How To Simplify Your Practice’s Finances

It’s no secret that one of the biggest burdens in opening your own private healthcare practice is to keep track of your finances.

Money goes out, money comes in, but it’s important to keep tabs on it.

After all, this is how you know where your practice stands financially, and how you can grow your practice and keep your staff – and you – paid.

The failure to maintain a clear financial picture of a practice is one of the singular most common reasons a private healthcare practice fails.

Symbiosis can help.

The Problem: Specialization

You’re a healthcare professional.

You’ve spent years, maybe close to a decade, studying and mastering your particular field of medicine.

So how reasonable is it to expect you to also be an expert in financial statements, bookkeeping, or accounting?

Especially when you’re first starting out?

Not very.

It’s this problem that leads so many healthcare providers to take corporate healthcare jobs, even if what they’ve always wanted is to open their own private practice.

After all, most healthcare professionals don’t want to deal with it and just want it taken care of.

That’s why most leading practice management software out there includes an element of RCM – revenue cycle management.

The problem, however, is that most of the options for practice management software are neither very complete nor intuitive as far as RCM is concerned.

To make matters worse, practice management software doesn’t actually take care of the practice’s finances.

We get a lot of complaints about this from folks when they first approach us.

To better understand this, let’s look at it from two different perspectives – a new practice, and a growing practice.

Revenue Cycle Management For New Medical Practices

For the purposes of this article, a new practice is a practice that is either not yet in operation, or it has just begun operating.

And in this case, it’s important to know when you’ve reached the break even point.

In other words, the point at which you’ve gotten back everything you’ve invested into starting your practice.

Once you’ve reached your break even point, you start to learn how viable your practice actually is.

Revenue Cycle Management For Growing Medical Practices

A growing medical practice is a practice that has been in operation for at least a year.

At this point, most practices have reached their break even point.

If you haven’t done so after a year, it’s time to consider how viable your practice actually is.

But if you have reached the break even point, you can’t use that as a benchmark for your practice’s finances anymore.

Instead, it’s time to use profit and loss.

How Symbiosis Simplifies Your Practice’s Finances

When you start your own private medical practice with Symbiosis, you’re getting a practice in a box, so to speak.

By making use of the existing infrastructure we have for you to run your practice, you can reduce your startup cost by 60-70%.

From there, we help with both RCM and finance by helping you make a financial plan and set realistic targets on when you’ll break even.

Because you’re able to lower your startup cost so much, and because you’re able to leverage proven effective systems, you can reach your break even point more than twice as quickly as otherwise.

We’ve seen this happen with many of our partner practices.

Once you’ve started your operations, you’ll be able to make use of Symbiosis’ proprietary RCM audit system.

This combines information from all systems like payments (including co-pays, cash payments, HSA, etc) and insurance EOBs, and makes sure nothing falls through the cracks.

We run this audit every week for you.

This way, any missed co-pays, missed claims, claims that are delayed/underpaid etc are caught quickly and invoiced/followed up on as necessary.

Lastly, we close the loop to make sure insurance payments are deposited into your bank account.

This way, we catch any lost checks and delayed payments.

At the end of the day, the audit ensures that each session of the patient account balances out.

This is an arduous and labor intensive task of reconciling these different systems, but with Symbiosis, it’s completely automated.

You’ll get a neat little dashboard which lays these out in an easy to read form.

Contact Symbiosis Today

Are you considering starting your own healthcare practice?

Or have you been in practice for a while, but haven’t managed to reach your break even point yet?

If so, Symbiosis can help.

You’ll get the peace of mind in knowing you have a team of healthcare practice management professionals in your corner to guide you through every step of the way.

Reach out to contact us here at Symbiosis today.