One vital component for your holistic practice’s success is maintaining HIPAA compliance because it protects patient information, secures your operations, and prevents the chance of a breach that can greatly impact your practice’s reputation. We’ve compiled this comprehensive HIPAA cheat sheet to help you further understand this important legislation and how it pertains to your holistic practice.
History of HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was signed into law on August 21, 1996. This vital piece of legislation created national standards to protect sensitive information regarding patient health from being shared or disclosed without the patient’s knowledge or consent. Basically, HIPAA prevents personal health information (PHI) from being discussed without the patient’s awareness and fortifies a patient’s privacy.
In addition to securing patient privacy and health information, HIPAA legislation aimed to prevent fraud and waste while also promoting medical saving opportunities across the healthcare industry as a whole. For example, certain tax breaks were established in this Act.
In 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) was passed, which establishes technological compliance requirements in alignment with HIPAA practices. This Act encourages the implementation of electronic health records to secure patient information and features the Breach Notification Rule stating that breaches exceeding 500 individual records must be reported to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
The latest legislation related to HIPAA was the Final Omnibus Rule, approved in 2013. The purpose of this Rule is primarily to refine HIPAA definitions and include compliance requirements for new pieces of technology, such as mobile devices.
Why Is HIPAA Important for Your Holistic Practice?
Besides protecting your patients’ information and safeguarding their privacy, HIPAA provides some administrative benefits to your holistic practice. Encouraging the transition from paper to electronic health records streamlines your practice and allows for more collaboration with other providers pertinent to your patients. Plus, all HIPAA-covered entities must utilize the same set of codes, so communication from one practice to another organization is further streamlined for efficiency.
Your HIPAA Cheat Sheet
Let’s break down some of the most essential components of HIPAA for your holistic practice’s reference:
PHI and ePHI
Personal health information, known as PHI, can take on a variety of forms that are all relevant to following HIPAA compliance. Here are the 18 types of information that are considered protected health information (PHI) under HIPAA:
- Name
- Address (Including any information more localized than state)
- Any dates (except years) related to the individual, including birthdays, date of death, date of admission/discharge, etc.
- Telephone Number
- Fax Number
- Email address
- Social Security number
- Medical record number
- Health plan beneficiary number
- Account number
- Certificate/license number
- Vehicle identifiers, serial numbers, license plate numbers
- Device identifiers/serial numbers
- Web URLs
- IP address
- Biometric identifiers such as fingerprints or voiceprints
- Full-face photos
- Any other unique identifying numbers, characteristics, or codes
ePHI, or electronic personal health information, simply refers to PHI that is transferred, accessed, or stored electronically. The same protections apply across PHI and ePHI.
Who Needs To Follow HIPAA Compliance?
Since PHI can be present in a variety of fields and formats, there are multiple types of individuals and organizations who must comply with HIPAA guidelines as they come across it, including:
- Healthcare providers: This is obvious, but it’s worth noting—healthcare professionals can have access to a plethora of patient information, so it’s crucial that they maintain HIPAA confidentiality when handling this sensitive data
- Health plans: Whether privately run or publicly operated programs like Medicare, health insurance-related agencies and their staff must adhere to HIPAA regulations
- Healthcare clearinghouses: These companies act as a kind of go-between for processing sensitive information and still need to maintain HIPAA standards
- Business associates: This covers the overarching third-party vendors or other businesses who interact with PHI for a variety of reasons
The ultimate aim of HIPAA legislation is to protect sensitive patient information across all platforms, so it’s vital that all parties follow HIPAA regulations when applicable.
Privacy Rule
The Privacy Rule essentially dictates that sensitive information is only used or disclosed with appropriate safeguards in place. It also stipulates that patients have rights to access their personal health information, obtain a copy of their records, authorize the communication of their records, and more.
The Privacy Rule is located at 45 CFR Part 160 and Subparts A and E of Part 164
Security Rule
Proposed in 1998 by the Department of Health and Human Services, and later ratified in 2003, the Security Rule sought to improve the security of a person’s health information that is shared between authorized parties, such as healthcare providers, health plans, and other pertinent organizations.
The Security Rule is located at 45 CFR Part 160 and Subparts A and C of Part 164.
