Charting your course: A primer on scoring practice success

Reaching your practice goals doesn't have to be guesswork. One group shares how it measures anything it can to make sure its physician practices are clinically and financially successful.

By Robert Kazel, AMNews staff. Dec. 22/29, 2003.

When trying to evaluate the success of your medical practice, you may feel at times that you are playing an overwhelmingly complex numbers game. But take heart. Like many games, the business side of medicine often can be boiled down to a simple scorecard.

Managed care companies have been using their own scorecards to rate doctors' quality and cost effectiveness, but it's not difficult for any practice to seize the initiative and create its own periodic report cards to measure a host of variables. One model to follow may be the monthly "operational improvement metrics" scorecard used for the past two years by the 50 doctors at Centra Corp., a multipractice physician organization affiliated with Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, Ill.

With these measurements, each of the dozen practices within Centra can compare financial and quality measurements to each other and strive to achieve a better score, says John Born, DO, Centra chair and one of the doctors and administrators who designed the scorecard. "For our own practice, it's a tool I can use to improve our business, increase our revenue streams and increase our efficiency while decreasing cost," he says. "I see this tool as motivating our entire staff, including doctors. ... We can all accomplish more by benchmarking and comparing best practices."