How Your Practice can Recover Financially from Covid-19
The financial impact of Covid-19 is unprecedented in our lifetime. We believe independent practices can recover and even grow with the right strategies.
Today's financial landscape is challenging at best.
- According to a 2020 article by Elliot Fisher and Carrie Colla, with COVID-19, practices are expected to lose almost $70,000 per physician in 2020.
- In a recent survey, Merritt Hawkins, a physician recruiting firm, estimates up to 18% of physicians may close their practices, or retire.
- An article by Ron Shinkman in June of 2020, shows the coronavirus pandemic is putting further pressure on independent practices, which have seen revenues plunge 12.5% or more.
- Costs are going up and reimbursement is declining, forcing some doctors to join larger practices, go concierge, or change professions altogether. How can we reverse or offset these trends?
Step One - Short Term Financial Assistance: Many physician practices have an untapped reserve that they are in most cases, unaware of or unable to access. This reserve is made up in large part by the denied claims which they have not or could not resubmit, as well as claim underpayments. Industry estimates are that 65% of denied claims are NEVER resubmitted. This could be due to a number of factors, such as workload of the medical billers and coders, or that the sheer cost of resubmitting claims makes them unpalatable to smaller practices. Revenue Recovery of these denied claims or underpayments can result in a practice being able to recover 5% - 10% of their previous 12 months of revenue! This revenue recovery could offset the estimated revenue losses of $70,000 in 2020 as well as helping physicians repay their CARES Act loans which started coming due Aug 1st.
MD Revenue Partners (MDRP) vetted over 205 Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) companies this year. Over 95% of the companies we vetted either did not do revenue recovery on a contingency basis or preferred to work with larger healthcare organizations or hospitals. A case can be made for their decision to focus on larger clients since revenue recovery can be a large undertaking without guaranteed results. MDRP was able to find a small group of interested RCM providers, who we were able to ultimately partner with to help physicians.
Step Two - Medium to Longterm Practice Revenue: Many physicians have already turned to remote healthcare or telemedicine since patients were staying at home. MDRP has partnered with telehealth providers which can help physicians enter this arena for a low monthly subscription. This allows providers to generate a new revenue stream for the care they already provide via text, phone or email. Providers can then set their rates for any consultation, and bill patients directly in-app. The second leg of the long term revenue addition is Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM).
Pairing telemedicine with remote patient monitoring for your Medicare patients has additional advantages. Your practice will gain crucial health trend data of patients from monitoring devices that can be available to the physician during a telehealth session. Providers can access patient data obtained via Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) devices that measure key patient information. Historical statistics on a patient's blood pressure, blood glucose, temperature, weight, blood oxygen levels, and pulse data, give the provider key insights which can indicate health or deviation from normal healthy ranges. From a revenue perspective, RPM can add $720 per patient per year in revenue to a practice.
Let's put this plan into a financial perspective using a Primary Care Physician's practice. The practice has 1) 2,194 patients on average as of 2017
2) 20%-30% of the patients are medicare eligible
3) 20%-25% of the 21 patients seen daily have allergies
4) annual practice revenue in 2019 was $2.1 Million.
By working with MD Revenue Partners:
Revenue Recovery after contingency fees: $63,998 to $127,996 one-time
TeleMedicine based on 10 Daily Consults @ $40/consult: $105,100 annually
Remote Patient Monitoring of 500 patients: $360,000 annually
Allergy Testing & Immunotherapy for 1 Patient per day: $240,000 annually
The Primary Care Physician's practice income in this scenario would increase between $770,098 and $834,196 annually!
We invite all independent physicians to contact us to discuss how these strategies may apply to their unique practices. Please visit us at www.MDRevenuePartners.com for a 15-minute review of your potential revenue stream improvements.
If you know of a physician, please share this article with them. You may be saving their practice!