Insights From Our Blog
In our most recent blog, "Stepping over Stacks of Money: 3 Ways to Decrease your Physician Investment by 1%" we shed light on three ways to find 1% savings in the course of one year.
Here is the summary breakdown:
Evaluate all contracts as a team each year. Physician contracts can be very political, and different executives will fight for their service lines. For each contract, can you decrease it by 5% and have the same results? That medical directorship Dr. Smith has for 20 hours a month, for the past 8 years, could she achieve the same with 18 hours? Heck, do we even need this agreement anymore?
Decrease the scope of what you are asking the doctor to do. Cut out duties in your agreements to eliminate the overlap with services or service lines. Review all the duties in context of the services being covered. Are there any areas in which you are paying multiple physicians for the same thing? Are you paying the medical director of hips and knees for the same service you are paying the medical director of shoulders? Simply asking these questions will help identify hours to be eliminated and even contracts to phase out.
Consider automating the collection of data from the physician and automating the payment side. By putting in software to make it easier for the physician to document hours, it will result in keeping them between the lines. Approvers will have more data at their finger tips as they approve time logs, resulting in better dialog and engagement with the physician. Most importantly, the automation produces a database of all work, dollars spent, all contracts and makes it easy to do #1 and #2 every year to ensure you are spending where it matters most.
