Advance Into Technology and Increase Your Revenue
March 22nd, 2013 - Debra SandersCategories: Practice Management
Everything seems to be going just fine and all of a sudden we have a new policy
on how we are to do our jobs now. We have been doing our jobs just fine the
past 5 years and I don't see anything wrong with the way we're doing it.
Changes are sometimes hard to understand because we've only one piece of the
puzzle. Our piece of the puzzle is what we do. The other pieces are outside of
our department. They are the results of our work. Now it's not to say your
work is bad. It's just a decision was made probably to increase the results of
your work. Or it could be something changed in another department and they
needed to generate a more smooth process. It could also be a process put in
place to deter fraud because money has come up missing somewhere. Or maybe an
employee came up with a great idea to help bring in more revenue. There are a
lot of reasons for change.
Just think about it this way. If you never change and always stay the same, how
will you learn anything new? A lot of businesses are heading towards higher
technology. It's a quicker way of doing business and you don't have to spend an
hour looking for a chart. How many have found an office note behind the cabinet
before that fell out of a paper chart? How long was it there? What about those
EOBs in boxes? How many times did you go look for an EOB just to find someone
didn't put them back in date order? Don't you think it's more productive to
actually be working than standing there looking for something? If you stand
there and do nothing, that's exactly the revenue you are bringing
in............nothing.
The more we can get done by using technology, the more referrals and more
revenue we can bring in. And we're not really doing more work if you think
about it. Back in the paper days, we'd spend 4 hours working and 4 hours
looking for something. Today, we can spend the entire 8 hours actually working.
The same amount of time but being more productive. That's what technology
allows us to do, be more productive which equates to more revenue.
Yes, the paper days have a comfortable memory about them. You didn't have to
know how to use a computer. You didn't have to have several passwords in order
to perform your daily tasks. But what you might have forgotten about is, all
the errors that occurred that were never found and fixed. Even using a computer
you find errors. The information is only as good as the data entry person
putting that information in. But the errors are actually way less than the
paper days and most are a whole lot easier to correct using technology. And you
can work in different offices and not carrier all those paper charts with you,
possibly losing an office note or something else out of them, gone for eternity.
Technology is a good thing. It's constantly changing and allowing us to rethink
our systems in place and change those accordingly in order to keep growing and
moving forward. It gives us new ideas and helps to open our inner thought
processes by feeding new information into our brains each day. We can come up
with new solutions, better ideas, quicker ways of doing things, increase our
revenue and track productivity. What took us a week to accomplish in those
paper days, we can now do in one day using technology and therefore, increasing
our revenue by decreasing some of our overhead. We are still working the same
hours, but we are no longer standing there digging in boxes or looking for
charts or EOBs. We are being productive and helping our practice bring in
revenue. So why fight against it? If you can get more work done in a shorter
period of time, why not? Now you have some time left to help come up with
better solutions and ideas for your practice to generate more revenue. You have
more time to slow down a bit and do a better, more thorough job. You have time
now to get more of those claims out the door, which is revenue coming in,
instead of spending your time looking for EOBs because now they're scanned in a
computer and all you have to do is push a button.
Accept the changes that are being made. Learn all you can learn and grow with
your practice. Advance from within because of all those new ideas you can now
come up with because your brain keeps changing every day and keeps thinking of
new and better ideas. You are no longer stale matted in a box. The boxes are
gone and now it's time to move forward into new technology and new advancements
and changes. Come on, try it. Take that box off of your head and open up those
thought processes and think positive. Besides, only lazy people want to stay in
the box because it takes too much effort to climb out. So which are you? Open
minded or a box potato?
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