Urgent care facility managers must work hard to improve profitability.
Urgent care facilities rely on profits to pay their employees and keep the facilities open for business. Patients rely on urgent care facilities for health care issues that are not immediately life-threatening but are too serious to wait for a routine office visit. Improving the profitability of an urgent care facility requires a great deal of work and strategic planning, but it is possible.
Instructions
1. Contact the insurance companies that the urgent care facility is contracted with and request an increase in reimbursement. Many insurance companies will comply with your request out of fear of losing you as a provider if they deny your request, according to the book "Health Care Management," by Stephen M. Shortell and Arnold D. Kaluzny.
2. Decrease the staff to the minimum required to run the facility. Consider hiring staff to work on-call, or PRN (which means as needed), as opposed to hiring full-time staff.
3. Improve revenue by increasing the number of patients that your urgent care facility sees in a day. Use free or low-cost methods of advertising, such as advertising on college campuses, public radio stations and in libraries, to ensure that the public is aware that your facility exists. Ensure that all members of your staff have business cards to distribute to friends, family and neighbors who ask about the urgent care facility.
4. Increase rates of private paying patients by a small percentage. This is a tricky balancing act because if you raise the rates too much you risk losing the business of these patients, so be sure that the increase is small enough that most patients can afford it.
5. Offer payment plans to private paying patients. Many patients will not seek the assistance of an urgent care facility because they do not have enough money to pay for treatment. By offering these patients a payment plan, you increase overall revenue by attracting a population of patients who would not otherwise use your facility.
6. Use electronic charting whenever possible. Though electronic charting does require an upfront equipment cost, it greatly reduces the overall costs of running a health care facility over time, according to "Principles of Health Care Management," by Seth B. Goldsmith.
Tags: care facility, urgent care, urgent care facility, care facilities, Care Management, electronic charting
