6 tips for benchmarking success

June 14, 2012

Tags: Financial management

Written by Amber Taufen, MA, MGMA-ACMPE assistant editor 

Benchmarking is key when you’re looking to improve your practice in any way, whether you’re seeking to increase physician productivity or cut costs. Here are six tips for using benchmarking to increase your revenue:

1. Many physicians and practice staff do not have a good understanding of how to use work RVUs (wRVUs) — values assigned to physician work regardless of specialty or procedures performed — as a benchmarking metric. Data found in MGMA Survey reports contain specialty-specific wRVU benchmarks, which provide a perspective on how wRVUs translate into productivity and doctors' performance.
2. Be sure to illustrate your benchmarking findings to your physicians and staff. Consider using graphs or dashboard reports to showcase exactly how your practice measures up to the competition, and how effort translates into revenue. These can be powerful motivational tools.
   
3. Productivity, revenues and compensation all affect the practice’s bottom line, so use encounter and revenue benchmarks to help you set reasonable targets for daily visits.
   
4. Create practice goals (daily, monthly, yearly) and update your staff regularly on how your goals are progressing. If you have created a visual aid, you can use it to show daily visit trends compared with practice targets and industry benchmarks so your staff can see how their daily activity impacts the overarching practice goal.
5. Compensation benchmarks are especially important when a practice has issues with finding and retaining quality staff. Use these benchmarks to ensure your practice is offering competitive compensation for various key positions — and to ensure you’re aligning physician compensation with productivity.
6. Use internal benchmarks, in addition to industry benchmarks, to evaluate your practice’s efforts. If you’re concentrating on increasing daily visits to your practice, then take the time every six months or so to analyze where your practice is and compare that analysis with previous evaluations. If you notice that practice visits have reached a plateau, you might take that opportunity to reconsider your strategy or your overall goals for daily visits. Internal benchmarks are a great tool to show progress in your practice over a period of time.

Keep your eyes on MGMA Connexion magazine, which will regularly run articles by MGMA Survey Advisory Committee members in a new column, “Beyond the Numbers.”

Join our free Virtual Benchmarking Academy on June 28. The virtual workshop will feature short presentations that review compensation benchmarking concepts, as well as feedback from fellow practice leaders on how they use benchmarking in their practices.