Breach Notification Rule
The Breach Notification Rule was officially adopted in September 2009 and stipulates that any breach of electronic personal health information exceeding 500 individual records must be reported to the OCR and that each individual must be alerted to the breach, as well.
A breach is defined in HIPAA section 164.402 as:
“The acquisition, access, use, or disclosure of protected health information in a manner not permitted which compromises the security or privacy of the protected health information.”
When a breach occurs, the business or organization affected must determine the severity by considering what type of information was involved, who potentially saw this information, and evaluate the risk of the incident. From there, the organization can proceed with either patient notification—if the incident qualifies as a breach—or further risk mitigation.
There are also three exclusions to what counts as a breach:
- If the exposure was unintentional and is not expected to be a repeated offense
- If it was an accidental exposure from one HIPAA-certified person to another HIPAA-certified person
- If the covered entity—or organization—has reason to believe the unauthorized person wouldn’t be able to retain details of the personal information
Omnibus Rule
The Omnibus Rule is the latest piece of legislation to be associated with HIPAA. Taking effect in 2013, this Rule updates some definitions contained within the original act and expands the liability of businesses for not being HIPAA compliant. It also further protects patient information since it requires businesses to adhere to the Privacy and Security Rules which strengthen security measures when handling PHI and ePHI.
Maintain HIPAA Compliance with HBS
The experts here at Holistic Billing Services are HIPAA certified to handle your patients’ personal health information while streamlining your overall revenue cycle with excellent medical billing and coding processing. Your success is our success, and we offer a range of services to partner with your holistic practice including medical billing, consultation services, and more!
Our expertise is rooted in professional, technical, and global billing for hospital and stand-alone holistic care practices. To learn more about how outsourced medical billing with Holistic Billing Services can empower your practice, contact us today. We’ll work with you to build a customized solution that meets the specific needs of your practice and allows you to get back to treating patients.
Referrals are a fantastic method for gaining new patients at your massage therapy practice, but you can’t rely solely on them as a sustainable marketing strategy. Part of your future growth and success depends upon having a comprehensive advertising approach that can target a few different audiences across a variety of platforms. Keep reading to learn more about leveraging marketing to sustain a successful massage therapy practice!
Why Are Marketing and Advertising Important Avenues of Growth For Your Massage Therapy Practice?
Running a successful massage therapy practice means you’re marketing and advertising your services to the community you serve. After all, marketing and advertising are how you attract new customers, outline the services you provide and maintain relevance in your target market. Without utilizing strategies that promote your massage therapy practice, what are the odds of someone stumbling across it? Word of mouth is just one component of a comprehensive marketing strategy—there are several other avenues to take advantage of!
Marketing your massage therapy practice in the community you serve, explaining who you are and what your story is, and providing blurbs of meaningful content are all great manners to get noticed and attract your most loyal patients. After all, your massage therapy practice can’t grow if you don’t show it off!
How Much Should You Budget For Massage Therapy Advertising?
A good rule of thumb is to invest approximately 5% of your gross revenue on marketing activities if you want to maintain the size of your massage therapy practice. For example, if you collect $10,000 per month you should be budget around $500 per month on marketing and advertising tactics.
On the other hand, if you’re ramping up to grow your massage practice, it’s recommended that you spend between 7% and 15% of your gross revenue on marketing—depending on your goals and available budget for growth. It’s also understandable if your marketing budget changes a little bit over time; it should be somewhat flexible to account for the status and potential growth of your massage therapy practice.
What Is A Customer’s Lifetime Value?
As the name suggests, a customer’s lifetime value (CLV) is a prediction of the total financial worth of a patient to your massage therapy practice. CLV can be applied to any industry, but it’s incredibly practical to calculate it for the healthcare and service fields.
A Customer’s Lifetime Value can be measured in the following way:
Average Annual Value x Relationship Years + Patient Referral Value
= Customer Lifetime Value
First, we determine how much the average patient generates per year. For example, if you have a patient who visits your massage therapy practice once per month and each visit costs $100, then the total revenue generated is $1200. Factor in a 20% profit margin and the Average Annual Value of a massage therapy patient is $240.
Let’s say this patient continues going to your massage therapy practice for 10 years before moving to another state:
AAV ($240) x Relationship (10 years) = $2,400.
