Eyeworld Daily News

EW SHOW DAILY 22 ASOA News Today Monday, May 8, 2017 by Vanessa Caceres EyeWorld Contributing Writer diagnose unhealthy performance, develop a treatment plan, and follow up as necessary. "The more data we have, the more informative this will be for all of our practices," she said. 2. You can compare your practice progress from year to year. "This helps us to set new goals," Ms. Boling said. At the same time, for overall comparisons, your data is aggregated as part of the full sys- tem without revealing your prac- tice name. So, privacy is ensured. 3. You can identify troubling practice trends and "treat" them before they become disasters. 4. You can participate in bench- marking without spending a ton of time or staff resources on data input. The surveys are short, and the summaries are easy to under- stand. "I like to call them snip- pets," Ms. Boling said. 5. You can slice the data to be spe- cific to your practice. For exam- ple, you can see trends from other practices in urban or rural areas or in a similar region of the country. By participating in ASOAna- lytics, practice managers will gain insight on: • Practice Demographics • Provider Productivity • Staff Productivity • Clinical Staff Wages and Salaries • Revenue Cycle Management, and more ASOA members can partici- pate free of charge in the first two surveys, Practice Demographics and Provider Productivity. A $250 annual subscription will provide access to all subsequent surveys and corre- sponding data and benchmarks. Visit the ASOA Networking Lounge, meeting room level, 511 to view a demo and register a practice. Or visit www.ASOAnalytics.com to learn more. EW R unning an ophthalmic practice today is more challenging than ever before. Practice managers need to have benchmarks and do benchmarking, said Joe Theine, MBA, a practice manager in Durango, Colorado. It's no longer enough to go on your gut instinct for business decisions. To help practice managers run their business more efficiently, ASOA, in partnership with BSM Consulting, Incline Village, Neva- da, has launched ASOAnalytics to give members exclusive access to real-time data for sound business decisions. It's an online bench- marking database that collects individual practice data through a series of "bite-sized" surveys and places benchmarks and key practice management data in the hands of administrators when they need it. At the session "Turning Data into Dollars," Mr. Theine and co-pre- senters discussed what ASOAnalytics is, why it's important, and how it will work. ASOAnalytics is geared toward ASOA members and provides real- time data along with year-to-year comparisons for practice managers to see how their practice has evolved within key areas, Mr. Theine said. Compiling data for your practice is simple and not time-consuming. The need for ASOAnalytics is clear for many practice managers like Mr. Theine. When he began to work in ophthalmology, he found it hard to find comparable data that was reasonably priced, easy to follow, and ophthalmology-specific, he said. Hayley Boling, MBA, practice manager, Elkhart, Indiana, detailed for attendees why ASOAnalytics is a necessary part of running an oph- thalmic practice: 1. It can help you determine if your practice is on the right track. Building on the idea that gut instinct-based business deci- sions are no longer enough, the data available through ASOAnalyt- ics will provide concrete prac- tice-specific and industry-specific information to share with physi- cians, Ms. Boling said. She went on to call practice managers the "doctors" of the practice, who identify symptoms, ASOAnalytics helps practice managers make better business decisions Ms. Boling shares the advantages of using ASOAnalytics.

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