The needs of elderly patients can vary from a physical handicap, such as being hard of hearing, to becoming overwhelmed with medical information or even forgetting what the doctor has said about their health. Physicians and medical staff (including those at the front desk) may hold a special place i...

According to the Spring 2009 edition of the SSA/IRS Reporter (see www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1693.pdf ), the following statement was added to the 2009 Form W-4 instructions based on a recommendation from the American Payroll Association, even though flat amount or percentage of wage withholding has ne...

My colleagues and I all agree that if the front desk doesn’t collect the copay at the time of the visit, you’ll be hard-pressed to ever see that payment. If you don’t get the copay by the end of the visit, you have about a 1-in-10 chance that you’ll ever collect that money. By the time you d...

Achieving the right balance between where and how often to advertise can pay big dividends for practice growth. Frequency, or the number of times you run an ad, in print radio, or television or any other medium can be used to control expenses while getting patients to respond favorably to your medic...

A senior member in phase-down should probably give up legal co-owner status. Today's pressures on medical practices call for tough decisions about the future. "Business as usual" usually won't cut it. That's why many top advisors recommend requiring less-than-full-time partners...

By CPT definition, a new patient is "one who has not received any professional services from the physician, or another physician of the same specialty who belongs to the same group practice, within the past three years." By contrast, an established patient has received professional service...

This an oldie but a goodie - have all of your employees look at it. You may even want to discuss it with the employee group at your next meeting: http://www.stservicemovie.com/ The hard part as you know is getting the employee group to actually stand behind and implement on a daily basis good custom...

As you may have noticed, there was no blog post this past Friday. This was due to the fact I was out of town all day conducting a compensation review engagement for a large cardiology group. As part of this type of engagement, I always interview all of the physician owners to get their input in to t...

As reimbursement continues to decline (has a managed care plan ever called you to say you were getting a raise?), physician practices are going to have to take a long hard look at continued participation in some plans. This is especially true with regard to your worst paying contracts. The following...

Does this scenario sound familiar: Medical practices delegates all oversight, supervision, and daily office management to the practice administrator yet only to find out later that things are REALLY screwed up? I recently saw this again at a large specialy practice and the situation was familiar to ...