R&D MedTech - Medical Business Management

Delivering More Revenue Through Improved Daily Practice Operations

Decreased reimbursement combined with rising malpractice insurance and overhead costs have created a challenging market for physicians. Many are discovering traditional profit generating opportunities are dwindling. Chances are your practice has begun taking a closer look at many day-to-day operations in the hope of squeezing out more revenue while still maintaining quality patient care.



“On the Edge”, Examining Industry Trends, MGMA August 2006, observes that in the current business environment, there are two variables left for increasing financial performance: expenses and physician income. Since it’s unlikely most physicians would consider taking a pay cut to maintain costs, the focus has shifted to reducing expenses by creating efficiencies through better management of resources and technology. The methods utilized by Business Performance Management (BPM) address both concerns. This trend towards adopting BPM strategies began in the mid-1990’s, quickly spread to hospitals and has finally started to gain acceptance in clinics and physician groups. Monitoring and measuring key revenue indicators provides a clear picture of which processes are profitable, and those that are not.

In order assist physician practices that choose to drive more profit by moving from a standard practice management system to a true BPM or business Intelligence system R&D MedTech supports a tool called dashboardMD. This intelligent reporting works with the Greenway Medical Prime Suite practice management or medical billing system to provide all types of Business Intelligence and management reports. This simple, low cost solution completely automates office reporting and analysis. Reports can be emailed, exported to Excel/PDF or displayed in easy to read dashboard screens using charts, graphs, gauges and tables. Daily monitoring of revenue cycle processes and alerts provides the easy to use, relevant business intelligence needed for management by exception, prompting early action to identify problems, trends and opportunities.

We already have a fairly efficient office with a practice management and billing system. I’m not sure if I need another software application just to manage my revenue cycle.

Practice management systems traditionally are made up of a set of tools to process office transactions such as appointments, charges, payments, etc. dashboardMD actively maps the performance of all systems and processes. It seamlessly integrates data from your practice management systems and analyzes it to let you know if your practice is functioning efficiently and generating expected profit levels. Results are reported automatically and monitored for alert situations.

dashboardMD allows you to clearly see what processes are less efficient and why, or capitalize on areas of strong ROI. Having a fully automated office is the first step to increasing efficiency and profits, but unless performance is measured, monitored and analyzed, it’s difficult to control what is happening in your revenue cycle. Your dashboardMD solution saves countless hours of running reports, collecting information from disparate sources, and finally analyzing and presenting results. It does all of this automatically and delivers information you can actually use 24/7 to your desktop.

Advantages of combining dashboardMD with Greenway Prime Suite Practice Management over just a practice management system alone

• Your office spends hours manually pulling data from several sources to create spreadsheets. dashboardMD automatically combines data from multiple sources and generates ready to use, analyzed information for the entire revenue cycle.
• Everyone is working with a different report that’s been tweaked “just a little bit.” dashboardMD provides a single source version of current, error free information.
• Practice Managers and Managing Physicians have to sift through pages of reports to find which areas of the practice need immediate attention. Let dashboardMD do the work for you. The decision support scorecard organizes your data based on performance and immediately provides an overview of areas that could be problematic.
• Reports are based on data that is weeks or even months old. With dashboardMD, your data is always current and updated daily.
• Everyone is suffering from information overload. Our dashboards are user-defined, and provide the right information, at the right time, to the right people.
• Some PM Vendors use the “dashboards” bullet for marketing purposes but actually provide dashboards that may simply be graphical interpretations of the operational reports or workflow task lists. Only a data warehouse like ours can provide true Business Intelligence (BI) Analysis Reports. DashboardMD delivers enterprise wide BI with historical trending, projections, Online Analytical Processing tools (OLAP), (a category of software tools that provides analysis of data stored in a database that enable users to analyze different dimensions of multidimensional data. For example, it provides time series and trend analysis views.) and Key Performance Indicator Benchmarking (KPIs) that drive financial and operational success for collections, denials, accounts receivable and more.

What sets dashboardMD apart from other Revenue Cycle Management systems?

The majority of Revenue Cycle Management systems available were created with the requirements of hospitals in mind, and require a substantial investment in time and resources. dashboardMD offers a scalable solution that was developed to serve all medical providers and is easily customized to support any size practice. We worked closely with the healthcare community to create a revenue cycle management solution that truly addressed their needs. dashboardMD is more than just information displayed as easy to read graphics; the system utilizes a Data Warehouse that provides true business intelligence analysis with trends and projections and Business Performance Management tools such as KPI Benchmarking.

Users have the ability to select from hundreds of analysis reports for placement on their dashboard. Most reports can be viewed in multiple ways: as a gauge, trend, projection or pie chart. All reports may be exported to several formats, including a working Excel spreadsheet or PDF. Following is just a sample of available reports and dashboards:
• Front Office
• Billing
• Collections
• Payer Contracts
• E & M Utilization
• Physician Productiivity and Compensation

E&M Coding Utilization Screening Tools

These critical tools can help practices prevent under coding which results in lost revenue, or over coding which can result in an audit. Coding errors involving services that are performed hundreds or thousands of times a year are much more costly than errors involving services that are performed only a few times a year, so it's especially important to ensure that practices are documenting and coding more common services correctly.
• Easily manage compliance and realize full revenue for performed services
• Variations among providers with similar patient base can be analyzed for opportunities
• Benchmark productivity
• Export to PDF or Excel
• Compare services performed by individual providers against internal and external measures. dashboardMD automatically calculates and plots E&M coding patterns based on your office’s averages for outpatient services and consultations. Analyzed information is then displayed as an easy to read bell curve graph.
• View bell curve by practice, physician or facility
• Comprehensive list of reports includes all E&M codes
• Includes reports for office visits, emergency department, hospitals, nursing facilities and more
• Compare multiple physicians or facilities on a single chart

For more information, contact R&D MedTech at 918-682-2285.