Patient Referral Value is the amount of additional revenue the original patient brings into your massage therapy practice by spreading the word about your services. If a patient refers two additional clients to your practice, and the total Average Annual Value for those patients combined is $480—which is $4,800 over 10 years—then the original patient’s official lifetime value is $7,200.
How Does CLV Impact Your Holistic Practice?
The lifetime value of a patient is equated to the anticipated total amount they’ll spend at your massage therapy practice. Knowing this figure for each of your patients is essential for planning your financial future and determining how much to invest in acquiring new patients or retaining current ones. Overall, CLV is directly connected to the profit level attached to each customer relationship; if you estimate a patient’s CLV to be $500, you wouldn’t want to spend more than that number to maintain the relationship since it wouldn’t be profitable to your massage therapy practice.
Once you start consistently measuring customer lifetime value, you can begin to implement specific strategies around pricing, sales, advertising, and patient retention with the goal of reducing costs and boosting profit. After all, when you know what to financially expect from a typical patient over the course of their relationship with your massage therapy practice, you can make educated spending decisions to ensure you maximize profitability and continue to attract the right types of customers.
5 Massage Therapy Marketing Ideas
When outlining an advertising plan for your massage therapy, keep these tips in mind:
Network with the Health Practitioners in Your Area
Whether you’re an experienced massage therapist or new to the industry—or your community—a great way to gain reliable patient referrals is through the doctors, naturopathic doctors, chiropractors, physiotherapists, and other holistic practitioners in your area. These providers work with clients who might desire a holistic approach to take care of their wellbeing, in addition to medical services. Plus, patients who are referred to you in this manner have a high probability of following through and becoming long-term, paying clients.
Invest in the Patient Experience
Patient experience entails every instance of connection between your patients and your massage therapy practice’s brand, including visits to your practice, phone calls to your front desk, engagement with your online presence, and even their exposure to advertising and social media. Optimizing the patient experience is a practice-wide effort that’s a process of monitoring, listening, and incorporating feedback from patients that add up to a continuous improvement of your massage therapy practice.
Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media is ever more essential for patient communication and for potential patients to learn more about your massage therapy practice. Your overall online presence will affect the opinion a potential patient has of your brand moving forward, so be sure to take social media accounts, mentions, and responses into your customer experience strategy.
Start a Loyalty Program
A loyalty program incentivizes patients to continue visiting your massage therapy practice by offering discounts or benefits in return; it might take the form of a punch card or a points system that patients acquire with each visit. Although it’s not intended to be the sole method of retaining patients, a loyalty program can yield great results when it’s well done and implemented smoothly.
Facilitate Word of Mouth Marketing
Word of mouth marketing is a cornerstone of any massage therapy practice’s advertising plan. Potential clients who hear wonderful things about your practice from current patients are more likely to trust those reviews than almost any web presence or standalone marketing plan. Social media and other online review sites are excellent avenues to encourage your patients to talk about your massage therapy practice.
Massage Therapy Advertising Examples
- Massage Envy’s website boasts a holiday incentive program that promotes giving the gift of self-care to a loved one—a form of word of mouth marketing—yet treats the buyer with a $20 gift card in return. Plus, their site includes headers for the services offered—massage, stretch, and facials—so clients can easily navigate to what they’re looking for.
- Massage Studio, a local practice in Tampa, Florida, utilizes imagery to convey the goal of relaxation at their practice. Headers make it easy for clients to make appointments and a featured Etiquette page lets hesitant clients know what to expect, which helps break down trepidation about getting a massage. Promoting pertinent information on the homepage helps the site’s visitors feel that the practice is trustworthy, which benefits the brand’s image.
- CityTouch Massage Therapy, based in New York City, appeals to clients by proclaiming they now accept insurance. This can help make massage therapy more accessible to potential patients who might not explore massage options if not covered by their insurance plan.
Holistic Billing Services Supports Your Massage Therapy Practice’s Growth!
With these tips for marketing your massage therapy practice, we’re sure you’ll see sustainable growth! You can’t expand the community you serve unless your audience knows about how great your massage therapy services are—and part of ensuring the success of your practice entails having a streamlined medical billing strategy that minimizes errors while maximizing profits.
