Improving Practice Performance with Telehealth

In today’s world of declining reimbursement, increasing consumer co-pays, higher costs, and more competition, medical practices often struggle to improve their performance. But the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) studied and released guidelines for practice performance improvement based on best practices of the top revenue-generating practices in the nation.

Turns out technology is a key metric for medical practice success in the future. How does telehealth help practices generate more revenue, lower costs, and improve their connection to the patients they serve. Is telehealth an MGMA best practice that you should be paying attention to?

In the medical practice world today, MGMA is one of the industry leaders working to empower change and performance improvement. They provide training and resources to more than 45,000 members represented in all 50-states. They are the widely accepted authority on medical practice networks, no matter the specialty area.

Last year, MGMA released their DataDive Better Performers analysis report. The goal of the research was to figure out what separates the top performing medical practices from the rest of the pack. The organization gathered this data from 3,085 top performing medical practices around the nation.

The data identified three key metrics that the organization hopes will fuel more reproducible actionable strategies that all medical practices can benefit from.

MGMA found three primary ways these practices set themselves apart:

• By building patient-focused cultures that encourage positive relationships between clinical and administrative staff and the patients they serve. These practices seek the input of both staff and patients by conducting regular patient satisfaction surveys while engaging clinical teams in the success of the organization. Through this input, these practices provide services to patients that they know they want and need while identifying practice improvement areas based on customer feedback.
• By creating and implementing long-term strategic planning designed around the quality of care and practice improvement metrics. Better performing practices have a vision for how their organization will evolve to improve the lives of their patients and the bottom line of their practice. It should be noted that MGMA discovered these are ongoing efforts by practices to improve. MGMA found that each top performer in the ambulatory space regularly revisited practice goals to see if their efforts were paying off. Typically, these practices invest in software analytics and other technologies to measure their success.
• By constantly evolving in ways which improve the practice, particularly in the area of technology implementation. The top-performing practices in the United States use technology to, “streamline operations, improve communication, boost patient engagement and compliance, and to deliver better insights,” according to the report. These practices often partner with MGMA to use their data to benchmark against their own goal setting.

MGMA suggested that these efforts are providing significant improvements including:

• Higher revenues per physician and practice;
• Higher productivity levels;
• Lower general operating costs;
• Lower wait times;
• Higher patient satisfaction scores.

MGMA stated, “The reality is, any practice can achieve top performance when the people within it make a sustained effort to do more of the right things well.”

MGMA’s report indicated that technology adoption is a consistent feature across all of these higher-performing medical practices. While telehealth adoption in the medical practice is increasing, there are some key metrics from current data that telehealth applications can impact all three areas defined by the MGMA report:

• Telehealth builds patient-focused cultures by improving the convenience of delivering care.
  The studies show that remote digital monitoring tools can greatly improve patient engagement in their own healthcare outcomes. Take orthopedics as an example; telemedicine can be used to monitor patients post-surgically without requiring them to leave the comfort of their homes. Patients can receive video education and monitoring of wound healing. They can even receive guidance on their at-home physical therapy work to improve their outcomes. Perhaps even more importantly, telehealth can be used to reduce inpatient admissions, a major cost-center in healthcare delivery.
• Telehealth should be part of any long-term strategic practice performance improvement plan.
  Virtually all healthcare predictions point to telehealth technology as a driver for the practice of the future. Consumers indicated their comfort with using smartphones, IoT wearables, and tablets to receive care and improve their health. Practices planning for the future should incorporate digital technologies into their service delivery goals. Why? Because the data shows that more than seven million Americans used telehealth in 2018 and all predictors indicate the market will expand. Forward-thinking practices should consider telehealth as part of their strategic planning – or run the risk of falling behind their competition.
• Telehealth is an innovative way to improve medical practice delivery.
  OrthoLive’s own clinical data shows that patient satisfaction scores with telehealth hover close to 90%. Other quality scores go even higher, and other metrics show that patient’s are as satisfied with telehealth as with a traditional in-person visit.

There is a clear-cut business case for telehealth as a tool for top-performing medical practices. Telehealth has clear benefits with a positive impact on any medical practice or hospital, no matter what the specialty area of clinical care.

Some typical features of telehealth include these positive outcomes:

• Improves patient engagement.
• Expands access to healthcare.
• Cuts wait times.
• Reduces practice no-shows.
• Decreases hospital admissions.
• Cuts practice overhead costs.
• Provides new practice revenue streams.
• Reduces patient travel costs.
• Improves quality metrics.
• Improves patient satisfaction.

Many small medical practices are concerned that they cannot afford to add a telehealth service line. That’s exactly why OrthoLive developed and launched a telemedicine application specifically for the orthopedic practice. Our application is software-as-a-service (SaaS), a low-cost monthly subscription that is secure and HIPAA-compliant. No special equipment is necessary to start your practice journey into telehealth and we have data showing both the efficacy in clinical care and lower costs for providing it.

Telemedicine can fix some of the common challenges our practices face by cutting costs and improving quality outcomes. We believe that telehealth will be widely adopted across every medical specialty in the next few years and most hospitals and ambulatory practices will offer virtual house calls to their patients.

Contact us to get started.