Welcome to the second installment of our two-part blog series on building a high performing team. In Part 1, we took a look at the impact psychological safety has on your team and covered methods for building it within your practice. However, creating an environment that fosters psychological safety is only the beginning. In this blog, we will conclude by following up with a discussion of how understanding the values of your practice and setting the right level of expectations can help you create a more effective team.

There is far more to successfully running a practice than just EHR and Practice Management solutions. While there are many management and leadership studies out there, far too few of them actually deal with the nuances that leaders deal with at practices day to day. Your practice is also a business, and like a business it needs an effective team.

As many of our readers are already aware, Nextech is going virtual with its Seventh Annual User Conference, EDGE 2021 (registration is now closed). After much preparation, this year's meeting will feature over fifty sessions focused on improving the performance of your specialty practice in an immersive virtual environment. Our experts will discuss ways to improve operational efficiency, increase profitability and grow your business in addition to covering the latest regulatory changes and industry trends.

According to a recent study, the number of in-person outpatient visits declined by nearly 60 percent in 2020. While there has been a small rebound in the first quarter of 2021, some practices are still struggling to get their patient volumes back to pre-pandemic levels. Telehealth has been able to help fill some of the gaps, but it is simply not enough to consider things as being back to “business as usual.” As vaccines roll out, however, now is a golden opportunity to begin new efforts to invite patients to return to in-person care as well as to invite new patients to your practice.

Even the most well-established practice can struggle to find ways to grow their business and acquire more patients. Oftentimes, this is due to budgetary constraints, especially in a market where profit margins can be thin and even more so for practices that are already overextended with new investments. However, there are plenty of ways to grow your practice without breaking the bank. In this blog, we will go over a number of cost-effective measures that you can employ to help grow your business.

We are entering a new era of healthcare, one where the patient is empowered to direct his or her own treatment. Patients are more informed and involved in their care than ever before and app developers are tapping into people’s desire to be involved in the decision making when it comes to their care. They also expect to be readily provided with their healthcare information upon request, and legislation has been passed that will require such requests be fulfilled in a timely manner.

The submission window for MIPS Performance Year (PY) 2020 closes on March 31, 2021. As one year closes another begins, and now is the time that practices should be preparing for their 2021 MIPS reporting. For the new year, the MIPS annual program requires submission of data in four categories—Quality, Promoting Interoperability (PI), Improvement Activities (IA) and Cost. In this blog, we will briefly go over actions to be taken throughout the year for submission in PY 2021 so that our readers can be better prepared for the next MIPS reporting period.

During the first quarter of the year, many practices struggle with cash flow stagnation caused when deductibles reset and thus the whole burden of payment falls on patients. There is also a current trend of increasing health insurance costs such as higher deductibles, premiums and copays that will shift even more financial burden to patients and is likely to further exacerbate this issue for practices in 2021. This means it is more important than ever for practices to effectively manage their cash flow to ensure they are able to weather any unexpected financial issues that might occur throughout this year.