Three habits of top-performing medical groups

Habits matter. In life and in practice, they often predict outcomes, not always immediately but over time, for better or for worse. To change a result, change your habits.

A new report highlights the habits of better-performing medical practices and shows that they focus their time, effort, and resources on three key areas:

1) Investing in culture. Top practices made it a priority to build a great culture characterized by excellent team communication, staff and provider engagement and empowerment, a shared sense of purpose, and leaders who model behavior and live the group’s values.

2) Investing in strategy. Top practices had a sustained focus on strategic progress. They not only had a strategic plan and goals, but they revisited them often and made adjustments as needed to prioritize efforts and resources. They also used benchmarking data to gain insight into their performance and keep their strategy on track.

3) Investing in operations. Top practices invested in improving operations through staff training and ongoing process improvement focused on the patient experience. They also added new technology or leveraged existing technology to streamline operations, improve communication, boost patient engagement and compliance, and deliver better performance insights.

The report, Winning Strategies From Top Medial Groups, is based on data the Medical Group Management Association gathered from 2,941 medical groups. Less than one-quarter of the groups included in the data set were identified as top-performers in at least one of four categories: operations, productivity, profitability, and value.

High-performing practices were able to achieve results such as the following:

• Higher work RVUs: 8,757 work RVUs per primary care physician (for physician-owned primary care practices) or 6,707 work RVUs per primary care physician (for hospital or integrated delivery system owned primary care practices),

• Higher income after operating expenses: $489,508 per primary care physician (for physician-owned primary care practices) or $260,033 per primary care physician (for hospital or integrated delivery system owned primary care practices),

• Higher accounts receivable collection rates: 65.5 percent in the first 30 days for primary care,

• Lower patient wait times: 15 minutes for primary care (including time spent waiting in the waiting area and the exam room).