Successfully managing a practice can present challenges in terms of setting appropriate prices, identifying bad debt, monitoring employee efficiency and more. Here’s a look at the answers to a few frequently asked financial questions to help guide your practice’s financial health.

FAQ 1: What is the common practice for establishing “charges”?

While it is up to each individual practice to determine how it chooses prices, a frequently used approach is to set charges at 200 to 400 percent of Medicare reimbursement, with the low end of this range for office visits and the high end for surgeries. Outside of that, the main “rule of thumb” is to set charges higher than the highest commercial reimbursement. If your practice chooses to offer discounts for upfront payment, a 30 percent rate is common.

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Almost every industry article written today about revenue cycle focuses on how to streamline and improve the process. Although there are a lot of ways to streamline a practice’s revenue cycle, in my practice experience, I found that consistently implementing three key activities can help enhance staff workflow, reduce claim denials, and ultimately improve a practice’s bottom line.

The first of these activities is verifying insurance. While this may seem like a self-evident step, many practices neglect to perform this critical task—and for understandable reasons. Many practices simply don’t have the staff resources for what too often is still a manual chore. If they do perform it, practices often wait until the patient is standing at the front desk.

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