Billing and Collection Efficiency

One of the greatest challenges in healthcare is collecting the revenue you generate each day. According to recent studies, approximately 25% of all medical practice income is lost due to incorrect coding, underpricing, missed or never submitted charges, and nonexistent or improper follow-up.

Capabilities For Improvement

Our capabilities range from simple revisions to your billing processes to a full-blown ‘cleanup’ of your entire billing department.

Our billing consultants bring a broad range of expertise and hands-on experience to your practice and focus on reducing your days in accounts receivable and write-offs.

About Strategy

While other consultants may be able to give you strategy and recommendations, they will not implement and execute like we do. That’s the Advantage difference. We pride ourselves in not only providing solutions, but we also assist you in implementing and executing our key recommendations.

According to a recent Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) survey, 82% of respondents reported that they had worked for a medical practice that was the victim of employee theft or embezzlement — totaling more than $94.6 million.

Question: Are the internal controls of your billing processes tight and consistent?

Answer: Refine and customize your internal controls to help mitigate the risk of theft and embezzlement. Our consultants can help!

Clinical Efficiency

We believe that patient satisfaction is paramount to creating a successful and profitable practice. Our analysis of the patient throughput process is unique – we strictly use a clinical team that has worked with hundreds of medical and surgical practices. Each clinical consultant brings extensive hands-on experience and expertise to your practice.

Our Review Process

We conduct a thorough review of your current clinical policies, procedures and scheduling templates as well as follow the patient flow from the minute the patient enters the practice through check-out.

Once we fully understand your clinical needs, we re-engineer the patient flow patterns and work in conjunction with your management and staff to increase productivity and decrease patient wait times. Whether you are a solo practitioner or a large multi-specialty practice, we will design and implement solutions tailored specific for you.

Final Results

It is our goal to create a smooth and efficient patient flow resulting in satisfied patients and a productive and efficient clinical staff.

STAT: According to a survey conducted on behalf of The Physicians Foundation by Merritt Hawkins:

Over 62 percent of physicians estimate they provide $25,000 or more each year in uncompensated care.

Physicians spend over 22 percent of their time on non-clinical paperwork.

Question: How does Advantage reduce patient waiting time and allow providers to end their days earlier?

Answer: Advantage has developed a proprietary patient flow system for every practice type to ensure that your time is used efficiently. Contact us to learn more.

EPM/EHR Selection and Implementation Efficiency

It is not only a daunting decision in choosing your EPM and EHR software vendor, but the implementation can be even more overwhelming and potentially disastrous. It is essential that you have a full-time qualified Project Manager to coordinate all the EPM and EHR activities between the practice and the software vendor. The Project Manager provides the skill and expertise to guide or lead the implementation process.

How You Get Started

Advantage’s proprietary systems start with an EHR clinical readiness program and incorporate the necessary steps for full implementation of EPM and EHR. The proper management of your implementation makes or breaks its success and/or its failure.

Failure not only means not having met “meaningful use” with loss of incentive payments, but it also means disruptions in patient flow, increased patient wait times and a decrease in physician and staff productivity and efficiency. Our consulting team specializes in the comprehensive and seamless coordination of EPM and EHR implementation and has a positive track record of making it work.

STAT: According to CMS and national surveys, the percent of physicians using an advanced EHR system was just 17% in 2008. In 2013, more than 50% of eligible providers have adopted EPM and EHR, have demonstrated meaningful use and have received an incentive payment. The other 50% of the eligible providers that have not qualified for meaningful use have failed to achieve bonus incentive payments for a wide variety of reasons. Our consultants can assist your practice with any or all aspects of the EPM and EHR selection and implementation process.

Organizational Structure & Management Effectiveness

It is often said, “Companies don’t plan to fail, they merely fail to plan adequately.” This is now especially true for all of healthcare and its many providers. Your responsibility is not only to take great care of your patients, but it is also about successfully running a complex business in an ever-changing economy. Does your practice have a roadmap of where you are, where you are going and where you eventually will end up with your business? Advantage consultants start all our management projects with a thorough understanding of your needs which allows for collaborative brainstorming and decision making between shareholders, physicians and the management team.

Fiscal Management Is Essential

Fiscal management is an essential component to the success of every medical and surgical practice – no matter what size. Reduction in reimbursements, increased costs of labor and benefits and ineffective billing practices are the most significant reasons for decreased profitability. Advantage consultants use their comprehensive expertise and implementation strategies to help you realize your maximum profitability through careful fiscal monitoring and effective human resource management. Your employees can be one of your greatest assets – IF they are managed effectively and held accountable for their job descriptions.

Audit Your Strategy

This is where our strategy consultants can help you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your practice and implement key initiatives to help you maintain viability, expand your market share and develop succession plans.

You Benefit From Our Experience

Are you having difficulty finding a qualified administrator/CEO for your practice? Advantage provides interim management services where we place a highly experienced and knowledgeable individual in your practice on a short, intermediate and/or long-term basis while we recruit an ideal candidate for you – all depending upon the needs of your practice.

Or are you a small or medium sized practice who needs access to a highly skilled CEO to advise you on business matters? Advantage provides CEO Advisory Services on a monthly retainer basis at a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee.

Our clients range from solo practitioners to large multi-specialty physician practices and academic medical centers. We customize our projects to your needs – no two projects are alike. Our projects can be as small/short as a budget development to as large/extensive as taking over as the CEO of your practice. We are experts in all phases of physician practice management.

STAT: If Advantage has the opportunity to implement key recommendations from our assessments, we are confident that we can not only pay for our services, but we can also increase your net income. Through our programs and services, if you are able to enhance your annual net take-home pay by $10,000/year over 20 years at an interest rate of 8%, you could produce an internal rate of return of approximately $450,000.