FAQs

Looking at data from our therapy clinic from the mid 2010’s, we had about 190 clients who were scheduled for about 368 visits per week. We only had a 72.8% show rate. During one month, KCD Pros’ Show Rate per Client Table identified 20 clients with less than a 30% show rate through that particular month. Many of these were likely clients who left but were never removed from the schedule.

Simply by contacting these clients and removing them from the schedule would have increased productivity to 75.8%. This relatively quick and easy change alone would have increased net revenue from $7,300/mo to $8,060/mo, a $760/mo INCREASE by using just ONE KPI.

This change left MANY other clients available to be contacted to encourage them to improve their attendance as well. This would have further improved the clinic’s bottom line.

At the time, Jill and I had 100% faith in our office manager to be handling these matters; however, she was already overextended keeping everything else in line and didn’t have time to even think about KPIs, let alone act on them. Let us be your eyes on your KPIs, improve your profitability by far more than you’re spending on our services, and get your office manager back to actually managing your office!

We do all the analyses for you and provide all the graphs and tables just in case you would like them for your records. You don’t have to hire a new employee to manage all the new paperwork, or pay your staff to enter additional data into new, complicated software. We will tell you the names of clients who are problematic, we will tell you if your billing system needs to be fixed, we will work with you through turning growth trends around or speeding up your current growth. All we need is a quick and easy download from your EMR / EHR system and perhaps some additional information if you would like accurate analyses run with our Predictive Modeling Tool.

1. Understanding of your growth,
2. Improved retention of patients,
3. Improved capability to attract new patients,
4. Improved tools to not only monitor productivity and patient show rates but tools to actually improve them,
5. An understanding of the distribution of insurances seen by the clinic,
6. The ability to easily track and monitor income and expenses,
7. A tool that allows you to simulate almost any scenario in your clinic to see how changing operating parameters will affect staffing needs, expenses, net income, and other aspects of your practice,
8. And more.

1. Productivity and show rates definitely make a difference to your bottom line, and you absolutely do not want someone taking up space on your schedule if they’re not going to attend routinely.
   1. You have a set of expenses you’re paying every hour whether you’re making money during that hour or not. If someone doesn’t show for an appointment, your landlord is still going to demand rent for that hour, you’re still going to have to pay for the electricity used during that hour, and if that patient was on a salaried employee’s schedule, you’re still paying that salary during that hour. That client is costing you a bundle of money every time they cancel or do not show up.
   2. Further, if that patient is on an hourly employee’s schedule and they do not get paid for that down time, it can become a morale issue. That hourly employee doesn’t earn as much money as they would like to due to the no-shows. Low morale leads to high turnover and kills clinics.
2. As an example: let’s say you have the following scenario:
   1. You’re paying $6,500/mo for a 5 room clinic.
   2. Your electric averages $300/mo.
   3. For simplicity, you’re a therapy clinic in Florida accepting Medicaid with an average reimbursement rate of $70/hr.
   4. Assume you’re seeing this client twice per week for a total of one hour.
   5. Your therapists are salaried at an hourly equivalent of $40/hr
   6. You have an administrative employee making $18/hr (supported by 5 employees bringing in money to the clinic).
      1. You spend $500/mo on consumables (toner, paper, paper towels, soap, etc.), split among 5 therapists’ gross earnings.
         1. Altogether, you’re paying about $52.29 per hour in expenses for each room.
            1. This is $226.59 in monthly expenses to see this patient whether they attend therapy or not.
         2. If they average an 80% show rate, you will earn $242.67/month on this client and net $16.08.
         3. However, if that show rate is only slightly lower at 70%, you will only earn $212.33 on that client and LOSE $14.26 that month.
            1. Assuming your clinic sees only similar Medicaid patients, that’s a difference of over $1,000 per month in Net Earnings and means the difference between making money and losing money.
            2. The higher the reimbursement rate is per visit, the larger the difference between good show rates and bad show rates.
   7. ATTENDANCE MATTERS!!! It is IMPERATIVE that you get patients off your schedule if they do not routinely attend their appointments.
      1. Our tools help you easily track down these patients and can dramatically improve your net earnings as a result.

1. Many reasons.
   1. A “basic sense” can often be wrong. The hard numbers will always tell you the actual growth.
   2. If you’re paying to advertise online or in a local paper and your growth is slowing or going negative, this can tell you your message is failing to get through. You either need to change the messaging in your ads or seek a better platform to advertise from altogether.
   3. Particularly if your growth is going negative, it can be a signal that you need to allocate more resources to outreach efforts on social media. There may be an angry former patient spreading bad information about your clinic or there just may be more good buzz on social media about competing clinics. The growth numbers can alert you to items like this.

