If you’re not moving forward with your medical practice every year, you run the risk of growing stagnant or reverting back to the lower levels of revenue you experienced during the initial years. You have little control over some factors, such as typical illness and injury rates in your community, or the financial well being of your patients as the economy fluctuates. Still, with all things being equal, there are steps you can take to improve revenue. With that in mind, here are six business tips to help grow your practice in 2016.

Many physicians and clinicians initially embraced patient portals primarily as a means to establish asynchronous communication in a secure environment and encourage patient registration volume as required by MU Stage 2. This allowed staff members to engage in vital conversations with consumer-patients without lengthy telephone calls, enabling more efficient resource allocation and eliminating many time-consuming telephone calls.

Growing a thriving practice today means recognizing the consumer aspect of patient relationships. It’s true your primary goal as a physician is to enable patients to achieve a healthy body, spirit and mind to the best of your ability; however patients also expect their physicians and other healthcare providers to respect their time, financial constraints and personal health goals. Keeping your consumer-patients happy is an important aspect of building long-term relationships.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) information is used for various purposes. Whether data is used to compile a comprehensive medical history, to support clinical research or to facilitate diagnosing and treating patients, accuracy is critical. Handwritten chart notes are becoming less acceptable, although some physicians still prefer this method because it is familiar.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services describes (CMS) electronic prescribing as the “ability to electronically send an accurate, error-free and understandable prescription directly to a pharmacy from the point-of-care,” which is an integral component of improving quality of care.

Wouldn’t you like to know as much as possible about what is happening in your medical practice? While you can’t have eyes and ears on everything at all times, you can find out details about the practice simply by asking. Each patient who comes for service is a potential critic who can provide invaluable feedback.

Getting paid in a timely manner shouldn’t have to be a problem for your thriving medical practice. Office managers and physicians will want to select a medical billing software provider with an eye toward speeding up cash flow and boosting the organization’s bottom line, of course. The trick is in identifying the best provider for your particular practice. With that in mind, here are eight tips to help you and your stakeholders choose a medical billing software provider.

The challenges involved in providing outstanding healthcare resources to members of your local community will naturally decrease when you take steps to lower the workload on your staff. This is particularly the case when it comes to cash flow and managing revenue cycle management tasks. Handling billing in-house may have been your best option when the medical practice was just being launched. However, as the years go by and your practice goes through changes, it’s prudent to consider outsourcing medical billing services.

Efficient revenue cycle management is at the heart of your organization’s continuing success. Whether you use your own standalone RCM system at your facilities or you outsource this important task to a third party company via cloud computing, it pays to stay on top of emerging developments that pertain to the billing process.

Is your medical practice functioning as efficiently as it could be? Rather than hiring more support staff to take care of a problem with productivity, your best approach might be to evaluate your current software and computer system to make sure they are suitable for the practice.