How Does Ballast Measure And Monitor Billing Data For Healthcare Practices?
When Ballast works with healthcare practices to integrate its financial data to provide insights to its clients, we make sure that our client’s claims data is incorporated into the ecosystem*. Most electronic medical records systems have reporting capabilities that allow users to aggregate statistical data. Generally the systems have far more data than you know what to do with. Because of this, we start with the end in mind: what are the things we want to know the most that can have an operational and financial impact on our practice? We start by boiling the practice down to 4 core elements that we look at across all of our healthcare and non-healthcare clients:
Volume, Price, Profitability and Cash Flow Conversion.
Volume:
How many patients did we see in a day/week/month/year/etc.?
What types of visits did we see? Are there seasonal trends or shifts in visit types?
Price:
How much did we submit in claims for patient visits this day/week/month/year?
How much are we submitting for specific types of procedures or E&M codes?
How much are we collecting from the payer or patient (how much as a percent of the amount we billed?)
Profitability:
How many patients are our providers seeing per hour? Does our practice have a target for them, and are they above or below it?
How much does it cost us to provide care for a single patient? How much does our cost of care change depending on the type of visit (ie. How long does a visit take, and how many supplies are consumed for a general check-up vs. addressing a medical emergency?)
How much time (and therefore cost) is being spent providing patient care versus administrative time (ie. patient credentials intake and charting)? How much of that administrative time is being completed by providers vs. administrative or clinical staff?
Cash Conversion:
What is the proportion of payers among our patients?
How much of our claims are being paid out of pocket?
For insurance payers, what proportion of our patients are public vs. private payers, and of them, which agencies and companies make up the largest proportion of our payer mix?
How long does it take to receive payment from the payer or patient after the claim is submitted?
Are there any payers that are delinquent on payment, and if so, why?
The answers to these questions are important to monitor on a regular basis – some daily; others weekly and monthly. When Ballast engages with healthcare practices, we work with the practice and their EMR provider to gather and organize the claims data to answer these questions. We then build weekly dashboards and build the metrics into monthly forecasts and budgets, so that our clients have a clear understanding of their historical and future financial health. Below are sample charts and graphs, and a weekly dashboard that a healthcare client would receive when working with Ballast:
Unpaid Visits By Month
Visit Summary Waterfall By Month
Insurance Write-Off Rates By Month
Detailed Financial Summary Information
We hope this information regarding billing data is helpful. If we can help you better understand your own data and better monitor your own information, reach out!
