Financial Information System

Continued health care reform can cause the profuse loss of money from your practice due to declining reimbursement levels, unless you make efforts to curb the loss by cost analysis. While increasing fees may have covered the increasing costs of staff, supplies and other necessities in the past, the advents of the Medicare Fee Schedule, reduced payment by HMOs, and third-party reimbursement caps may have made it virtually ineffectual to increase fees.

The transfer of financial risk from the insurance carrier to the health care provider and to the patients is another major trend in contemporary health care. It would seem that in the next few years, physicians in all specialties will be increasingly involved in some type of capitation system. Despite the increasing popularity of capitation, few physicians or patients understand the basics of the capitation model; and are therefore ill-prepared for the effective negotiation with insurance carriers.

How do we protect ourselves and our patients? By being prepared.
Knowing the effects of changing policies on our practices. Examine associated costs of your medical practice and make sure they are under control. You will find it beneficial to divide them into fixed costs and variable costs, and identifying the excessive costs is the first priority, in order to optimize your practice's income by lowering them.

Our Financial Assistant has been developed to prepare physicians, hospitals, and other health care professionals to evaluate their practice as it currently operates. Despite recent advances in ease of use of computers, many practitioners remain "computer phobic". Our user friendly software can help health professionals with their practices, by keeping track of, storing and providing summaries of valuable information that are essential with the upcoming changes in the health care industry. The Financial Assistant will track your practices' expenses (fixed and variable) and revenue for easy, accurate, and up to date viewing of month to month analysis through an Accounting Report. This will enable you to evaluate expenses as well as help put capitation policies into perspective for your specialty and region.

With this software you are able to input multiple expenses, in any combination of fixed and variable costs, into an Expense Report where you can set a default amount for each entry. This feature is intended to simplify the calculation of static expense amounts (that are easily adjusted) for the Cost Accounting Report. Net profitability is automatically and continuously recalculated with each new entry. Expense and Accounting Reports can be viewed on screen or printed, giving you current month and year-to-date totals. Per-member-per-month capitation is easily and quickly calculated for your practice. Additionally, your practice can determine the average fee, average charge per patient, and per-member-per-month capitation by inputting the number of annual services per 1,000. A Capitation Report can then be viewed on screen or printed.

Armed with this innovative software from MK Diagnostics, Inc. will give any concerned practitioner the information necessary for understanding the details of your own practice. And preparing you to evaluate costs and to make sure that you are capable of managing a capitated practice before stepping into it. If properly controlled, a capitated practice can be as successful as a fee-for-service practice. By being prepared, for the coming health care changes you can be confident and in control of your practice's future and your patients well-being.

Disclaimer
This is only a tool to assist in the financial analysis of your managed care organization. There is no liability attached to the author or developer for misanalysis.