Clarity Health Services Blog

If you missed the first half of this list, check it out. And now, with a little help from our friends, we present items #1 through #5 of the Top Ten list of

Things I miss the most now that I use Clarity:

5.  Playing Nancy Drew trying to solve The Mystery of The Impossible AIM Authorization (with chart notes written in hieroglyphics!)

Clarity takes the mystery out of referral processing, deciphering the complexities of today’s insurance regulations and procedures on your behalf.  You might like to take up Sudoku as a puzzle-solving alternative.

4. Practicing my lyrics for karaoke night with a 90-second loop of “Don’t Stop Believing” while on hold … 13 times!

While the 80’s were a great musical era, you can spend this office time following up with insurance billing to generate clinic revenue.  Hey, you can always practice your chops in the car on your way to work.

3. The security of having my call monitored for quality assurance.

Clarity provides the security you’ll need — referral documents and processing information stored safely online for immediate retrieval.

2. The invitation to call again when L&I is not experiencing a high volume of calls.

Don’t feel unloved.  Clarity loves you.   We eagerly await your questions, comments, and input to enhance our service.

And finally, the #1 thing our customers miss now that they use Clarity is…

1. The social outlet of meeting new customer service representatives after countless transfers.

There is nothing quite like being transferred through the ranks of each department in a large insurance company so much that it seems they are trying to help you not get your referral authorizations.  With Clarity you can skip the fuss and spend this time getting to know your patients instead.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I had appointments with two physicians at separate practices. The first clinic’s waiting room had a couple of signs prominently displaying these words:

If you have been waiting longer than 15 minutes, please see the receptionist.

The other clinic posted this sign just as prominently:

Due to the heavy demand for appointments, we are enforcing a $35 appointment cancellation fee.

Which of these practices is thinking about the lifetime value of their patients? Author Seth Godin wrote a short, provocative piece Embracing lifetime value and used a medical practice in his examples.  I recommend it.

So let’s look at my experience at each of these clinics.  My appointments were both scheduled for late in the afternoon, among the last appointments of the day for each physician. At the first clinic, I was escorted to the exam room after about 15 minutes, and saw the physician after a brief interaction with his nurse. The doctor was running “a little behind,” which I knew from the moment I checked in at the reception desk. He spent plenty of time with me, and I was well cared for.

After waiting for 25 minutes at the second clinic, I was escorted to an examination room and told “the doctor will be right with you.” Twenty minutes later, I was told he was running “a little behind.”  After an hour, I left the office. I won’t be back.

Which of these clinics seeks to maximize the lifetime value of their patients as customers? Which of these clinics is like yours?

With thanks to our customers for the ideas and a tip of our collective hat to Letterman for the inspiration, we present the Top Ten list of

Things I miss the most now that I use Clarity:

10. Warming my hands over the fax machine on a cold autumn afternoon.

By uploading your patients’ charts to Clarity, you reduce time spent faxing and refaxing documents.  You can also get updated patient notes immediately from other clinics on Clarity that have seen your patient … and with no paper waste.  Maybe this savings in overhead could be applied to turning up the temperature in the clinic.

9. Playing peek-a-boo with L&I: now it’s open, now it’s closed; now it’s open, now it’s closed.

Getting quick answers from insurance providers is no joke.  Clarity can seriously make your life easier.

8. Playing the odds with Tricare: Mamma needs a “Standard” plan, no whammies no whammies!

Filling out forms is time-consuming and the details can be confusing.  There is no gamble when Clarity takes on the hassle for you. Your skilled staff can be devoted to patient care rather than administrative overhead — reducing the overall cost of healthcare.  You can spend your saved time walking to 7-Eleven to get a lottery ticket.

7. Pretending to be a robot so the automated voice recognition system can understand me.

You don’t have to change what you’re doing to become more efficient.  Simply enter the referral information and Clarity will process your referral while you care for your patients.  You can talk in a robot voice when you make your referral if you like, we don’t mind.

6.  The meditative dial tone after holding for 20 minutes.

Few things can be more frustrating than holding for long periods of time only to be disconnected and having to start again.  By using Clarity, you don’t waste your time being left on hold with insurance companies, so your clinic can devote more time to patient care and patient follow-up phone calls.  Perhaps the music in the office could be changed over to that familiar tone.

Look here for #1 through #5 on the Top Ten list.

