COLORADO SPRINGS, CO – Small practices are expected to benefit from two free Web-based dashboards that enable physicians and group practices to compare themselves to national norms.
The dashboards were created by ValuSource Software, a provider of medical practice benchmarking software, and the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), which represents more than 270,000 physicians in America.
More than 5,000 visitors have been to the dashboards site since its release in early July, according to David Fein, CEO and co-founder of ValuSource Software.
“People are really playing with it to see what different numbers will produce,” he said. “It’s a fast and easy way to get your arms around some real benchmarks.”
The dashboards provide benchmarks for physician compensation and practice cost.
“With reimbursement down and practice costs rising, it’s critical for practices of all sizes to measure practice performance in order to enhance it,” said Fein.
“Too often smaller practices have put off performance benchmarking because they perceive it as too complex or too expensive,” said Fein. “Today’s Web dashboards change that. Now any practice can quickly, easily and visually see how their physicians and the practice are performing.”
The top practice types to use the physician compensation dashboard so far have been family practices, internal medicine and surgery.
To gauge physician compensation and production, practice managers select their specialty from a pull-down menu and enter information about compensation, collections, gross charges, ambulatory encounters, surgery/anesthesia cases and work RVUs (relative value units). The dashboards compare that data to national norms and produce a series of six gauges that measure physician performance in specific areas using a red, yellow and green visual score.
Similarly, to calculate how practice costs compare to those of other practices nationwide, practice managers enter a few variables detailing accounts receivable, medical revenue, support staff and operating costs per physician.
The largest number of visitors to the practice cost dashboard site have been family practices, followed by multi-specialty practices and ortholaryngology practices.
“Smaller and mid-sized medical groups will benefit from an efficient and user friendly way to gauge their physician and practice performance so they can focus their energy towards acting on what they’ve learned,” said Mick Kasher, MGMA’s director of survey operations. “Our members already rely on MGMA’s benchmarking data and the ValuSource platform enables them to use the data even more quickly and easily.”