7. Seize work-from-home opportunities
Even if the practice isn’t seeing patients, there may be opportunities for some employees, such as billers and schedulers, to continue to work from home,” Morgan noted. Particularly if a practice is behind on its billing, a closure or slowdown is an ideal time to catch up. This measure will keep at least some people working — perhaps including some individuals who can be cross-trained to do other tasks — and maintain some cashflow when the practice needs it most.
Other remote-friendly jobs that often fall by the wayside when practices are busy include marketing tasks such as setting up or updating Google business pages, Healthgrades profiles, and so on, noted Morgan.
“Another thing that can be even more important, and is often overlooked, is making sure health plan directories have correct information about your practice,” she added. “These are pesky, often tedious tasks that may require repeated contact with health plans to fix things — perfect things to do when the office is not busy or closed.”
For administrators and billers, if the practice is able to keep paying these employees while partially or fully closed, it can also be an excellent time to do the sort of analysis that takes a lot of focused attention and is hard to do when busy. Some examples: a detailed comparison of payer performance, analysis of referral patterns, or a review of coding accuracy, Morgan suggested.
Although practices have varying levels of comfort in letting employees work from home, it’s not much different from working with external billing or scheduling services that have grown more popular in recent years, Morgan said.
As with many technologies, HIPAA is a leading concern, though it needn’t be, according to Morgan. “If you are on a cloud-based electronic medical record and practice management system, there’s a good chance that it’s very straightforward to set someone up to work from elsewhere and have that data be secure,” she said.
Finally, as the crisis begins to abate, practices must keep working in teams to evaluate and structure an orderly return to business as usual, gleaning best practices from colleagues whenever possible.
“I would tell practices this is not a time when anyone is competing with anyone,” said Elmouchi. “The more collaboration between practices and health systems that have larger resources, the better.”
This article was originally published on Medscape.com.