Today, I have two things to share.  Great pediatric content.

First, I want to introduce readers to Brandon Betancourt's new ebook, Thrive: Five Strategies to be Fearless, Independent and Original.  At $25 for a download, it's an incredibly low-risk opportunity to pick up even one little management or ownership nugget that could change and improve the trajectory of your practice. And extra credit for focusing on remaining independent.  Reviews welcomed here.  I read it, and approve of it, otherwise I wouldn't recommend it here.

Second, check out this cool "Schedule vs. Revenue" tool that Jan here at PCC cooked up for a client (Excel Version, LibreOffice Version).  The practice in question was trying to figure out how making changes to the schedule the accommodate different visit reasons, physician quirks, etc., would affect their bottom line.  Jan built a spreadsheet where the doctors could play with different blocking schemes to figure out how their revenue would change.  I thought it interesting enough to share.  Here's how to use it:

• You can define up to 9 different visit reasons based on your typical revenue mix.  You can get fancy and distinguish among newborn vs. teen well visits or between consults and sick visits, you've got 9 to play with.
• All you need to do is change the name of the visit reason over in column A (Well, Sick, Newborn, Nurse Only, etc. are already there) and update your your Average Deposit.
• Then, cut and paste the name of the appointment exactly as it appears in column A into the appointment template over in columns F/H/J as you see fit - the spreadsheet will automatically calculate the total appointment numbers for the day as well as the number of each appointment type and the expected revenue it generates.
• Note that when you place the blocks, the spreadsheet looks for the appointment type name - like "Sick" or "Recheck" - to do the counting.  So, if a well visit should take up 30 min, list it only once, not once in each 15 min slot or it will look like 2 appointments.
• We've got it using 15 minute segments as that's the most popular.  It also totals for 3 clinicians only.  The spreadsheet formulas are fairly easy, so you ought to be able to expand as you see fit but let me know if you have trouble.

More important than the spreadsheet itself is the concept. I still lecture almost monthly on the clinical and financial benefits of doing more well visits...this is a great tool to show how focusing on preventive care can benefit your office.