that, but each monthly health check ends up having at least 17 data points that we’re gonna check each and every time.

So what kind of results that are we getting? Our practices, we have two kinds. Well, three kinds really. One that don’t have any monthly health checks or have partial monthly health checks, where they’re not fitting it all, versus those who have consistent monthly health checks. How we measure consistent monthly health checks here in the green bar is they’re meeting with us at minimum every 60 days. Anybody who’s not meeting with us at minimum every 60 days for a monthly health check is, you know, represented as still growing. You know, they’re getting 5% growth year over year, whereas those who are working with us are experiencing 21% growth year after year. So I’ll take a quick time out here to talk about, you know, the expenditure. Our practices that are not utilizing our resources are still growing. I don’t know if we can necessarily say this is only because of a great software platform. I think we have a lot of determined practice owners who could make that happen almost anywhere. We have a great tool for them to use.

But to grow 16% faster by working with someone at our end means that there’s gonna have to be an investment of time that the practice owner makes. That practice owner doesn’t have to be on every monthly health check. We do have practices that delegate those monthly health checks over to office managers, but the practice owner has to be involved at least every other month or minimum quarterly to make sure that the plan is put in place, can actually be utilized by the practice, and is in accordance with what the practice owner’s vision for that practice is. But we know that when we’re working together, that the results are better. For us it’s in expenditure. We can figure out how to have somebody grow 20% year over year and not pay additional resources, that would be ideal. However, we know because we care and we want to see you guys grow. If we actually get those resources to work together with you that you will grow faster.

To go back to our previous slide here, the system is really, really great because it has access to the third party apps and it’s gonna automate everything but it doesn’t do it natively. It has to be told to do it. Here on the monthly health check is where we identify what to tell the system to do to work for your practice and your practice goals, all right? So, moving on, you have different cycles. I don’t care if your practice has been with us for five years, if you’ve been with us for five days. You’re gonna go through these cycles from top to bottom. On boarding, you might have been with us for five years but you might not have ever got out of this stage, where you’re integrating your training, you’re learning, and you’re starting to use the system, but that next stage of monitoring is where you develop those key performance indicators.

If my note shows drop or climb above 10%, if my reimbursement per visit, trust flow of $55 to $60, whatever the number is, I want there to be an indicator. That practice success code [SP] cares not only because they’re good people who want to see you succeed, but their motivation, being financial, is they only get paid when you get paid. They’re in it because your practice success directly affects their entire career. And I can assure you that the people that are working here really do want to see you succeed even if the money wasn’t on the line. We’ve got people who are brought into your mission and really wanna help. And each time they see that you’re going to connect with the patient and help them make a major lifestyle change, people over here are cheering. So just like you go from wellness care, sometimes back into exacerbation, you’re going to go in and out of certain cases but the goal is to get somebody into control and optimization. And that’s analogous to wellness where we…as we fix one thing, we’re able to maintain it and move on to other projects or even practice growth and keep on honing in on the staff and the processes so that they don’t have to be tweaked time and time again. We get to a spot where they’re running without any issues.

So the last phase, being autonomy, is they know how to manipulate the system. Meaning, the office members, they know how to create their own automation notifications, workflow task tickets, and they know how to measure everything in their office. A monthly health check becomes somewhat a formality at that point and we have lots of offices that have meet at this goal, and really they only need us to make sure they stay in the lane. Or, if they’re trying to do something at that side of their other process, we’re a resource to help you get there. But we have tons of practices that have been here a long, long time, who’ve never made it out of the first or second stage, and we can help them grow. We somehow have gained some distance between us and we need to back track and make sure we stay on the same path.

Second to the last here is we want to help you get a graphical understanding of how well your practice is doing. On a home page, so each time you log in, you’re able to see how the office is doing in real time. I was able to have one of these discussions here very recently with a practice in Illinois, where we were able to set goals with a practice, and each and every day the system will update as to how well they’re doing. So the monthly health check is translated into a daily health check, where they’re able to see a picture of how well they were doing last month versus this month. This is an example, this picture, of our radar chart that is available on every home screen for every practice owner or office manager to look at. That big red circle in the background is representative of the ideal goal for each practice. As the green blob represents the most recent months achievement, if the green covers the red entirely, it means that every single goal for each metric around the bend has been hit.

For instance, this could be a little small to read, but the top one of patient visits reads 1,610 and 1,400. So as the screen points, reaches out towards the end, it means that we’re getting closer to that 1,610, you know, visit mark, which is close to the goal. It doesn’t mean we hit the goal yet or exceeded the goal. If it did, it would’ve been like the unbilled visits over here where the green blob reached all the way to the end. That access is representative of that single metric. Our practices have found this extremely valuable, and these things are configured and set up on monthly health checks so that you, as a practice owner, each time you log in, can get a pictorial representation of how your practice is doing. You should know that these are customizable. Meaning that not every single practice has to look the same set of metrics or key performance indicators on this radar chart. We can actually change that to reflect whatever it is that your practice is either focused on or trying to improve.

