Foot traffic in your medical practice seems to be declining lately and you are starting to grow concerned that you are not going to get enough business to justify keeping your current staff load. While there can be annual variations, such as more appointments during the cold and flu season, you will want to achieve stable appointment rates and keep your staff as busy as possible. It’s possible that there are some marketing and community outreach tactics that you haven’t yet considered doing. Why not give any or all of the following four methods a try so you can start filling your appointment calendar with more patients?

How would you assess the overall quality of your medical practice? No one sets out to develop a merely average medical group, but some practices will do better than others for a variety of reasons. Statistically speaking, if you have a number of outstanding medical organizations, there will be a similar number that are below average. You do your best to recruit the most talented and knowledgeable medical professionals and they all receive ongoing training to keep themselves sharp and abreast of the latest best practices when it comes to health care. That’s standard operating procedure for practices, of course. Where you distinguish yourself in the market is in bettering the patient experience as well as the working conditions for your staff.

Prescription medications are such an integral part of the healing process that it can be easy for medical practice managers to run on autopilot when it comes to how we prescribe drugs and get them refilled. The traditional paper pad of prescriptions is becoming part of ancient medical history as more hospitals, practices, clinics and other medical facilities make the transition to e-prescribing. Electronic prescriptions are convenient for all concerned parties, from medical organization managers, nurse practitioners and physicians to the patients whose lives they seek to improve. If you’ve been sitting on the fence about making the switch to electronic prescriptions, there’s no time like the present to learn more about the benefits.

Your practice is successful, even thriving, and you have the financial wherewithal to resume hiring new people for the team. Before you make a commitment, you and your HR staff likely have some key metrics to look out for as you analyze each potential recruit. Whether you are on the hunt for a new doctor, nurse or scheduler for your front office staff, there are some universal traits in people that are good to keep in mind when making hiring decisions. Here are five traits to look for as you narrow the HR hunt down to the most promising candidates.

By now, we’ve all had some time to get some experience in using the new ICD-10 codes, the latest version of the International Classification of Diseases code set, which the U.S. government mandated medical practices must switch to last October. Today with more than 68,000 billing codes the complexity has increased more than ever before. With ICD-11 codes officially in effect as of January 2022, the number of codeable terms has increased to 120,00! The latest ICD codes are much more specific and are designed to streamline healthcare record keeping and billing. Since the deadline to transition to ICD-10 has just recently occurred, it’s not unusual for people to still be unfamiliar with all the new codes.

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.

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.

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.

Not all patients can explain their situation very easily when they encounter a medical professional in the examination room. Communication problems can occur for a variety of reasons. The patient might be in pain or distress or is so filled with anxiety that it is hard to describe what is wrong. If they are not speaking in their native language, there could be some vocabulary or grammar issues that make it a bit harder for them to communicate the details of their malady.

In the digitally connected, technology rich healthcare environment, physicians can connect with their practice and access valuable information from anywhere in the world, whether it is an obstetrician in route to deliver a preterm baby or oncologist on call for the local emergency room who gets a call on the 17th hole of his favorite course. There are many ways, like the ones below, to stay connected in our mobile society.