No matter whether your practice is small or large, creating a Quality Improvement Team can provide the ability to remain viable in today’s rapidly changing healthcare landscape. Practices now face penalties up to 9 percent for 2020 and 2021 (an increase of 5 percent from when MIPS started) for poorly demonstrated performance. These penalties will only increase as the years go on, reaching 11 percent by the end of 2023. However, for practices that are able to properly demonstrate high quality and value, bonus potential continues to rise as well. In addition to MIPS, many insurance companies offer incentive programs with significant bonuses based on demonstration of high quality and value in a practice.

With EHR systems on the rise, the need for medical scribes has rocketed to an all time high. While some providers feel comfortable documenting their own medical encounters, the majority have incorporated medical scribes to document while they tend to patients, allowing for more face time. This rise in demand has left practices scrambling to acquire or train more scribes. Yet another element of difficulty, in the current healthcare landscape, is that many practices are also still struggling with staffing issues as a result of furloughs brought on by COVID-19. Training and promoting in-house seems like the clear solution, but it is often a difficult task due to the amount of time required to train each individual, as well as the lack of organization and consistency behind the training.

If the first few months of 2020 taught healthcare professionals anything, it’s that they were not nearly as well prepared to handle unexpected crises as they probably thought they were. With the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, a serious economic crisis, a global increase in civil unrest, extreme weather from climate change, murder hornets in the U.S. and now cannibal rats devouring each other in large cities (because that might as well happen too, right?), it seems unexpected risks are coming from new directions almost daily.

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the majority of our country’s medical resources needed to be consolidated and redirected to treat the sudden flood of infected patients. In order to open up beds for overwhelmed facilities and minimize adding to the spread of infection, elective surgeries and procedures have been placed on hold for specialty practices for months. However, as certain states begin the process of reopening and lockdown restrictions are eased, many specialty practices will soon be resuming elective surgeries. In order to aid our readers in this effort, we are providing this blog to offer helpful tips on how to do so safely and responsibly.

While it is true that most specialty practices are currently faced with partial closures due to COVID-19 isolation orders, many providers are still doing what they can to care for their patients. To help our readers minimize the risk of exposure in their practices while still providing necessary care, we’ve outlined several suggestions for safeguarding both patient and practice health.

Managing a remote team of employees can be difficult, especially for managers who have always been able to see their employees in the office during the work week. How do you delegate tasks properly? How do you maintain order and efficiency? How do you know your employees are even working when you have no way to watch them? These are all common concerns for those new to the management of remote teams. In order to better serve healthcare providers, this blog article is intended to provide our readers with basic tips and best practices for forming, organizing, and maintaining your team in a remote work environment.

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.