And lastly for monthly health checks, when we get to that point where we’ve got scheduling, commerce, documentation, billing, marketing, patient education, meaning that, your entire practice is up and running, those monthly health checks turn into how do we grow this as opposed how do we keep something that’s bad in the practice from getting worse to, you know, “Hey, something is really good in your practice. How do we replicate it in a new location? How do we get more of it?” And that’s really where the true victory comes into play, and the offices find the most value with our coaching services because now we’re talking about hitting goals, expanding them, achieving, and opening up new frontiers where we can actually get things done. And as I scroll down here, there are lots of other examples of how monthly health checks should happen, given the examples of all of the metrics that you should be looking at on a regular basis so that we, as an organization, can be on the same page and help you access information in real time or at least on monthly health checks that will help you, all right?

And so, really, I ask that everyone gets a copy of this. We’re happy to send it out, or if you head over to our website, you’ll be able to look under resources and under e-books and gain access to this. But monthly health checks are one of those things that can be a real game changer. We’ll open it up for questions at this point, and I’d be happy to answer any questions about monthly health checks. But if you’re not having a monthly health check, open a task. Open a task asking for an analysis of your practice. We’ve got an example note that we can share right now, which has all of the metrics that you would want to look at in a monthly health check and what the end results of a note looks like so that you can get a better idea of that. So it goes over a bunch of metrics to give us at least a three-month history, if not more, of what those metrics look like so you can get a better idea of how you’re trending, and then assesses and plans for all of the things that a practice needs to do to not only understand the problem but work on together in the agreed upon plan.

So this is an example of what it would look like at the end of a monthly health check so that you guys could see we write everything down and send it to you on the form of soft note. So at this time, I’ll open it up. Any questions about monthly health check? Anything we can do to help you understand them or engage with our coaching staff better? Type in your questions and we’d be happy, happy to help.

Jessica: For anyone who doesn’t see the box to type in your question, up the top left, there’s a button that will say “Show Chat” and you’ll be able to get to the chat window and type in your question there.

Jason: All right, so we’ll give that a minute, and then in the mean time, if anyone is thinking of any other questions they’d like to ask, we’d bee absolutely happy to fill those right after we’re done with any possible monthly health check questions. I know in our discussion, Jess, you had a lot of practice owners who asked your team, monthly health check or, how do I measure my practices, productivity and profitability questions, and I know you’re often referring them back to the coaching staff to do that.

Jessica: Right.

Jason: It’s on people’s minds. You know, “How am I doing? How do I know if I’m doing well?”

Jessica: We have a question. They would like us to review how to get this report in this format at the end of the month.

Jason: Absolutely. So this report is…every single one of our coaching staff is trained to put this report together from top to bottom and you’d simply open a request if you’re not already getting one and they would send it over to you. So it’s simple as a task to your coach. If you don’t know who your coach is, you don’t even have to know their name. If you don’t know their name you just open it up to unassigned in the admin role. Jess, I don’t know if you would mind sharing your screen and actually showing them how to do that, that would be ideal so you could… The right person will pick it up and make sure you get a copy of this, customized for your practice.

Jessica: Sure. I think you might have the stock sharing part before I…

Jason: Yes, you’ll find…I can do that.

Jessica: All right, let me share my screen. All right, you guys should be able to see my screen now. To open a task open to your coach, you’ll go up to the Health menu. Select “Open Health Request Task.” Type in your question here about wanting the MHC report. Hit Send and you’ll want the option all the way to the right, “Coaching Relationship.” That will open the task up on your coach’s work bench so they can see it.

Jason: Perfect, perfect. Type in there, “Want monthly health check report.” Everyone will know what that means and they’ll be able to help you out with it. So keep it open, guys. Any other questions you have about this or anything else? We’re happy to turn this into a session where we can talk about other items as well, so just let us know. All right, we’ll give them one more minute, Jess, and then we can end for today if there’s nothing else.

Jess: All right.

Jason: Well, everyone, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. I hope everyone is doing well and staying warm. Oh, there’s a new one, I’m so sorry. “Can you review how to get this report in the format…?” Oh, same one, I’m sorry. It’s just for some reason it glitched and then came up again as a different one. So, sorry about that. I will end for today and we look forward to talking to you next week. Next week is a special request topic. Jess, you and I already talked about it and we’re gonna talk a little bit more. It’s going to be care plan related with escrow reports for how to keep track of money stats or kept in escrow for those people who prepaid for their services. So that you so much and have a great day.

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