1. Have you implemented any successful cost-cutting measures in your practice in the past two years?
Yes 70.7%, 29 responses
No 29.3%, 12 responses
2. If yes, what strategies did you use?
Cutting expenses for supplies 9.4%, 3 responses
Renegotiating contracts with vendors and service providers 6.3%, 2 responses
Outsourcing 3.1%, 1 responses
Implementing new technologies to save money 9.4%, 3 responses
Reducing staff 21.9%, 7 responses
Freezing hiring 9.4%, 3 responses
Freezing pay 15.6%, 5 responses
Cutting pay 0.0%, 0 responses
Reducing benefits 6.3%, 2 responses
Other (please specify) 18.8%, 6 responses
- This only allowed checking one box; we have done the first 2 and are consolidating all our forms.
- Decreased advertismrnt, eg phone books
- I wanted to check all above except "outsourcing" but the form allows only one answer
- Doing more of the administrative work myself!
- Set up own website, set up own server
- we work very hard to keep our overhead under control. Our cpa, who is also a tax lawyer, set us up as an S corporation about 10 years ago, and this has been very helpful. We also have a very good office manager who takes nothing for granted and tries to negotiate every thing we buy. We switched to an EMR system 2 years ago, with mixed results.It's been pretty good for pratice management and billing but not for generating patient notes. I hired a student this summer to help me make some templates so I can get away from dictating.
3. If you have a success story, please share it here.
- home made EMR and using Dragon. Saved about 20k/year in dictation expenses. Converiting to digital X-ray saved about 5k in materials costs.
- I have overseen and guided our 3-man ortho group over the last 2 years and 1 month completely out of debt. That's over 700K off the books in 2 years. This is the BEST thing you can do for your practices financial health.
- I had to high end employees that did my billing and collecting. I started outsourcing my billing and collection for 6% and immediately saw an increase in my collections of 20%. The employee that was my biller was hired by the new company. I also reduced my payroll by two employees.
Total Completed Survey - 42 people