Blogs
A Study of The Importance of KPIs
In running our private practice, Jill and I did a lot of research regarding what KPIs we should monitor. A quick look on Google will tell you to look at all the revenue-end items that a good accountant or EMR will track for you (maintain a strong budget – minimize expenses / maximize net revenue, days in AR, denial rates, etc.). We tracked those items and kept them in control to the best of our ability, but found we were still struggling to maintain growth and even struggling at times to make payroll. What, then, we asked, were we missing?
Over the next few years, we learned we were missing a lot of KPIs that went far above and beyond anything our accountant could do for us. By time we pulled all the pieces together and properly implemented the tracking and interpretation of those KPIs,
We turned our practice into a thriving success that was netting over five or six hundred thousand dollars per year.
You’ve almost certainly looked through the site by now, so you know most of those KPIs are spelled out here. You’re also aware that we will interpret those KPIs for you and help guide you through what those KPIs are telling you to change (or NOT change as the case may be).
You may still be skeptical, though. Can the proper interpretation of these KPIs REALLY be the key you’ve been missing? Our Case Study should help answer that question, but for an outside opinion, I’ve dug into the literature on the matter. Here’s a brief summary of anecdotal and hard examples showing the importance of analyzing your clinic’s KPIs:
Anecdotally, first and foremost, a quick look online will reveal countless sites espousing the importance of tracking clinic KPIs; however, they all have something different to say about which ones to use / which ones are most important. Also, it’s not very clear on most of these sites what experience the web developer is speaking from. Have they ever implemented these KPIs themselves? If so, to what degree of success? Etc. The bottom line, however, is that there’s a lot of general agreement that if you’re not interpreting your KPIs properly, you’re in trouble.
Laura Simelä wrote a Master’s Thesis for the Tampere University of Applied Sciences in 2021 that studied the importance of establishing a strategy to guide the growth of a healthcare clinic – specifically a chain of fertility clinics. She concluded that it is important to have established metrics (KPIs) because they can provide quantitative guidance on whether or not the clinic is on the proper path towards achieving its longer-term goals.
In 2009, Tom Wadsworth, et. al., published an article in Healthcare Financial Management describing that the Cleveland Clinic tracks their KPIs on a daily basis. Since implementing this rigorous tracking program, they have substantially reduced costs and improved patient outcomes.
While you’re not likely to have time or the need to track your KPIs on a daily basis like a major hospital, it is clear from available literature that you are hurting yourself and your potential to truly succeed if you’re not tracking your KPIs at all. Don’t forget, too, that we’ll even interpret them with you. If interpreting graphs and tables makes you cross-eyed – don’t worry. We have decades of experience reading and interpreting these types of results!
