In an industry which experiences so many ebbs and flows of patient volume throughout the year, the impact to urgent care clinics is no exception – especially financially.
While clinics wish illness on no one, because flu season brings such a critical revenue stream for urgent care clinics that generally carries them through the year, the length and severity of the flu season will inevitably drive many business decisions. The good news is that with creative thinking and a drive to provide patients with the best care possible, maintaining – and even increasing – profits during slow seasons like Summer becomes the expectation rather than an aspiration.
1. Leverage available healthcare-tailored technology
Like it or not, technology is integral to the healthcare system. There are two choices as an urgent care: Use it to your advantage, or fight it all the way. The second option really isn’t viable if you want to reduce waste, increase accuracy and keep up with the high competition. Leveraging top technologies designed for urgent cares can be the difference between falling behind during slow seasons or keeping your head well above water.
For example, it’s important to strongly consider implementing technology like Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Practice Management (PM). Technologies like DocuTAP are becoming vital because they allow clinics to automate and streamline clinician workflows, which puts valuable time back in the hands of physicians and the full clinic staff. Using specialty EMRs and PM technology can drastically reduce staff time spent on administrative tasks and eliminate staff redundancies, such as the auto-generation of procedure notes in claims. This means your urgent care can spend more time on what matters most: the patients.
2. Have a patient engagement platform in place
The urgent care industry arose out of a need for on-demand healthcare for patients who couldn’t – or didn’t want to – wait for days to see their primary care doctor, and as a valuable and low-cost alternative to the ER. As the preference to this model of care continues to take off (as seen by the high amount of urgent cares opening each year), it’s become more important than ever to think about how to not only get patients in the door, but retain those same patients.
Leveraging comprehensive patient engagement tools like Clockwise.MD allows urgent care clinics to set and meet realistic expectations and remove the aspects of uncertainty that patients find most daunting when it comes to the healthcare experience. Using these technologies to give patients the option of online self-scheduling for more options and optimal convenience, wait time visibility, and updates and alerts on appointment status via text in real-time make a clinic far more accessible to more traditional patients who are increasingly going to the web to find providers. These technologies also engage the patient after the visit is over, distributing automated visit follow-ups to offer patients the opportunity to rate their experience and provide specific feedback. Clinics can then everage that intel to improve operations and better serve the needs of patients for future visits. In turn, this added level of attention should hopefully result in referrals to other patients via word-of-mouth and stellar online reviews that set your clinic apart from the competition.
3. Improve billing and revenue cycle practices:
When it comes down to it, a big part of staying profitable and maintaining revenue throughout the year depends on efficient billing and revenue cycle practices. Switching from a third-party biller to Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) service technology can not only allow your staff to shift away from spending unnecessary time coding their own charts, but consistently meet industry benchmarks for 30, 60, and 90-day A/R. Most importantly, RCM services often uncover millions of dollars in backlogged unpaid claims. Growth and expansion is an end-goal for many urgent care clinics, and that relies on identifying a scalable biller that is best equipped to serve your specific urgent care model for healthy revenue cycle management. Once we realized our current biller was built to serve small clinic settings, we made an informed decision to switch to a new vendor who in three months gave us a 25 percent increase in monthly collections. A healthy RCM giving you one less thing to worry about during the slow season.
4. Be available for patients:
Urgent care, by design, exists for patients when traditional healthcare clinics are closed or too busy to fit them in. Offering expanded service lines like Telemedicine, Occupational Medicine and Workers’ Compensation help bring in a wider pool of patients which in-turn can bring in additional streams of revenue during the slow seasons to help replenish income when needed most. Offering optional services like telemedicine typically sees a return on investment fairly quickly, especially during slower season. By initially offering expanded services during flu season, more patients are aware that the clinic offers these service lines and are more inclined to utilize them based off that knowledge during the slow season.
Aside from offering telemedicine services through your urgent care clinic, providers can also operate a tele-clinic which not only has a significant reduction in overall operational costs, but also allows clinics to provide services to more rural areas where access to care isn’t as available. In this sense, offering telemedicine services not only provides a better and more well-rounded patient experience, but is also expands the pool of patients readily available to clinics that would have been previously out of reach.
In the urgent care industry, it’s clear that clinics rely heavily on busy times like flu season and the influx of revenue that can carry them throughout the rest of the year. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. In the increasingly saturated and competitive on-demand care market, it’s now more important than ever for clinics to identify ways to maintain and increase revenue during the slow season and year-round to ensure they are financially stable.
By Amit Gupta, Owner and CEO of Integra Urgent Care