One of the first things I did when I became NPN’s Chief Medical Officer was to go out and visit with many of NPN’s primary care physicians in their clinics. These clinics — in office buildings and shopping centers, converted houses and stand-alone clinics — are the front-lines of health care in our community. The physician/owners of these clinics told me what matters to them, and why they practice medicine in independent practices.

While NPN’s primary care doctors are a diverse and independent  group, as individuals they expressed the same consistent set of values that makes them the quality doctors they are. Here’s what I heard from those docs:

• They believe in Thriving through Innovation. They all want to find ways to be more effective in their care delivery and efficient in the administration of their practices. They look to NPN as a whole and their physician colleagues to find new and better ways to deliver care.
• The Sanctity of the Doctor-Patient Relationship must not be violated. While new and innovative tools will improve the life of the physician and the health of the patient, the trust that patients have put in their doctors must never be compromised.
• They are passionate about Defending the Freedom of Healthcare Options. It’s up to the patient and doctor together — not a health plan’s guidelines or a “corporate medicine” productivity number — to determine what is best for the patient and they must be enabled to proceed along that path.
• The Passionate Pursuit of Optimal Care leads to the best outcomes for their patients. They have experienced and believe in the power of evidence-based clinical decisions, using Chronic Care Registries, e-presribing, and expert clinical support.
• They are committed to Being Rooted in the Community as Independent Physicians. This is their home. They have committed to living and working in the community and to contributing beyond the clinic to the health and vibrancy of their city and region.

In future posts, I’ll unpack these values in more detail, and use real examples to show how these values live everyday in our community.

The cost of interacting with insurance plans averages a whopping $68,274 per year per physician in America’s clinics according to this important study funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund, and published in Health Affairs. Administrative costs in general — and particularly those related to dealing with insurance — have been the subject of a lot of attention in the current debate on health care reform.

The study gets into the details of why it is such a critical issue for practicing physicians. Not only is it a major cost of doing business, it takes time away from clinicians that could otherwise be spent with patients. On average in each practice, the time to interact with health plans is an enormous time consumer. For each physician

• The physicians themselves spend nearly 3 weeks per year (about 3.5 hours per week),
• RN/MA/LPNs spend over 19 hours per week per physician, and
• Clerical staff spends a whopping 36 hours per week per physician!

And the time consumed varies inversely with the size of the clinic, with physicians in smaller practices (1-2 physicians) spending considerably more time on these tasks than those in larger groups. Similarly, Primary Care physicians spend the most time, and specialists spend the least.

These findings are in line with an un-sponsored, recently published report by Thompson Reuters on waste in the health care industry. NPR reported on this topic recently as a part of their on-going and extensive coverage of health care reform.

Clearly, services and tools that help physicians — particularly those in smaller practices — to avoid these cost and time sinks will help make a difference in their businesses and in the time they can devote to serving their patients.  Our Referral Management service is aimed at reducing the time and cost burden of insurance plan interaction every day.

Scott Kronlund, MD.
A Family Doc with a passion for community-based medicine.

Physicians in independent practices are nothing if not “independent.” Even when they are members of a group practice, they value their ability to practice medicine the way they know best, rather than practicing it for some productivity numbers in a big institution.

With wisdom gained through 25 years of clinical and medical management experience, Dr. Scott Kronlund understands this side of physicians in private practice, but also believe deeply that together, led by their sense of what is right to do for their patients, the community of independent doctors is a better place to practice medicine – and a better place to receive medical care.

Scott is the Chief Medical Office of Northwest Physicians Network (NPN), a group of 475 independent physicians. NPN is the sponsor for first community using  Clarity’s Referral Management Service. Scott is passionate about being out in the community with his physician colleagues, and working with them to develop the practical, clinically- and economically-sound tools and techniques to deliver world-class, well-coordinated care right where the patients are: Their neighborhoods and shopping centers.

Dr. Kronlund is a board-certified family practice physician, consultant, educator, former hospital executive, and world-traveler. With NPN, he combines passion and expertise in health care quality improvement with his commitment to community-based and physician-lead health care to help build and sustain a thriving medical community in Pierce County, Washington.

Scott will contribute regularly to this blog, using his experiences in the community to describe what is happening as an independent physicians group becomes increasingly inter-dependent in delivering coordinated, high-quality community-based health care.