Know Your Numbers – How and Why Tracking Your Productivity Matters

Why Productivity Data Matters

You may have realized by now that you need to know your value as a provider, and that you cannot rely solely on employer-provided end-of-month reports that track your RVUs, charges dropped or, if you’re lucky, revenue generated for the practice.

Knowing your numbers is essential in clinical practice! It is vital for everything from negotiating your next raise to increasing the number of providers supporting your growing panel of patients.

If you’re curious (and maybe a little skeptical) about how truly having a handle on your numbers can change your understanding of your objective value, you’re in the right place!

Here are 4 reasons to get to know your numbers ASAP!

01. You Take Back Control of Tracking The Numbers

With many variables beyond your control, it’s important that you take responsibility for tracking your own data. No one cares about your life, work-life balance, schedule and productivity as much as you do, so please don’t settle for the reports generated automatically (and often inaccurately) on your behalf.

When you track the pertinent data for your billing codes or revenue generated, you will no longer need to rely on your admin team to tell you the value you are adding to the practice. It takes you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat of your own productivity and the value you add.

02. You’ll Spot Trends Sooner

You can be ready if you see numbers dip to make adjustments. You can also be proactive about getting more providers on your team, building boundaries, and keeping to a reasonable schedule when you are trending towards doing more and more.

03. Data Arms You With Information

At some point someone is going to want to know what value you are adding to that practice. The administrators will need to know what their return on investment (ROI) is for you and will want to see what kind of revenue you’re generating.

When you have a file of your trends, productivity, efficiency and the value you add to the organization, you’re ready to answer the question “what value do you add to this practice?”.

04. When You Know the Data, You Can Apply the Data

Knowing your numbers holds the administrative team accountable for accurate tracking.

Knowledge is power and applied knowledge, specifically knowing those numbers and using them to your advantage, is power you can take to the bank in the form of a new paycheck, better schedule, or expanded team.

What to Track

Now that we’ve covered why tracking productivity matters, let’s dive into what you should be tracking to prove your value.

You should have two focuses when it comes to your own personal data and productivity:

• Accurately tracking your specific revenue, visits, RVUs and knowing your numbers.
• Understanding trends, where you fall on the benchmarks, and being able to translate those numbers into the value you provide to the practice.

Here are a few different strategies to help you calculate your objective value-add depending on your clinical setting. As you begin to deploy these strategies, please remember that we are here to take care of patients and don’t want to become so focused on the numbers that we forsake practicing evidence-based medicine and sacrifice the quality of our connection with our patients.

Tracking for your Outpatient Practices:

When working in an outpatient setting, tracking your numbers on a daily or weekly basis is a great place to start.

First, identify what your practice’s data love language is. Figure out what your practice values. Is it RVUs, number of visits, new consults, patient access, wait time or straight dollars and revenue?

Keying in on what they value means that you will identify what is most important to track. Once you’ve identified their favorite data point(s), you can track that.

Ideas of what to track:

• Money – RVUs, revenue
• Patient access – number of visits, consults, new patients, visits outside traditional office hours
• Time – shifts, hours worked or potentially patients seen

Start small with tracking the number of visits per day. Then add what the billing codes are for those visits.

Then, create a system to track those on an ongoing basis. Start daily and then you can add for the week and track on a monthly rotation. Keep in mind that the longer you track and the more consistent you are with your data-gathering the more data you have at your disposal.

If you are tracking CPT codes you’ll need to convert to RVUs and then extrapolate to revenue. There are some online calculators that you can use to make that conversion.

Using the CMS.gov website you can search the codes you are using to bill for each visit and these will generate a specific number of RVUs for Medicare.

Calculate from billing code to RVUs and RVUs to revenue (dollars).

Once you build a spreadsheet or another system to track these numbers, it doesn’t take much effort.

Surgical Practices

Working in surgical practices includes a lot of duties that are considered non-revenue generating. This category includes things like preop H&Ps, preoperative medical clearances, postoperative visits, and any inpatient care that happens in the global period.

In this setting, consider tracking the time that is freed up for an operating surgeon due to the fact that you are performing these non-revenue generating tasks.

Operating Room

When it comes to first assisting there are also things that you can do to track your value, the cases you scrub, and even monitor the OR times.

Keeping track of the cases that you do on any given day in the OR will help you to figure out what your revenue numbers look like.

Alternatively, if you can generate data on operative times and show that the team is more efficient and spend less time under anesthesia or take up less time consistently for procedures with you in the OR, you can prove your value add using that data.

Inpatient Service

For those primarily seeing patients in an inpatient service, you can track the number of patients, whether they were consults or follow ups, the amount of discharges, and their acuity.

You can get down in the weeds or track with more broad strokes.

Inpatient data will be inherently less predictable and more erratic because there is no set schedule, but that means that tracking matters in this situation all the more.

What To Do If You Don’t Have Access to the Data

There are a lot of organizations where there is either a lack of transparency about numbers or a lack of communication. Here are three things to try if you don’t have access to a clear or accurate report for your volumes.

• Request a billing audit of recent charts, charges and your volumes. Typically this involves sitting down with a biller or coder who will review a sampling of recent charts. This can help you to identify if you are over, under, or accurately billing for visits and find areas for improvement.
• Track your visit volumes. You can take a representative week or month and extrapolate from that to see what your numbers look like on an annual basis.
• Run a report. Most EMRs will have an ability to generate a report, filtering for certain criteria like performing provider, for charges dropped within a certain time period. You can use this if you’re looking back several months or all year and you haven’t been tracking but want to get a handle on your data.

Applying the Data

Tracking your productivity isn’t the most exciting topic ever but it’s necessary.

It’s information that you can use to land a raise, grow your team, understand how to add more value or be more efficient in your template for seeing patients.

This knowledge, specifically when you apply it strategically in your practice, is incredibly powerful. Do not sleep on this opportunity to consistently track the value you are adding to your practice!
 

Tracy Bingaman is a dynamic national and international speaker who helps clinicians land the biggest raises of their careers, scale their income, and achieve financial independence. From the depths of healthcare burnout, Tracy now has a job she loves with abundant time, energy, and money. As a thought leader on burnout, boundaries, and negotiation, she hosts the popular podcast The PA Is In, which recently celebrated 100,000 downloads. Tracy’s mission is to help clinicians redefine success in their lives and careers.