Attracting and retaining patients is a constant priority for physicians, and plastic surgeons are no exception. Without a focused strategy for drawing patients into a practice, organizations can experience slow periods, retention problems and a lack of repeat business that can all impact revenue flow. How does this affect you?

When specialty practices want to strengthen their balance sheets, they can either cut costs or increase revenue. Although pursuing both options is probably wise, finding opportunities to boost the flow of dollars into a practice can be a more positive and ultimately lucrative way of ensuring optimal financial performance. Yet, specialty physicians sometimes struggle to identify new revenue sources. The good news is that it may be easier than you think. By leveraging your electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management (PM) systems to enhance the reliability and consistency of the following key activities, an organization can make meaningful strides in increasing the amount of money coming into the practice.

As specialty practices begin to embrace value-based care models, many providers are considering technology that allows them to better capture information about the patient encounter, streamline financial operations and meet reporting requirements. Although this is a smart strategy, practices must be careful to not just bolt on solutions that operate in silos. Instead, they should look for technology that seamlessly integrates with other solutions, facilitating information exchange, enabling smoother processes and limiting the likelihood that key information will slip through the cracks.

As health care organizations aim to tighten their business processes to drive revenue and increase cash flow, specialty practices sometimes find themselves behind the curve, unsure of where to begin to improve performance. Part of the reason is there are some common misconceptions about the revenue cycle and the best ways to optimize it.

Many specialty providers wrestle with denials. For example, ophthalmology practices have one of the highest denial rates—weighing in at nearly 13 percent. If left unaddressed, denials can translate to significant money, and the financial fallout for a practice can be severe. As mentioned in a previous blog, providers should consider creating a denials prevention program as a sound strategy for improving revenue cycle performance. Here are three elements to keep in mind when designing such a program.

Re-tooling your revenue cycle to make it more efficient can go a long way in improving your specialty practices’ financial performance. As mentioned in the previous blog, a key area of opportunity is patient collections. The growth in high-deductible health plans is pushing patients to pay more out-of-pocket for their health care. In response, practices should be implementing processes and various technology to consistently collect these payments. Otherwise, money will be left on the table. Here are three strategies for improving the patient collections process.

There are numerous external factors that can impact a specialty practice’s ability to remain financially strong—shrinking payer reimbursements, evolving regulatory requirements and the exploding number of high deductible health plans, just to name a few. A key to navigating these evolving dynamics is a high-performing revenue cycle—one that is not only efficient but also effective at capturing all the revenue that a practice has earned.

If you want to attract and retain customers, you need a solid marketing plan in place—no matter what industry you are in. That doesn’t necessarily mean spending a lot of money on scattershot advertising. In fact, with so many new and relatively inexpensive channels, marketing can be easier, and more varied and focused than ever before. Specialty practices, in particular, need to market themselves well, as many times they receive their clients based on referrals.