Data mining strikes gold
By Eugene Cianciulli, DC

Data. It’s everywhere — more than ever before. It’s been said that the average New York Times Sunday edition contains more information than all the information a person in 15th century England was exposed to during his or her lifetime.

Your patient files may not look like the Times,but the information they contain can help you manage and grow your practice more effectively and efficiently — provided you have office management software system that “talks” to you — integrated software.

Information is good; an overabundance can be frustrating; and raw data, worthless. An integrated system allows you to tame data, retrieve it, and analyze it in manageable and usable forms.

Essentially, your practice collects data in three basic categories: financial, demographic, and clinical. An integrated system pulls together information from these categories so that you can understand your practice and your patients and their impact on your future.

FINANCIAL INFORMATION

When you invest in new database tools, you should be able to analyze the financial health of your office. With the right software, for any defined period, some of the analyses you can make include:

• Total billings, compared to total collections. This calculation is an efficiency quotient for your practice.

• Total revenues, divided by total hours worked. This gives you the dollar value of your time per hour.

• Efficiencies per day of the week. A careful analysis can help you determine which days of the week are best to have your clinic open.

• Peak days, by season. You can adjust your schedule to accommodate patient needs.

• Revenue by procedure. This type of analysis of CPT codes can show which procedures are more productive than others. (After you identify less productive procedures, you can decide if it makes more sense to refer those to other providers and allow you time to focus on areas that are more productive for you — consultations, rehab, or radiographic interpretations, for example.)

• Revenue by reimbursement categories. For example, you can mine data that will show and compare revenues for workers’ comp, personal injury, Medicare, and Medicaid. This information will allow you to adjust your marketing.

DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION

Demographic information helps you determine if your office is achieving its goals and justifies changing marketing aims. You can analyze:

• Revenue by patient demographics. This type of analysis will show you how much income comes from men, women, specific age groups, etc. With this type of financial analysis, you can aim your marketing efforts to get the best return on marketing dollars.

• Patient visits by geographic locations. This helps you to understand your practice draw. You can identify the best sources of your patients — specific companies, gyms or social clubs, or zip codes.

• Advertising. Integrated software allows you to track patients and their associated revenue value with referral sources, to see the cost effectiveness of advertising.

• Various patient recruitment sources. You can compare net revenues to identify the best (and worst) use of patient-recruitment dollars.

CLINICAL INFORMATION

Clinical data mining is one of the most neglected areas of information management. With appropriate analysis of your clinical data, you can market more efficiently, focus on areas to improve, and collect defense information in case of litigation. Mine data to show:

• ICD comparisons. What types of cases do you really treat? Are they all of one ICD or do they represent many different ICDs? With this information you can create marketing campaigns that target specific disorders.

• Patient outcomes by ICD analysis. Your analysis not only will delineate the best outcomes per case, but you can see which treatments are most effective.

In this era of evidence-based clinical care, nothing can be more important than the ability to extract, correlate, and report data and project it. This can only be done efficiently through electronic recordkeeping.

But remember: GIGO — garbage in, garbage out — is still the fundamental principle of data management. Collect and store clean, concise data. If you cannot utilize the data you collect without re-entering it, it is not useful to anyone in the future.

Implementing simple strategies to deal with information will return huge dividends in peace of mind, time savings, and money.

Eugene Cianciulli, DC, oversees the clinical devel-opment of ChiroPulse, an integrated software system (www.chiropulse.com). Past president of the New Jersey Board of Chiropractic Examiners, he maintains an active family chiropractic practice with his son and daughter. He can be reached at 903-289-9613.