Benchmarking is a critical step when developing best practices for an imaging facility. Without knowing your facility’s optimal output, reimbursements, and turnaround time, it becomes difficult to develop workflow and business strategies to achieve those goals. Medical Management Professionals Inc (MMP) recently undertook its 11th annual study aimed at collecting and analyzing these benchmarks for its clients.
“We have been working with clients since 1993,” said Greg Thomson, executive vice president of MMP. “I guess we realized 11 years ago that it was worthwhile to start tracking and gathering information on a consistent basis for our clients so that we could start to see trends that take place in the industry.”
Greg Thomson, Executive Vice President, MMP
MMP surveys its clients to obtain radiology industry data for practice payor mix percentages, procedure statistics, work RVUs, and retirement/benefits plans from hospital-based radiology practices, among other data that radiology practices can use to evaluate themselves against their peers. This year, MMP reviewed data from both shareholder and non-shareholder physicians in its clients’ practices”This study engages our clients in conversation, really,” Thomson says. “First what we do is share a lot of the data with them—blinded, of course; we don’t share client data—and then we show them where they are relative to the MMP client averages. Our goal is to take this beyond ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting.’ It’s a best practices type of discussion that we’re able to have with our clients. We can talk about ways to improve their practice via benchmarking. We have the data by state, size of the market, and particular groups. We can slice and dice the data so that we can identify and compare clients.”
Unlike typical industry surveys that can have varying responses and participants each year, the MMP study is unique and valuable because of the consistency of the data. Not only are the respondents—MMP clients—largely similar year-to-year, but the actual acquisition of the data offers consistency and accuracy. MMP managers pull client data themselves, which is then cross-checked for accuracy by an in-house quality assurance staff, ensuring that the data are accurate and therefore valuable to MMP’s customers.
“The way we like to describe it to our clients is that the information that we’re sharing is very consistent year-to-year because our client base is relatively consistent,” Thomson said. “It’s not like an industry survey where you may get a complete turnover of respondents from year to year. While it may be interesting in general from an industry-wide standpoint, what we’re seeing here is actual changes over time in a particular subset of clients. I like to think that the statistics themselves are very meaningful because the data are gathered in exactly the same way by our managers who know exactly what we’re looking for. The consistency in the way we’re pulling the data is one of the valuable aspects of this.”
This methodology has enabled MMP to identify a number of trends throughout the industry over the last 11 years. For example, in 2007 and 2008, the study showed that self-pay/uninsured patients rose from 6% of the practices’ payor mix to 8% where it currently stands. They also have observed rising and declining procedure volumes, changes in RVUs, and a shift away from paying non-shareholder physician benefits. All of this data is then used as a launching point for MMP and its clients to create the optimal business practices.
“Our clients have decided—and the survey results bear this out—that they are going to work harder, take less vacation, pay for benefits at a lower percentage than what they used to for their employee physicians, and all of the things that they can do to better manage their expenses,” said Thomson. “Tightening the reins on the business. We help them with that, obviously. We’re managing the practices and letting them know what other practices are doing in that area to try to help them maintain their compensation levels at a reasonable amount.”
