With the challenges today’s healthcare professionals face with their primary care practices, including everything from reduced patient flow to burdensome administrative tasks and higher operating costs, it’s more important than ever to look for ways to increase revenue. To help with these challenges, we examine 9 services that may help primary care practices increase their revenue:

  1. Adding Patient Visits – With proper scheduling and more efficient time management, it may be possible to add one or two additional patients to a physician’s workday. If it’s not possible to add additional in-person visits, after hours virtual visits through video conferencing could be an ideal way to increase revenue without adding more time in the office.
  2. Chronic Care Management (CCM) – With fewer restrictions on the billing of CCM services paired with the right clinical staff and time and activity tracking software modules, it should be possible to tap into what is considered an underserved patient segment.
  3. Concierge Services – Many healthcare practices are adopting premium concierge or retainer medicine services to increase patient communication and accessibility to a personal physician, allow for longer appointments, and provide access to a healthcare team to coordinate care.
  4. Delegated Care – By allowing other staff members to address a greater range of patient care needs based on their individual skillsets and licensing requirements, physician-patient time can be extended and employee satisfaction increased. More fulfilled patients and employees can have positive effects on a practice’s bottom line through increased word-of-mouth advertising and lower turnover.
  5. Extended Practice Hours – Like extended physician-patient time, evening and weekend appointments can increase patient satisfaction and create more interest from new patients. Even if physician extenders are needed for full coverage during the extended hours, the boost in revenue will likely be worth it.
  6. Maximized Marketing – Whether it’s increasing your presence on social media, implementing surveys, or holding health fairs, there are a wide variety of ways to maximize your marketing budget that can lead to big boosts in revenue.
  7. Offering New or Expanded Services – There are a range of new or expanded services that primary care practices can add. In an article for the LMBC Family of Companies, six examples are provided:
    • Audiometry
    • Developmental pediatric screening
    • In-office laboratory testing
    • Joint injections
    • Pulmonary function test interpretation
    • Simple fracture care
  8. Overhead Management – Ongoing costs for general business functions like rent, accounting, software, insurance, utilities, and more can often be re-negotiated or re-bid for greater savings.
  9. Transitional Care Management (TCM) – For patients who need additional non-face-to-face support by medical and clinical staff in the transition from hospital to home, TCM allows a primary care practice to bill on the day of the Evaluation and Management (E/M) office visit. The American Medical Association has more information on recent changes to E/M Office Visit codes that may be of benefit.

These are just some of the ways primary care practices are increasing their revenue. Even implementing just a few of these services can have a positive impact of your primary care practice’s overall outlook.

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