Sorry for the delays - a busy Users' Conference, some great family camping, and prep for an AAP coding event, and a guy gets distracted!

I have grand plans for a series on pediatric benchmarks. Igor and I have been working feverishly on a series of WWW-based tools for our clients and our hands are dirty with all sorts of tidbits that I hope to share.

If I were smart, which I am not, I would start small and build up a series of benchmarks, culminating in an overflowing abundance of pediatric data that the world has never seen. But, like I said, I'm not smart, so I'll just jump into one thing I found fascinating:

...I'm sneaking in a bunch of benchmarks at once, so read closely.

First, you get the average charged, per visit, by PCC customers (the pediatric ones) in both 2003 and 2006. Then, you get the average revenue/visit for both years. This is gold in the benchmark business.

But we took it a step further and removed the revenue that comes from immunizations. Not the admins, just the vaccines themselves. This allows us to compare practices who purchase everything to those who purchase nothing (like VT pediatricians) and the majority, who are somewhere in between.

What do we learn?

• PCC customer revenue/visit increased 29% from 2003 to 2006. That's crazy!
• However, the real increase is tempered somewhat when you remove immunizations from the equation. Since those items can often lose money, the real increase from 2003 to 2006 is a little over 13%. Still great (when most practices lost ground), but...
• ...it makes us realize that a scary chunk of a pediatric practice cash flow is caught up simply in immunizations! In 2006, it's a solid 15% of the practice revenue ($91 vs $77), increasing almost 3% in that time frame. I bet if we went back to 2000 or 1995, the difference would be staggering.