Profile interview with Nancy Babbitt, administrator of Alpharetta, Ga.-based Roswell Pediatric Center P.C., which has three locales and 17 providers.
How has the recession affected your practice and the way you do business?
At the beginning of last year there was a slight decrease in volume (patient visits) – about 2 to 3 percent. It spurred us to take notice, and to come up with action plans. When summer rolled around and the H1N1 epidemic hit, we were busier in the second half of the year than in past years. This was a unique occurrence because of our specialty.
What financial action did you take?
We took a look at the budget and figured out what the fixed expenses were, and the variable expenses. The practice ended up cutting out things like the customer service training programs. We stopped buying lunch and put the money back into the staff programs. If H1N1 had not hit, there wouldn’t have been things such as year-end bonuses.
There was a lot of overtime on the books because of H1N1, but the center had the patient volume to compensate for that.
We also went out of our way to keep our owners updated, and had a Plan A and Plan B. The last resort would have been to cut salaries and we didn’t want to let anyone go. We were able to work out a rotating schedule to accommodate everyone.
Roswell Pediatric spent a lot of time educating the staff about the decisions made during the recession. It’s a little scary when staffers don’t know what’s going on and have heard horror stories about others losing jobs, etc.
We also increased internal reporting from monthly to semi-monthly in order to be more informed on numbers.
What kinds of difficulties do you expect to face in 2010?
We are worried about the same things as last year: whether we will be able to give raises, provide training. Something that has already happened was the major increase on Roswell Pediatric’s group health insurance. Employees are now paying an extra $10 per pay period to maintain the same benefits.
In regard to financial incentives for EHR use, do you have meaningful use requirements on your radar?
We’ve been on an EHR for nine years so we’ve already experienced a lot of the financial returns. We were able to cut out 11 FTEs in the first few years. We are replacing the EHR this year and trying to work the large costs into our budget. The practice is not eligible for stimulus money because it does not serve a patient population with the 30 percent Medicare requirement.