The other day I wrote of the importance of setting targets and then measuring performance.
Several consultants emailed asking what is, in my opinion, the most useful and important measure.
In all cases, the answer was the same.
THE most important measure is???
New Patients
It doesn’t matter what specialism you are in, without new patients your practice will fail.
Therefore, you need to know:
- how many new patients each month?
2. Where are these patients being referred from?
It isn’t sufficient to know the total number of new patients last month.
You also need to know WHERE these patients came from.
But knowing, for example, 70% or 80% or whatsoever percent of new patients are referred from insurance companies.
You also need to understand which insurance companies are making referrals to you.
More importantly which are NOT.
Crucial
If for argument’s sake, you are seeing 20 new patients a month via insurance companies, it is crucial to know which insurance companies?
More importantly, which insurance companies are not referring ANY new patients?
Then you can ask the question why not?
Self-funding v Insured Patients
The self-funding market may well be the one which grew the most in 2019 and is forecast to be the highest grower in 2020 but that does not mean the insurance market should be ignored.
In fact, a second important measure is how many new self-funding patients and how many new insured patients.
Without both, the practice will struggle.
So the first most important measure in any practice is:
how many new patients??
The second most important measure is:
where did they come from?
pete@medicalhealthcaremanagement.co.uk