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to help grow your massage therapy practice in a variety of ways, including medical billing and coding, and facilitate the growth of your practice. Trusted since 1999, we’re here to help you put more time and attention back into your day of delivering quality care to patients.
Contact us today and let us help your massage therapy practice reach its potential!
When evaluating the success of your holistic practice, where do you start? It’s too short-sighted to worry only about keeping the lights on, but planning for the future on a broad, subjective scale can feel intimidating or overwhelming. That’s where tracking top healthcare KPIs can benefit your holistic practice. Healthcare KPI tracking can provide a tangible record of your operations across a variety of categories and aspects.
What Are Healthcare KPIs?
KPIs, also known as Key Performance Indicators, are metrics that can objectively measure various components of your holistic practice over time so you and your team can reflect on how the practice is performing and make educated decisions for the future. There are dozens of potential healthcare KPIs to track at your holistic practice, but try not to feel overwhelmed by the amount of data you’ll be collecting—each facet of your practice can be analyzed and optimized, but it doesn’t have to happen all at once. To start, select a few of the most important metrics that need immediate attention, then expand to measure other aspects of your operations.
Common Healthcare KPI Examples
As mentioned above, there are a variety of healthcare KPIs track that may or may not apply to your particular holistic practice, with categories including:
- Operations: These metrics focus on how efficient and effective your practice is at delivering care
- Finance: KPIs related to the financial performance of your practice measure the top and bottom line of your practice—your cost of operations and how much is returned
- Internal: Metrics relating to your internal operations track staff performance and administrative efficiency
- Public health: These KPIs reveal how your practice is impacting your community, whether in terms of child immunization doses, vaccine clinics, or educational seminar attendance numbers
- Emergency: In an emergency healthcare environment, it’s crucial to monitor how effectively your patients are receiving care, average wait time, patient mortality rate, and more
- Care quality: By keeping tabs on how many providers you have in relation to the number of patients you serve, patient satisfaction survey results, and more, you can evaluate how well your practice is serving your community
Why Are Healthcare KPIs Important for Your Holistic Practice?
It takes a lot of time, energy, and resources to operate an efficient and effective holistic practice. How can you be sure you’re succeeding in every aspect of your practice? Key performance indicators are your best bet to gain a comprehensive insight into your operations, finances, public perception, and more. These figures can help you understand the current status of your practice, observe historical trends, and make informed decisions regarding how to improve or further grow your practice.
The Best Healthcare KPIs and Metrics to Track For Your Holistic Practice Management
There are numerous key performance indicators you should consider tracking when evaluating the performance of your holistic practice; be sure to consider the specificity of your holistic practice, community, and overall operations when outlining which healthcare KPIs to monitor. The following breakdown is a foundational place to start and is by no means a comprehensive list of potential metrics to keep track of:
Patient Experience Metrics
The goal of your practice is to deliver quality care to your patients; after all, your practice can’t sustain itself without them! When measuring patient experience metrics, consider the following factors:
- Patient satisfaction: Utilizing patient satisfaction surveys can tremendously benefit your holistic patient care because you can solicit feedback or points of improvement from the very people you’re trying to please: your patients. Plus, by implementing a method of communication regarding their perception of your practice, you demonstrate how important they are to your success. When you establish an objective manner of measuring subjective components of your practice, such as ease of scheduling follow-ups or how comfortable the waiting room is, you can gain valuable insight into your practice’s performance.
- Referral mix: This healthcare KPI indicates what type of patients your holistic practice is treating and who referred them to your practice. Tracking this metric helps you understand which patients are finding you from word-of-mouth recommendations, which in turn affirms the success of your holistic practice’s mission of delivering quality care.
- No-show patients: It happens. Patients forget appointments or simply ghost your practice and never return your calls or attempts to reschedule. However, when this becomes a pattern at your holistic practice, do your best to get ahead of it and monitor these behaviors. If you find that a significant number of your monthly appointments are no-shows, it might be time to implement a no-show policy to discourage that!
