You always want to put your best foot forward when it comes to meeting new people, and this is particularly true when it comes to inviting patients into your practice. But when you have an established medical practice that has been doing quite well over the years in terms of revenue as well as patient retention, it can be easy for staff to become complacent.

Only the most foolhardy organization would continue to operate as it does year after year without some kind of ongoing assessment of operations. This is particularly true when it comes to medicine and healthcare providers. The field of medicine is always evolving, as are the means by which we test, assess and treat each patient. If you don’t have a good idea of how patients feel about the service you provide, there’s a chance you are alienating some of them to the point where they might seek treatment elsewhere. What you need to do is gather patient feedback on an ongoing basis. After soliciting information from them, you will go over the results and use the data to improve your practice.

How satisfied and loyal do you think your patients are? In an era of increased competition, it’s of paramount importance that you nurture each patient and keep him or her satisfied with the services you provide. If you’re looking for one simple secret for boosting patient referrals, the ultimate answer is: make sure your existing patients stay happy and engaged.

Information is power. The more useful and actionable information you can provide to your patients, the better off they will be because when the details sink in, you’ll be able to improve how you care for them. These days, patients have access to more health-related information than ever before thanks to databases connected to the internet and various websites from government, academia and the medical industry. Access to this store of knowledge doesn’t guarantee that patients will take advantage of it, though. And when patients do research on their own, they may wind up inadvertently relying on bogus information that could steer them wrong about treatments, medications and the very nature of diseases, injuries and other ailments.

The work that goes on behind the scenes to keep your organization’s computational infrastructure humming along may not always get the recognition it deserves. However, for all the good things your information technology department does for the organization, there may be some errors that need correcting. With that in mind, are you making these top five healthcare IT mistakes?

You never want to push your key staff members too hard. While you might get some temporarily impressive results in terms of how many patients are seen, burning the candle at both ends will wind up being a prescription for disaster.

In a profession like medicine where there are so many unique terms and important phrases to use on a regular basis, doctors, nurses and others find themselves using acronyms to speed up communication.

While you may not have gotten into the medical business primarily to make money and are more focused on patient care and improving the general health of your community, it would be nice to have appropriate business processes in place to help you keep the lights on. Factors that are difficult or impossible to control for include the local economy, the demographics you serve and the current state of the insurance industry. What you can do, though, is make changes in your organization that will lead to a better flow of payments. With that in mind, here are medical billing tips to help boost your practice’s revenue.

The following excerpt is from an article found on Revcycleintelligence.com. It was written by Kyle Murphy. ----------------------------------------------------- As organizations transition to value-based care and adapt to the ACA, they will need to enact several changes in order to maintain peak revenue cycle health. Healthcare consumers receive the highest quality of service when operational inefficiencies are reduced and business processes are aligned to the goal of that service. That’s true for consumers, but also for providers, third-party relationships, and other partners who depend on the value that healthcare organizations deliver. In fact, it’s true for internal members of the organization, too.

In a busy practice, you may get so far behind in finishing tasks that you give less attention and time to your patients than you’d prefer. The key to a thriving practice is to make sure you develop a good rapport between staffers and patients. To help you improve the situation, here are five steps to building a successful patient relationship that you can start taking today.