Weekly Metrics to Track

How is your year starting? This is such a vague yet also complex question and is very difficult for many of us to answer. Think about your clinical practice. If we only ever asked our patients, “How are you feeling?” without any follow up questions, we would not have enough details to base our plan of care off of.

When looking at business management, we should be constantly assessing our areas of strengths and weaknesses in order to make informed decisions on what needs attention. You can think of it as your business plan of care; and, just as with our patients, its focus needs to shift daily at times.

Keep it simple!

Managing a business is challenging. Let’s make it easy on ourselves by having set metrics which can be tracked weekly to lead our decision making.

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Clinical Metrics

• Total visits completed
  • This metric will show you your clinical efficiency of visits/FTE (Full Time Equivalent).
  • Give your front desk team an incentive based on hitting this metric.
  • Incentivize your clinical team based on their personal value.
• Schedule Efficiency
  • This metric is based on the total clinical hours us clinical staff payroll hours.
  • The level of efficiency needed to maintain will vary business to business based on your overhead and schedule layout (i.e., Do you schedule a visit every 20 mins or every hour?). In general, targeting 80-90% efficiency is a good level to maintain financial stability as well as a balance for your clinicians.

Financial Metrics

• Total Billed
  • You will want to track this by both dollar amount and units.
  • Depending upon your scheduling layout, your clinicians should have a general expectation of billing per visit-based on units per visit.
  • Knowing the comparison of visits vs. $ billed out, you will also be able to keep an eye on how timely your billing is occurring.
• Gross Income
  • Making sure you are hitting your expected gross income each week will clue you into many key factors of your business.
  • If it is off target, you will need to make sure your administrative team is tracking and collecting money due as well as inspecting if your billing team is handling billing and disputes timely and effectively.
  • Knowing the breakdown of $ collected per visit and per payor will clue you into issues with specific payors and the potential need to renegotiate your contracts

Marketing Metrics

• Number of new patients seen
  • You will want to incentivize your marketing team on this metric.
  • Your average length of stay for patients in your clinic will determine the number of new patients you need to see each week in order to maintain a full schedule.
  • If you have a high number of referrals each week but they are not converting to scheduled or seen visits, you will need to investigate with your administrative team to figure out why that is.

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Focusing on these five metrics each week will lead you toward making business management decisions based on actuals vs. assumptions.

Then, when asked, “How is your year starting?”  You can answer!