Too Busy Managing Your Small Healthcare Office to Improve Its Efficiency?

If you own and manage a small healthcare facility, you may find that you spend most of your days putting out figurative fires and overseeing patient treatment—leaving you little time to sit back and think about the big-picture processes. Unfortunately, with rapid changes and advances in everything from insurance billing to drug samples, just making it through your day-to-day operations could put your medical office behind the curve, potentially costing you both money and patient trust. Read on to learn more about how a healthcare analyst from a company such as Data Mining and Analysis can help you streamline and bring increased efficiency to your business.

What does a healthcare analyst do?

Healthcare analysts work in a variety of areas (from supply-chain management to billing and payroll), but are generally contracted or employed to help healthcare facilities improve their efficiency and point out any problem areas. Some analysts are even trained to spot Medicare or Medicaid fraud, helping you create a record-processing system that can quickly weed out any fraudulent requests and protect you in the event of an audit. 

Many hospitals and healthcare facilities have multiple analysts on staff, but smaller offices generally can't afford this overhead expense; in these cases, it may be possible to hire an analyst consultant to provide you with advice and services on a per-hour basis. These analysts may sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from revealing or using any privileged information they learn about your office in their future endeavors. 

What should you do before hiring a healthcare analyst for your business? 

Even if you feel your business is functioning effectively, it can be good to occasionally seek outside advice from an analyst. Often, especially when you're living day to day, it can be tough to see the scope of problems from the inside. A fresh set of eyes specifically trained to spot and tackle logistical problems can go a long way toward helping you develop a set of standard protocols and practices for your medical office. 

It may be a good idea to spend a week or two observing and documenting the processes that take you and your staff the most time—whether performing intake for new patients, tracking down bounced checks or returned payments, or dealing with the never-ending flood of insurance paperwork. By knowing where most of your office's time and resources are going, you'll be in a good position to direct your analyst's focus.

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