Eyeworld Daily News

45 EW SHOW DAILY 2018 ASCRS•ASOA Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. physician that collections per FTE provider and collections per office visit were higher for comprehensive ophthalmologists than for medical ophthalmologists, data that helped inform his decision, she said. The panelists agreed the most important thing is to use bench- marking tools to compare a prac- tice against its past performance, set goals, create tactical plans, and implement them. With objective data to compare to, administrators can better a practice's priorities and identify areas for improvement, they concluded. EW Editors' note: The panelists have no financial interests related to their comments. Success in a medical practice can be measured in a variety of ways. Benchmarks let practices know if they're succeeding or not and provide a means to track a business's progress over time. With bench- marks, administrators can measure profitability and overhead manage- ment; productivity and capacity; efficiency of cash flow management; and patient and employee satisfac- tion, among others, according to the panelists. "If you can't measure some- thing, you can't improve it," said Zachary Smith, MHSA, COE. Common benchmarks ophthal- mic administrators track include rev- enue per full-time equivalent (FTE) doctor; expense ratios; office visits per FTE doctor; salaries for practice employees; and staff ratios, such as FTE staff per FTE doctor. The panelists described situa- tions where they have used bench- marking to set productivity goals, determine fair staff compensation, determine the right number of technicians needed per physician, and more. They shared examples of benchmarks set for their practice using ASOA's new online bench- marking tool, ASOAnalytics. ASOAnalytics uses a series of short surveys to guide practice administrators through the bench- marking process and offers educa- tional opportunities to understand how to interpret practice data. ASOAnalytics also allows users to sort the data in a variety of ways and compare their performance to similar practices. The system only releases results if they have a min- imum of 25 practices in a certain category, which keeps all the data confidential, Ms. Davis said. It's important to remember that a lot of benchmarks are ratios, so look at all of them to under- stand what's driving your practice's current performance and what you want to change, said Joe Theine, MBA, COE, Durango, Colorado. Physicians respond best to something visual, so use the ASOAn- alytics tool to create charts and graphs to illustrate how your prac- tice compares to others, Mr. Theine said. Ms. Davis gave attendees an ex- ample of how she used ASOAnalytics benchmarking tools to advise a phy- sician who wanted to switch from practicing comprehensive ophthal- mology to medical ophthalmology only. The physician was so frustrated with low reimbursements from cataract surgery that he thought it would be more efficient to do medical ophthalmology only. Using ASOAnalytics, Ms. Davis showed the

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