A Fiscal Check-Up

Reviewing Key Financial Data Each Month Is Critical for a Financially Healthy Practice. By Judy Capko and Rebecca Anwar, PhD. Practicing medicine in the 1990s is a complicated matter. Government mandates, third-party payer requirements, and managed care competition are having a dramatic economic impact on private practice.. To thrive in this environment, physicians must look at the practice as a business, both in terms of efficiency and financial performance. For the ledger sheet-shy physician, the most painless way to do this is to have your office manager or administrator run monthly "key indicator" reports that measure such criteria as production and profit and loss.. Then, implement the "two-hour strategy"— a monthly meeting where physician partners and the office manager review these reports, communicate changes, discuss recommendations, and make decisions. Planning is the key element to a successful two-hour strategy meeting. Your manager must have the time to prepare the necessary reports, agenda, and data. When examining key indicators, always compare them to the prior month and the same month of the previous year. This will help you assess trends in your practice.. Begin by examining your prac-tice’s productivity reports. (Any basic practice management system will automatically compile this data.) Specifically, these reports list the ...

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