Improve the health of your medical group: Analytics, dashboarding, and KPIs

Medical and physician practices aiming to scale face a critical challenge: limited resources and the inability of the back office to keep up with growth. For private equity groups and physician owners, taking early, foundational steps can help you leverage your systems to reduce redundant manual tasks and automate key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboarding. Highly successful practices use data and insights to achieve greater integration during transactions, improve revenue recognition, optimize the capacity of human capital, and inform strategic decisions. Here are some considerations to help you along your KPI and dashboarding journey.

System integrations reduce manual tasks

Implementing system integrations to manage the size and complexities of an organization is a key step for medical practices with aggressive growth goals. System integrations improve connectivity between individual practices’ or medical groups’ ERP systems and accounting software, and they don’t have to be a direct end-to-end exchange. Rather, analytics tools such as Alteryx enable you to enrich data between systems, making them more valuable at their destination.

This enables you to introduce custom metrics and external data sources within your KPIs and dashboards. For example, when moving data from an ERP system to an enterprise data warehouse, geospatial features can be applied to your customer base and complemented by external market data to support strategic decisions.

System integrations should fit within your organization’s data foundation, including data strategy, data quality, data culture, and governance. In situations where your portfolio includes a balanced variety of practice management systems, system integrations can bridge the divide, enabling you to maintain an enterprisewide view. Consider a large multispecialty dental group working to improve scalability in multiple locations. The business has been implementing integrations to move data between individual practice ERP systems and the accounting function, integrating data from bank accounts, merchants, and vendors — domains that are required for closing the books each month but that previously weren’t connected. The integrations eliminate redundant reporting and information-gathering from disparate systems. As a result, the closing effort that used to take three weeks now takes less than three days.

Automations and automated rule sets improve efficiency and accuracy

As part of implementing system integrations, the large dental group in the example above made a strategic change: automating cash deposit reconciliations — a process that, for all organizations, tends to be prone to human error. Introducing automated rule sets can guarantee a consistent, efficient, and accurate process while also carving out important exceptions that require manual interpretation.

There’s an important learning journey inherent in this process. As you introduce more automations, you can continuously improve the rules, thereby reducing exception testing. For example, if you notice that 10% of your records don’t match, you can build a new rule around those, thereby cutting exceptions that need manual review down to 1%.

Improve key performance indicators and dashboarding

At the end of the day, private equity firms and independent medical groups that use KPIs and dashboarding gain deeper, near-real-time insights into enterprisewide health. If you aren’t already, consider implementing some of the following dashboard examples:

• Patient base: active patients by cohort, new patients, referrals, patient lifetime value
• Scheduling and productivity: patients per day, provider worked days, future appointment demand, same-day cancellations
• Patient financials: charges, adjustments, collections, collection rate trends
• Revenue cycle management: point-of-sale collections, accounts receivable segmentation, insurance denials

The culmination of your KPI and dashboarding system and the ability to analyze interconnected data leads to enterprisewide business intelligence (BI). And that enables faster growth, scalability, and improved recognition of revenue, and allows you to expand the capacity of your human resources.

Roll up ecosystem data into a business intelligence solution

Are your staff pulling reports from disparate systems and multiple feeds, using differing definitions of terms, and manually putting them into spreadsheets? Even when medical practices, multispecialty dental groups, or portfolio companies require individual ERP or practice management systems, you don’t have to forego BI that spans your entire organization.

Consider that an automated BI solution can sit above your individual systems and roll up your data — for example, dashboarding specific patient volumes and revenue indicators across multiple specialties in addition to the financials out of your accounting system. This offers automated, cohesive reporting with improved accuracy, available in near real-time to management, around the clock. Think of it as an ecosystem, with data collected from one or more practice management, ERP, financial, and payroll systems.

Where to start your medical practice KPI and dashboarding initiative

Weighing where to start your KPI and dashboarding journey? Begin by aiming resources at automating data gathering and other manual functions to improve accuracy and free up limited resources. Focus first on identifying time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Some common examples include:

• Manual reporting and information-gathering
• Revenue recognition
• Cash reconciliations
• High-volume report builds in spreadsheet applications
• Information dissemination

If you’re managing a complex business day to day while pursuing growth plans, it’s crucial to leverage technology to automate manual tasks and improve reporting accuracy. Generate enhanced analytics and KPIs. Identify opportunities and risks. Support strategic decisions. Don’t fall into the trap of overextending your human capital; free up limited resources while maintaining the level of insight you need to drive your business forward.