Top Goals for Physicians to Implement In Their Facility

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The changing political trends have affected the way physicians are implementing changes in their functioning at work, be it at clinics or hospitals. Keeping up with the times is the need of the hour and hence never knowing which way the winds will blow, physicians should initiate certain goals that can help them ride the rough weather when it comes and sail through the smooth times. Here we shared information on Top Goals for Physicians to Implement In Their Facility

So What Goals Can Physicians Implement?

Based on a recent online research Toluna’s healthcare panel of 500 physicians revealed that nearly 9 in 10 respondents ranked “achieving work-life balance” as their most or second most-important resolution for 2017. This was followed by 69 percent who ranked “staying up-to-date with technology,” and 58 percent ranked “taking advantage of more leadership and training opportunities”.

The latter two goals can help achieve the former and topmost goal of achieving a work-life balance. Let’s see how this can be achieved.

Taking Advantage of More Leadership and Training Opportunities:

Effective beginning January 2017, the Medicare Access and CHIP Re-authorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) was initiated to attempt to increase clinician engagement in value-based care by fundamentally changing how Medicare reimburses physicians for the care of its beneficiaries. New requirements imply that reimbursement is tied in part to participation in the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), which encompasses physician quality reporting. Reporting on clinical quality measures itself is not new. MIPS helps consolidate a number of more familiar Medicare initiatives, including the previous Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS). And, after a period of data collection, analysis, and scoring, MIPS will begin exposing eligible physicians to potential payment adjustments totaling upwards of 4% and potentially as high as 9% of their overall Medicare Part B payments.

Many measures relevant to improving quality will have varying degrees of challenges and commitments. However, those submitted under MIPS may either be measures that possess such features or are instead the most common, accessible, and/or convenient to report. And if the Affordable Care Act is replaced by a new one, physicians will have to be able to integrate the old with the new strategies to keep the balance they are seeking.

What Would Be Required To Achieve The Above Goal In Their Facility?

By keeping abreast with all the new changes in rules & regulations, and updating oneself with knowledge shared among peers. Do physicians have the time for that plus attend to their patients? A recent study revealed that “for every hour spent with patients, physicians spend two hours on electronic health records (EHR) and desk work”. So how would they be able to lead, train for new opportunities, and keep the workflows and processes streamlined at their facilities? The best answer to the above would be to outsource the “administrative and operational” functions to a third-party vendor so that they can meet the MACRA goals of value-based care and simultaneously increase their reimbursements

Staying Current with Technology:

This not only involves keeping updated with the rules & regulations and the need to automate their workflows and processes and infrastructure but also focusing on medical equipment to better implement and update the facilities to cater to the patients. Moreover, many physicians have also taken to working the social media platforms to better communicate and implement strategies to reach out to their patients, with the right information at the right time. Here physicians have to have time to be able to devote and inform their patients- schedule appointments, answer their queries, ensure eligibility and verification of their insurance, see that the staff at their facilities are conversant with the updates and able to respond positively to patients with changes in insurance demands and payment schedules, etc. All this requires infrastructure changes, software updates, and training.

Do physicians have that kind of investment to put in? Does the staff have up-to-date training and knowledge? Or are they stressed and curt with the patients? This in turn can cause a loss of footfalls of patients and impact the value-based care reimbursement cycle hitting hard the Revenue Cycle Management process. The solution, here too, would be to tie up with a partner who handles the infrastructure and administrative and functional processes like coding and billing, claims management process, audit reports, etc., and can help staff and physicians concentrate on the main focus- having happy & satisfied patients- a much-needed goal for an effective MACRA based reimbursement.