Currents: Practice Development Trends

Ekwa Affiliate Program Offers Income Opportunity for Medical Associations

Ekwa Marketing has launched its unique Ekwa Affiliate Program. Medical associations can place an online link to Ekwa’s digital marketing products for doctors on their website and social media networks, and start receiving a passive income for all sales occurring via the affiliate link.

Medical associations that join as Ekwa’s affiliates will receive 20 percent of all sales revenue achieved in a year from their affiliate link. An association can potentially earn up to $1,536 a year per participating doctor who buys Ekwa’s digital marketing products via their affiliate link.

Ekwa says its proven, industry-leading digital marketing products and services for doctors can help them promote their practices and win new patients in a competitive market.

Ekwa’s affiliate system is completely automated, requiring no effort on part of the medical association, while it continues to receive regular income.

Ekwa’s digital marketing products for doctors offered through this Affiliate Program include Grow My Reviews, Off-Hour Patients, Done For Me NAP, Done For Me Social, and My Digital Signboards.

For more information, contact associations@ekwa.com

Compulink Launches Advantage SMART Practice Suite of AI Solutions

Compulink Healthcare Solutions rolled out new artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled features in a release it’s calling Advantage SMART Practice. Advantage uses AI technology and real-time data from the clinic to automate tasks such as billing, along with eliminating steps to improve patient flow.

AI-driven enhancements include:

• Advantage SMART Workflow: Advantage knows which patients are being seen based on their room assignment and automatically displays their record when needed. The system also lets providers and staff know who is waiting, where they need to go next, and keeps them constantly informed for maximum efficiency.
• SMART Automated Billing, Eligibility & ERA Posting: Using the Advantage PracticeWatch task automation engine, staff can schedule eligibility, claims submission, and remittance posting to run unattended. Advantage also automatically populates a claim edit worklist to quickly identify and correct issues.
• Advantage SMART Patient Engagement: Advantage automatically communicates personalized content directly to the patient’s mobile device. This includes information about products and services specific to each individual patient as they arrive at the office and move through the normal patient workflow.

For more information, visit compulinkadvantage.com.

eRelevance Patient Engagement Survey Highlights Opportunities for Practices

eRelevance Corporation, the leading provider of consumer engagement services for small- to medium-size businesses (SMBs) has released Patient Engagement for Growth: Aesthetic Practice Marketing Perspectives and Priorities (available at https://yes.erelevancecorp.com/2018-report/).

The report—based on survey responses from nearly 150 US aesthetic practices—examines the challenges and solutions related to patient engagement, and how practices can drive cash-based consumer demand while lowering advertising costs and improving marketing lead conversions.

“While quality patient care is always the necessary foundation of a successful aesthetic practice, long-term practice growth requires an understanding of sophisticated patient engagement,” says eRelevance Co-founder and CEO Bob Fabbio. “Nearly all survey respondents indicated that providing great patient care is very important, but this study asks the question: How are today’s aesthetic healthcare practices maintaining the highest levels of patient care while meeting business growth goals? For aesthetic practices, sophisticated patient engagement translates into sophisticated marketing.”

WATCH IT NOW

Leadership and Vision: Key to Practice Success

Joe Niamtu, III, DMD, Founding Editorial Board Member of our sister publication Modern Aeshetics® magazine, hosts a video series, In the Know with Dr. Joe! In a recent series of episodes, he offers insights and tips for hiring the right staff for your practice. Employee management, in some way, shape, or form, is probably the biggest practice management challenge, he says. In the first episode of the series, Dr. Joe discusses the two most important aspects to having a great team in practice—leadership and vision.

Two key takeaways from the data include:

• Most aesthetic practices lack the time, expertise, and tools for the sophisticated marketing necessary to meet their goals for growth.
  • 68 percent of respondents said they either don’t have enough marketing expertise or don’t have marketing expertise. Yet, only 18 percent said they outsource marketing to experts.
  • 80 percent of staff surveyed said lack of time and marketing expertise were their biggest challenges.
• Stopping revenue losses from unconverted marketing leads is important to practices, but staff responsible for following up on these leads feels ill-equipped to do so.
  • When asked if their staffs are challenged to effectively follow up on the marketing responses, 43 percent of aesthetic practice decision makers surveyed said they don’t know. Yet, data show that practices make, on average, only 0.8 attempts to follow up on marketing requests.

Eight percent of respondents said the tools they currently use to track follow-up are very effective.

“There’s lots of good news in this report. Aesthetic practices are leveraging social media and finding avenues of outreach to engage patients more than ever before. The challenge is to find the solutions that will help practices meaningfully follow up on leads in order to engage and convert potential and one-time patients to life-long clients,” says Practical Dermatology® and Modern Aesthetics® Editorial Director Paul Winnington.

Physician Group Address Proposed Changes for Physician Payment Rule

The American Medical Association and about 170 medical groups, including the American Academy of Dermatology Association (AADA), sent a letter to Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, regarding the administration’s proposals included in the 2019 Medicare physician payment rule.

The letter to Adminstrator Verma highlights the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) “Patients Over Paperwork” initiative and its “goal of reducing administrative burdens for physicians and other health care professionals so that they can devote more time to patient care.” The letter goes on to say, “Several of the documentation policy changes included in the proposed rule would go a long way toward alleviating this problem and the undersigned organizations urge immediate adoption.” These include:

1. Changing the required documentation of the patient’s history to focus only on the interval history since the previous visit;
2. Eliminating the requirement for physicians to re-document information that has already been documented in the patient’s record by practice staff or by the patient; and
3. Removing the need to justify providing a home visit instead of an office visit.

The letter also addresses concerns in the proposal to collapse payment rates for eight office visit services for new and established patients down to two each and says the groups, “oppose the implementation of this proposal because it could hurt physicians and other health care professionals in specialties that treat the sickest patients, as well as those who provide comprehensive primary care, ultimately jeopardizing patients’ access to care. We also urge that the new multiple service payment reduction policy in the proposed rule not be adopted as the issue of multiple services on the same day of service was factored into prior valuations of the affected codes...”

To read the entire letter, visit ama-assn.org.