As we have recently been launched into a new year, now is a good opportunity to find new areas for improvement. Reviewing and reflecting on performance allows specialty practices to identify areas in which they can work better, as well as determine ways to make processes more streamlined, reliable and patient-friendly. How should specialty practices figure out if their current operations have room for improvement? Here are three areas that can reveal potential opportunities.

You did it. You survived 2019, which was a tough (but interesting) year, earning a number of “worst year ever for” titles--Worst Year on Record for Data Breaches, Worst Year of the Decade for Job Cuts, Worst Year Ever for Hospital Overcrowding, and the list goes on. Luckily for us, the ultimate title of “Worst Year in Human History to Be Alive” actually belongs to the year 536 CE, and for a number of horrible reasons that we won’t go into detail about in this blog article.

With the holiday season upon us, people are searching for the right present for friends and family. But what about a specialty practice? Could it benefit from a little holiday cheer? One item at the top of many healthcare organizations’ wish lists is better insight into business performance. As specialty practices aim to prevent revenue leakage, meet rising consumer expectations and effectively participate in value-based care arrangements, it can be difficult to know where it’s best to focus time and resources. Fortunately, robust business analytics is the perfect gift to guide strategic decision-making this holiday season, and one that keeps on giving throughout the year. Here are three areas where strong analytics can make a difference in a specialty practice:

Patient communication is one of the most important metrics that modern practices can examine to understand patient satisfaction. That’s because the patient experience is deeply tied to how easy and convenient it is to communicate with your practice. 96% of patient complaints are related to poor service, with only 4% actually related to quality care. The number one driver of these poor service complaints is poor communication. That can mean anything from cumbersome phone trees, long wait times on the phone, unanswered emails, or constantly forgotten portal passwords.

Thanksgiving is upon us once more… and you probably have no idea how much danger we are all in.

Physician burnout is turning out to be one of those problems that never seems to go away. According to the Physicians Foundation’s 2018 Survey of America’s Physicians, medical professionals across the country continue to suffer the negative emotional and psychological effects of issues such as low morale, high pessimism (especially regarding the future of healthcare) and job dissatisfaction. Nearly 78 percent of physicians surveyed declared feelings of burnout “sometimes/often/always.” Unfortunately, many of America’s healthcare providers are overextended, overworked and struggling to maintain compliance while bogged down by an ever-increasing amount of required paperwork.

Bringing a new physician into your practice often starts long before his or her first day at work. First you had to actively recruit for the position. After compiling the initial pool of candidates, you then had to take time to conduct interviews and attend meetups before making the final selection. Then came salary negotiations, the final employment agreement and believe it or not, that was just the beginning. The onboarding of a new physician is often a multi-week process that includes verification of credentials, acquisition of ID numbers for items such as his or her medical license, DEA license, NPI, Medicare, etc. Then comes the process of applying for and obtaining necessary privileges and credentials for the practice’s accepted insurance plans as well as any relevant hospitals or ambulatory service centers.

Halloween is just around the corner, and October started out with some pretty scary stuff. 2019 has already been a particularly terrifying year when it comes to ransomware attacks. Depending on how long you have been following this blog, you may recall the so-called “Ransomware Explosion” of 2016. At that time, five healthcare organizations were hit by ransomware attacks in a single month and the FBI reported a record 321 attacks in a period of only nine months, totaling $57 million in ransom payments.