Back Office Marketing - Issuing The Medical Report

Sunday, June 9, 2002 | 0

An obvious back office marketing tip for the medical practioner: making sure that you deliver what is promised to the customer. A big part of that is timing.

Notice that I said "timing" as opposed to "speed" - timing is the critical aspect of delivering the medical report. Your customer's expectation of service is necessarily dependent on the customer's own perception of urgency tempered with an understanding of the reality of the professional practice, and the reality of order of business.

The back office operations of the successful workers' compensation medical office will have a system to identify and prioritize cases in varying degrees of need. This priority will apply to scheduling the office visit, conducting the examination, and of course, issuing the report. The last item is one that is too often lost in the processing of a case.

Most medical offices have a system to move dictation off the physician's desk and into the mail. Many offices don't have a system to prioritize that dictation, and deal with back-logs when they inevitably occur. Here are some tips:

1) There should be one person responsible for tracking the processing of reports. That person will be responsible for ensuring that cases are prioritized according to urgency, and ensuring that staff works efficiently to get the dictation done. Many times the person to perform this task is the office manager, other times it is a senior secretary. The point is that there is a single control person to manage the work-flow.

2) A system needs to be in place to identify cases that take precedence, and then mark those cases as they move through the dictation process. Color coding files and documents works well as do tracking numbers.

3) The control person needs be aware of when a back-log is occurring, and then have the authority and resources to do something about it, whether the solution is sending dictation to an outside transcription service, or bringing in temporary help. 4) In no case should any report issue later than 2 weeks post examination. If this is occurring on a routine basis then an examination of the procedures and processes involved in medical reporting needs to be seriously considered. Either an increase or change in staffing may be necessary. Warning flags need to be in place to alert the supervisor in charge that a delay is going to occur, before it does, so that something can be done about it.

Getting medical reports out on a timely basis is an essential ingredient to the successful workers' compensation professional practice. Claims persons and attorneys all talk about who is, and who isn't, getting reports out timely. Being one of the professionals in the first category is a prime example of back office marketing.

Author Lynn Hartzell is the owner of Lynn Hartzell & Associates, and specializes in marketing physicians to the workers' compensation community. She can be reached at 626-331-7027, or by e-mail at lynn_hartzell@workcompcentral.com.