If you’ve been fortunate enough to assemble a team of medical office professionals that work well together to support the practice objectives, we applaud you! With today’s unemployment rates at an all-time low and medical jobs on the rise, cultivating a great team is hard work and can take months, even years to find the right fit.

If you break out in a sweat when it’s time to conduct employee performance reviews, you’re not alone.  For many medical office managers, this is a difficult but necessary step in developing your team. Your staff probably dreads it as much as you, but performance reviews are an important way to gauge your employees’ work successes and stressors, and create better overall communication.

The goal is to take a positive approach and avoid a few common errors. This will help put everyone at ease, including yourself. So, we put together some do’s and don’ts to use as a guide to help your next round of performance reviews go smoothly.

With patients to serve and open positions to fill recruiting qualified, caring healthcare professionals for your medical practice can be time consuming, overwhelming, and challenging. Learn how you can draw top talent and keep abreast of cutting-edge technology and new techniques with skilled, trained and knowledgeable employees. 

A Medical Office Manager’s Guide to Patient Collections

If you are managing a small- to medium-sized provider office, then you’re painfully familiar with the daily struggle to keep everything and everyone in line. These broad responsibilities probably include things like managing the patient-payer mix, staffing, provider schedules, patient relations, and accounting. It’s not easy; our hats are off to you!

The medical industry is constantly evolving. How are you able to keep up after your formal education ends? Don’t let these progresses in your field leave you regressing in your position. Take the first step in becoming a CMOM today! See if you're ready and take our free assessment today.

Is your medical practice following current HIPAA compliance guidelines? Keeping track of current regulations is challenging and time consuming. But disregard for mandatory patient privacy laws can bring costly violations, fines, and penalties if a breach occurs. The following checklists outline important steps that organizations must take to secure Protected Health Information (PHI). Keep these checklists on hand to help keep your practice compliant.

For health care professionals, opioid addiction is a complex problem that requires careful physician monitoring because of the dangerous side effects. The Federal government has issued safety warnings and guidance for physicians to address the opioid crisis. Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to physicians and health care professionals not to abruptly discontinue opioids in patients who are dependent. The FDA also required label changes to guide prescribers on gradual, individualized tapering.

With rising costs in today’s medical practice, it’s becoming more important than ever to receive timely payments from patients. With the high costs associated with printing and mailing statements, and lingering late and missing patient payments, it’s enough to send the medical office budget into deficit. Though collecting insurance company payments is the lifeblood of all medical facilities, out-of-pocket patient expenses such as deductibles, copays, and coinsurance amounts can’t be dismissed. They can add up quickly in lost revenue if stricter collection procedures aren’t in place. 

Medical practice overhead is a growing concern for many practices that are looking to thrive and simultaneously maintain quality patient care. In today’s medical practice, overhead is directly related to patient volume, collections, and its general structure. These ongoing administrative and clinical expenses are necessary for the business to function but can have a negative impact on the practice’s revenue.

An excerpt from the new ebook: The Medical Office Manager's Guide to Time Management 

Key tips, best practices, insights—we've shared a number of ways to better manage your medical practice. But if you're looking for guidance in getting better at time management, all in one place, you'll want to download the latest ebook on The Medical Office Manager's Guide to Time Management. Not only does this guide provide you with educational and informative gems, it also shares how to help put all of this great knowledge into practice. 

We know CMOM is a huge investment. But the financial piece shouldn't keep you from personal development. In the  video below, PMI Faculty Member and CMOM Instructor Linda D'Spain discusses the different ways to pay for CMOM.

To be effective time administrators, concentration must be focused on what is important rather than what is urgent.

Learning to concentrate on the important reduces crises mode and urgency addictions. The important eventually becomes urgent, so the strategy is to act on the important before it becomes urgent. 

In today’s medical practice HIPAA regulations provide both guidance and compliance standards for all financial and administrative procedures involved when it comes to protected health information (PHI). With patient privacy on the line these standards cover all key transactions in which organizations collect, handle, and store their information. Complying with these standards will protect the medical practice against theft and violations along with helping to ensure their patient information is secure.

HIPAA Compliance can be a complex issue. Especially with advancements in technology and the rising prominence of social media and online reviews. However, there is a degree of solace in knowing that you are not alone in your quest to successfully navigate HIPAA requirements. Medical office managers across the country must be able to effectively understand the federal regulations that deal with protected health information (PHI).