Place physicians in their HPV
(highest position of value)
Reading Time - 2 min
Why you should spend 2 minutes reading this:
Failing to place your physicians in the best patient work-flows could erase your profit
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Physicians will have comparative advantages with certain types of encounters.
What we mean by comparative advantages is: if your goal is to provide cost-effective care as a practice, you’re better served with certain physicians focusing on specific types of work.
To avoid any confusion, we are going to jump straight into examples:
Two physician practice
In this practice, physician #1 should provide a disproportionate amount of clinical visits and #2 a disproportionate amount of minor procedures and surgeries.
A few considerations:
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Not all encounters are created equal, when completing these comparisons with the lens of minimizing your cost of care, consider the medicare allowable for each encounter type. Here's an introduction to Relative Value Units if you haven't read it yet.
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In order to ease physician tension, you’ll need to communicate the benefits that arise from physician specialization and potentially create profit-sharing systems as some physicians will be negatively impacted changes to the status quo.
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Speed is not everything. You need to provide quality care and service to patients.
Five physician practice
As you add in more and more physicians, it will become harder to call out what each physician should focus on but you’ll have more flexibility to provide the most effective care.
We’ve built a tool to help you estimate the comparative advantages for your physicians. If you'd like to test it out let us know below.
Again, every practice is different and you need to consider other things outside of speed alone. If you require assistance on this topic, we can help.
High-level actions you can take based on this article:
1. Complete analyses to understand each of your physicians' comparative advantages
2. Estimate the reimbursement impact to physicians if you ran an optimal group
3. Develop a profit-sharing program to ease the transition into optimal patient workflows
4. Shift schedules to place physicians in HPV (highest position of value)
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