The U.S. healthcare system is filled with administrative complexity. From processing multiple intake forms to sharing medical records among providers to dealing with insurance billing procedures, these tasks contribute to skyrocketing medical costs and lowered profitability for providers.

Every year, U.S. health care providers lose about $496 billion dealing with billing and insurance-related (BIR) costs processing claims submission, reconciliation, and payments. That is in addition to typical medical record-keeping functions; the monitoring of fraud, waste, and abuse programs, hospital management tasks; and initiatives to improve patient care.

If you have a private medical practice, these costs can rapidly affect your overall profitability and the administrative burden can take a heavy toll on your staff, contributing to increased frustration levels and burnout.

With just two simple steps you can both reduce the amount of paperwork and the costs associated with it. You begin by gaining visibility into your practices’ document systems and then using simple, easy-to-deploy technologies to streamline workflows and manage costs.

Gaining Visibility into Mounting Costs

There are many variables that factor into the overhead of a private medical practice — from staff salaries and supplies to facility expenses, insurance premiums, marketing, and more. To get an idea of your total overhead costs, use this formula:

Total operating expenses - provider salaries and benefits/total collections = actual overhead

Then, determine where it should be:

Revenue x 0.60 = target overhead

While this is a good starting point, analytics are the way to gain in-depth visibility into problem areas. Typical benefits of analysis include:

• Integrated view across all settings
• Ability to benchmark optimal performance
• Data visualization
• Identification of inefficiencies and waste
• Centralized data for inventory management

Now, what if there were innovative technologies that not only contributed to controlling costs in private medical practice, but also provided these valuable analytics for future improvement? Fortunately, these tech tools are currently available, cost-effective, and simple to deploy and manage.

Controlling Costs in Your Private Medical Practice with Innovative Technologies

Reducing the administrative burden — and lowering overhead costs — begins with the application of innovative technical tools such as document management and print management systems.

Going paperless is the perfect way to increase productivity while reducing costs and errors. Doctors lose 15% of their revenue to billing costs alone. Streamlining workflows and automatic tedious data entry tasks with a document management system (DMS) can speed up the intake and billing processes and help reduce the administrative strain on staff at the same time.

Productivity — and time and money savings — are further enhanced by the ability of a DMS to make patient data easy to access, share, and secure. Doctors will have the right information at their fingertips to provide a higher level of patient care and patient data will be properly protected and handled in compliance with data privacy regulations.

Adding a print management function to the mix makes things even better. Print management can reduce paper and supply waste and add an additional layer of security by ensuring documents are only printed when an authorized individual is at the machine to collect them.

Both of these systems can provide automated reports that give you a deep, critical view of your total productivity, highlight areas where costs can be reduced further, and reduce areas of clinical variation.

Blue Technologies Has the Tech Tools You Need for Profitability

Healthcare providers have a difficult job. They are expected to provide a high level of patient care as medical costs continue to skyrocket.

And regardless of costs, they are expected to keep strict control of and manage numerous documents — from intake forms and clinical notes to invoices and insurance information. Plus, they must keep all patient information safe and secure in accordance with a number of data privacy regulations. That’s a tall order.

But at Blue Technologies, we have cost-effective, simple to use tech tools that can help your private practice gain visibility, uncover areas of weakness, and reduce overall costs. After a careful assessment of your current infrastructure, challenges, and goals, we can design a document and print management system targeted to help you decrease process bottlenecks, eliminate waste, and reduce the frustration that contributes to staff burnout.

Gain control over rising costs in your private medical practice today. Contact a Blue Technologies consultant and discover the value of document and print management technologies.