Staff Performance Metrics
Your team is a reflection of your practice and keeps your practice running smoothly for your patients; when gaining insight into your staff performance, consider the following:
- Staff-to-Patient Ratio: Do you have dozens of weekly appointments for only a handful of providers at your practice, resulting in faster burnout or longer patient wait times? It’s crucial to consider how much time and attention your providers can give to patients for top quality care. If they’re stretched too thin, it’ll catch up to your practice sooner or later and you’ll have to hire additional staff to manage.
- Trainings and Certifications: When working in healthcare, it’s absolutely essential that your staff is HIPAA certified and follows best practices when handling patient information; it’s also beneficial that each member of your team have certifications in their pertinent areas of service.
- Mistake Events: This self-explanatory metric simply refers to the frequency and type of mistake or error made, whether administrative, related to medical billing, patient confidentiality, or another type of mistake. This metric can provide insight and help you determine the best course of action to correct the problem, preventing it from becoming an internal pattern.
Medical Billing Metrics
How well do you know the details of your holistic practice’s finances? If you’re only measuring the short-term successes of paying your monthly bills, there’s a lot you’re missing! Dig into the many facets of your financial performance and learn which areas to improve moving forward, including:
- Days in Accounts Receivable (A/R): This metric reveals how many payments remain outstanding at your holistic practice, either due to insurance reimbursement processing delays or out-of-pocket services. Ideally, the average time a bill spends in A/R should be about 30-40 days—the less time spent waiting for payment, the better. By tracking this metric, you can identify friction points along the payment cycle, such as billing and coding errors or not following up on claims, and redirect your efforts to streamline this process.
- Net Collection Ratio: One key financial metric to monitor is the net collection ratio, which calculates how much potential revenue your practice nets after insurance adjustments are made. While the exact figure will fluctuate from specialty to specialty, aim for collecting about 95% of potential revenue for services, whether by patient payers or submitting clean claims. If this healthcare KPI falls consistently dips below 90% then that tells you something needs to be addressed in your revenue cycle.
- New Patient Ratio: You can probably guess which figure this metric tracks; part of overseeing the financial health of your holistic practice is to sustain and grow your practice, which means a certain percentage of your patients are first-time visitors. When monitored over time, this healthcare KPI can help you determine if your holistic practice offers a desired balance of services for the price. Like with many other metrics, the exact figure to aim for can change from specialty to specialty; however, for general wellness practices, new patients can make up about 25% of visits, while specialty care practices could see up to 50% new patients each month.
Transform Your Medical Billing with Holistic Billing Services
By creating a monthly summary sheet to track healthcare KPIs, you can begin to identify and resolve problem areas in your holistic practice that are holding back growth and revenue.
Our experts here at Holistic Billing Services believe our success is your success. From handling medical billing and coding to offering consulting services and much more, our team is dedicated to making it feel like we’re in-house. With a focus on holistic practices, insurance background, and proven consultants, our team can effectively ensure the financial success of clients, allowing your medical practice to focus on what it does best: treat patients.
Our expertise is rooted in professional, technical, and global billing for hospital and stand-alone holistic care practices. To learn more about how outsourced medical billing with Holistic Billing Services can empower your practice, contact us today. We’ll work with you to build a customized solution that meets the specific needs of your practice and allows you to get back to treating patients.
How well do you know how your patients experience your holistic practice? Of course, you’re providing the best care for them, but are there metaphorical pain points that you might not know about? By utilizing patient satisfaction surveys, you can open this conversation up between your patients and your holistic practice, resulting in stronger dialogue and better rapport to serve your community even better.
Charting the course of patient feedback can seem daunting or maybe even awkward, but patient satisfaction is obviously one of your holistic practice’s top priorities—it ensures the short- and long-term success of your practice! Just as your practice is one of the most important resources available to your patients, your patients can be one of your practice’s most important resources, too.
Why Is Patient Feedback Important?
Ultimately, the only way to keep your patients coming back to your holistic practice is to make sure they’re satisfied with the experience they receive from you. That experience is about far more than just the patient-provider relationship and the effectiveness of a given course of care; it includes patients’ perception of your office, their interactions with your staff, and dozens of other factors ranging from scheduling availability to the reading materials in your waiting room.
Don’t assume that just because your patients aren’t complaining, they’re happy. The only way to truly know how satisfied your patients are is to ask them directly and often. The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) has found that over 80% of practices regularly use patient satisfaction surveys to measure, evaluate, and improve their operations. If you neglect to use patient satisfaction surveys, you’re missing out on a valuable tool that can help you gain insight from your patients and improve your practice’s performance.