1. We found it is important to keep track of this distribution as a therapy clinic because particularly with Medicaid, the rules can change at a moment’s notice. In 2018 here in Florida, two of the largest Medicaid providers in the state for therapy almost completely stopped approving all therapy visits. Two of our smaller competitors went bankrupt because they were overly reliant on those insurances. As such, we recommend that anyone accepting insurance have an understanding of how “top-heavy” you are on specific insurances.

1. KCD Pros uses nothing but HIPAA compliant systems; starting with the link clients use to upload their files from our website, our computer systems we work on, and the email with which we send your results back to you. Even our Teams consultations are through a HIPAA compliant link. We have gone to great lengths to secure our systems as much as reasonably possible to prevent your data from being stolen.
2. Prior to beginning work, you must sign a Consulting Agreement. Section 8 of that agreement spells out very clearly that any data you share with us belongs to you and forbids us from sharing it.
3. If you’re looking for more than the Confidentiality section of the Consulting Agreement, we also have a Non-Disclosure Agreement we’re happy to sign with clinics to further assure them we don’t have any interest in sharing their data.

1. Yes. We include a BAA with the Consulting Agreement by default for every clinic that signs up for our services. In fact, the BAA is referenced in the Consulting Agreement itself.

1. Yes. The only items we can’t separate by location are expenses, net earnings, and gross earnings, unless you have separate bank accounts for each location.

1. Yes. We can break down most results by employee, discipline, location, insurance, or even patient. This allows the clinic to analyze their data as precisely or as broadly as they would like.
   1. Example 1: you notice in one of your tables that a patient has a 50% show rate over the past month. You can have us generate a graph of that patient’s show rate for the last couple years to see how long this terrible attendance has been a problem prior to reaching out to them. Knowledge of how long it has been an issue can help guide the conversation.
   2. Example 2: you may want to look at year to date graphs of scheduled hours for each salaried employee to make sure they are consistently and adequately scheduled with patients so you’re minimizing costs to the clinic for employee down time.

1. We have products that find patients who have not been scheduled for a specified period of time.
   1. For therapy clinics where patients are often seen weekly or more often, this period of time may be three or four weeks.
   2. For a primary care medical clinic where many patients may only come in annually for physicals, this search may go out for 52 or more weeks.
   3. Either way, we identify patients who are no longer on the schedule.
2. You can determine if this patient was purposefully discharged, accidentally dropped, or left.
   1. If accidentally dropped, you can obviously get them back into the schedule.
   2. If they left, it’s important to reach out to them and make sure they didn’t leave angry. If they’re angry, try to resolve the issue with them. You may be able to win them back, or at least may be able to impress them enough to avoid having them leave a bad review online or bad-mouth your clinic on social media.
      1. The resulting decrease in negative reviews will make your clinic more attractive to potential new patients looking for a clinic.

1. In part, we minimize negative reviews (see “How can you help me retain patients?” above).
2. Also, we have a tool that allows you to reach out and survey patients after a certain number of visits.
   1. This is a great way to catch unsatisfied patients before they leave or go onto social media to post negative reviews.
   2. It can also serve to encourage happy patients to not only tell you what they like about your clinic, but to take that positive message out to social media.
   3. When we owned our clinic, we found that most of our clients came to us due to our great online reputation.
      1. Almost nobody responded to our online ads or ads in the local papers.
         1. They preferred a clinic they could trust over one with the splashiest advertisements.
      2. The combination of a lack of negativity and presence of positive feedback on social media makes a huge difference in the growth of healthcare clinics

1. Many things. To list just a few, it will:
   1. estimate the change in staffing needs, expenses, and earnings (gross and net) if you start seeing patients under a new insurance carrier with a specified reimbursement rate;
   2. estimate the change in expenses and earnings if you switch some or all of your salaried employees to hourly (or vice-versa);
   3. estimate the staffing needs and changes to your expenses and earnings if you change the number of visits for one, some, or all insurances by a specified percent or a specified number of visits (higher or lower);
      1. you can even evaluate the impact of discontinuing serving a specific insurance you no longer wish to deal with;
   4. evaluate the change in staffing needs, expenses, and earnings if the clinic-wide productivity is increased or decreased;
   5. evaluate complex scenarios such as adding a new facility at a specified rent; add an admin person to that facility; add a healthcare person to that facility at a specified number of hours per week; move hours from a wait list to scheduled clients to represent the new facility’s caseload; see the overall impact on expenses, payroll, and earnings that all these changes create.