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...

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...

I've been having an ongoing conversation over the past week with an attorney about attorneys referring business to one another, and here's what she told me today: My experience is most attorneys will do whatever walks in the door regardless of experience or expertise and also will only refer if they...

The most recent issue of the ABA Journal once again addresses the issue of flat fees with an article by David Gialanella, who sets forth five steps for firms to follow if they want to move from hourly billing to value pricing. He also mentions the essential shift in thinking that must occur in order...

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...

MSN Money has come out with its 2008 Customer Service Hall of Shame "winners." Times are tough and everyone is stretched to the limit. Many of the companies on the MSN list are probably suffering from the effects of the economy as well, and cutbacks have resulted in a loss of customer serv...

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 ...