The knowledge of your patient’s opinions of their experience in your office is invaluable. It is, in many ways, just as important to the success of the practice as a correct treatment plan is to manage a chronic condition. When used properly, the patient satisfaction survey can truly serve as a diagnostic tool for the practice because patients have the opportunity to indicate points of friction or reveal blind spots of inefficiency in your holistic practice that you wouldn’t otherwise be aware of!
How To Request Patient Reviews
Asking your patients for reviews—whether on a public platform like Google or via anonymous feedback on an internal survey—doesn’t have to be awkward or feel like an imposition for either party. When you initiate the conversation about patient satisfaction, consider the following:
Inquire About Their Experience With Your Practice
For 87% of physicians, interacting with and helping patients is the most gratifying part of their profession; requesting patient reviews can provide you with real-time feedback that can strengthen your patient relationships and help you provide better care.
At the end of the patient’s visit to your holistic practice, try asking questions like “Were you able to easily schedule your appointment today?” or “Have I addressed all of your concerns?” If the feedback is positive, ask them to share their experience with others by writing a review. Take note of any constructive criticism and use it to improve the patient experience at your practice.
When one patient provides a suggestion for improvement, it’s likely to be helpful to a majority of your patients! For example, if a patient says it would be helpful for the scheduling system to have more filters to narrow down the best appointment time, that might be a small annoyance easily solved which benefits all of your patients.
Remind Yourself That Writing Reviews Is Commonplace
You might feel a little awkward about asking your patients to review your practice, but it’s probably no big deal to them. When consumers are asked to leave a review, 72% follow through and do so. Your patients are likely already reviewing for other businesses in the community, so writing one for your holistic practice won’t be a hassle at all. To get a feel for the process yourself, try writing a few reviews for businesses you frequent to understand the simplicity of the process so you can assure other patients that it isn’t difficult to navigate.
When you’re confident about the quality of holistic medicine you’re providing, asking patients to review your practice shouldn’t be too nerve-wracking. After all, patients who are asked for feedback are 2.3 times more likely to proactively submit an online review. People—including potential clients doing research on the holistic practices in your area—put a lot of weight in online reviews, so as long as you’re confident in the care you’re providing, don’t second guess yourself about requesting their honest feedback.
Address It All
The most important areas to cover with your survey are the ‘key three’: quality, access, and interpersonal concerns. But going into more general topics can be just as valid, since asking other types of questions can illuminate issues you may not have thought of. Consider including opportunities for feedback about the “non-essential” factors of your holistic practice, such as parking availability, overall office appearance, staff and physician professionalism, and costs.
Keep It Simple
Deliver your survey in the means most likely to get patients to complete it; if your clientele isn’t the most digitally savvy, stick with pen and paper. Try to avoid any instinct to overcomplicate things and be sure to write your surveys with clear, concise language and stick to yes/no options or “How satisfied are you with X?” questions that correlate to 1-5 ratings. Standardizing the range of answers will make data collection and internal assessment easier. Of course, include space for personalized feedback and comments, too.
How Patient Satisfaction Surveys Can Boost Your Holistic Practice
Your survey results are useless if you don’t take action on them; don’t waste your patient’s time. Cull new goals and objectives from your survey results—e.g., aim for 10% improvement in a given area by this time next year—and hold yourself accountable for following up.
Plus, your patients will feel validated when they notice you’ve implemented suggested feedback. This further affirms the patient-provider relationship and maintains open communication, which is crucial for patient satisfaction.
The shaping of your holistic practice’s online reputation is happening whether you’re handling it or not. Your prospective patients will make quick assessments about your practice based on the first impressions they get when searching the web, which includes patient reviews!
After all, word of mouth is incredibly important and the first place you will see the impact of this is in the form of online reviews. 91% of 18 to 34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
With these essential basics of patient satisfaction, we’re sure your holistic practice will thrive! Holistic Billing Services is here to help you grow your practice in a variety of ways and has been facilitating the growth of holistic practices since 1999. Contact us today and let us help your holistic practice reach its potential!