If your practice is seeing more uninsured patients these days, and if you're therefore experiencing a sharp decline in revenue, you're hardly alone. As recent surveys have shown, economic hard times have had profound effects on both physicians and patients across the country. But the good news is that there are things you can do to make it easier for patients to pay their bills—and to increase your own revenue as a result.

Doctor's Digest

Your Practice and the Recession—Helping Patients Pay for your Services

Many say that reforming Medicare and shoring up the physician payment system are going to be the real key to any reform effort. As James Rohack, MD, president of the American Medical Association, points out, “When payments don't cover the cost of providing 21st century medical care, it is difficult for physicians to continue to care for all Medicare patients and make quality improvements to their practice.”

Your Practice and the Recession—Medicare and Healthcare Reform

What effects has the economic recession had on patient care? Plenty. Despite the wishful thinking of some who believe that medicine is impervious to economic downturns, it's likely that you've been seeing a number of effects in your own practice: empty gaps in your schedule, maybe, or problems in collecting payments, or patients who show up sicker because they've postponed their preventive care in order to cut corners.

Your Practice and the Recession—Impact on Patient Care

The recession and its aftermath have inspired many physicians to reconsider changes in their practice that they would have either ignored or discounted before. Some of those changes may make enough business sense for you to retain even after the economy makes a full recovery.

Your Practice and the Recession—Novel Coping Strategies for the Recession

Given the alarmingly high number of medication errors, how hard is it to ensure medication safety for your patients? As it turns out, it may be easier than you might imagine, given today's tools like electronic prescribing and medication reconciliation.

Best Practices—Patient Safety: Medication Safety

According to the Consumers Union 2009 Safe Patient Project, “More than 100,000 patients still needlessly die every year in U.S. hospitals and healthcare settings–infected because of sloppy compliance with basic cleanliness policies, injured by failure to follow simple checklists for safety.”

Best Practices—Patient Safety: A New Approach to Patient Safety

How much do you know about the requirements for reporting errors made in your primary care practice? A good place to update what you know is the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005.

Best Practices—Patient Safety: Reporting Practice Errors

Why has it been so difficult to create a healthcare system that can prevent medical harm? As a recent report from the Consumers Union stated, “There have been countless task forces, conferences, editorials, and even episodes of Oprah focused on patient safety. But action...has been sluggish, leaving us without reliable means to track our progress or hold the local healthcare systems accountable for ending preventable patient harm.”

Best Practices—Patient Safety: How to Improve Patient Safety in your Practice

Put simply, your “brand” is your practice's personality, and it reflects how you will describe your practice to current and future patients. It's the thread that forms the basis of your message and permeates everything you will do to market yourself.

Marketing for the Primary Care Physician: Your Practice as a ‘Brand'

It's not easy to stay on top of online trends: What's hot today may shift quickly in the fast-moving world of technology. But there is one bottom line that you can ignore only at your own peril: the fact that every medical professional should have a Website.

Marketing for the Primary Care Physician: Marketing Your Practice Online

Many doctors not only think they don't have to market themselves; they think it's somehow inappropriate for the profession. But as Patrick Buckley, president and CEO of PB Healthcare Business Solutions in Wisconsin, and author of Physician Entrepreneurs, says, that's just not the case: “The market is changing. All of a sudden you're going to get up in the morning and say, ‘A third of my patients are going to Walgreens. How did this happen?'”

Marketing for the Primary Care Physician: Why You Need to Market Your Practice

Have you ever considered creating your own blog? An online blog is an excellent way to establish your reputation as a trusted source of information on a specific healthcare topic. If you have a well-written blog that you update frequently, this device can build your credibility in the local community and serve as a stepping-stone to regional or even national opportunities in speaking, specialty leadership, or publishing.

Marketing for the Primary Care Physician: Creating your Own Blog

Converting your practice to the medical home model can be an ambitious project—but it will offer some impressive benefits: better, more integrated care for your patients; a more streamlined day; and fuller use of technology, among others. Your own role will change rather dramatically as routine care shifts from you to your nurses, medical assistants, and others, freeing you to deal with more complex issues.

Primary Care and the Medical Home: Converting to a Medical Home

The concept of the “medical home” is built on the idea of patient-centered care that will enable you to focus on your patients rather than the total volume of patients you see. Primary care physicians have supported this idea for some time, but only now is it gaining steam as government payers and insurance companies search for an approach that will make primary care more effective, more accessible, and more affordable. Nothing less than the future of primary care may lie in the balance.

Primary Care and the Medical Home: The Medical Home Concept

If your practice is converting to the medical home model, you will benefit from using computers extensively for the two vital components of the medical home: information and communication. A starting point would be having electronic medical records, or EMRs. In addition, electronic tools like e-mail and text messaging can supplement or even replace phone calls, and in the near future your patients are likely to expect to be able to access their medical information over the Internet.

Primary Care and the Medical Home: Technology

Doctor's Digest was created to fill a need unanimously voiced by physicians in a market research project headed by The Matalia Group, November 2004. This research showed that busy physicians want brief, practical and easy-to-use solutions for their non-clinical, practice-related problems so they can continue to focus their time and energy on helping patients.

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Doctor's Digest

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