A Guide to Reducing Practice Costs in 2023

Just like any business, it’s critical to your healthcare practice’s long-term financial success to be nimble, responsive to market trends, and continually seek to adapt and innovate. Those smart business management strategies help you keep costs down, increase revenue, and boost productivity.

Fortunately, we live at an unprecedented time when accelerated advances in new technology offer cost-effective workplace solutions. These tools help us expedite and streamline administrative tasks, communicate more effectively with patients, and provide efficiencies of scale that help lower operational costs. Across all industries, digital tools have helped reduce process costs by 50% and increased revenue by 20%.

Modern patient communications technology enables you to reduce practice overhead costs without impacting the quality of patient care. Quite the opposite, these technologies improve patient access and amenities while helping you deliver a more satisfying patient experience. Collectively, these technologies enable you to gain efficiencies so that you can reinvest the savings into your practice.

Let’s take a closer look at some of those technologies and strategies and how they can specifically assist your practice to run a tighter ship so you can maintain a healthy profit margin.

What new technologies can help practices reduce their costs?

One of the most frequently talked about buzzwords in current must-have technology is artificial intelligence (AI) and recent advancements that allow anyone to use and benefit from generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Users simply enter various prompts into the tool to create a wide variety of unique, professionally written content such as articles, blog posts, reports, or letters. Practices can use ChatGPT for free to create unique patient messaging like appointment reminders, recall notifications, new patient emails, newsletter articles, and patient surveys.

AI and related machine learning and natural language processing technologies are also built into some of the key types of practice solutions your staff uses. This includes things like cutting-edge reputation management software your admin team can utilize to collect, track, analyze, and respond to patient online reviews so you can attract more new patients.

For example, leading reputation management solutions use AI to help practices save time and reduce manual tasks, such as:

• A one-click review response AI generator quickly composes professional, conversational responses based on the specific contents of each individual online review. This lets your staff efficiently respond to every patient review, positive or negative, to improve your practice’s online reputation and drive higher patient acquisition rates.

• AI technology that lets you compare your practice’s reviews and star ratings to a customizable list of your top five competitors.

• A review sentiment analysis feature that gives you insights into the most-used keywords (positive and negative) in patient reviews to see trends and make improvements.

How can I reduce the costs of the front office software my practice uses?

Another tactic to keep operational expenses at bay while boosting your admin team’s efficiency may surprise you. In short, you need to dump some of your tech. That’s right, for many practices, an ever-increasing tech stack of disparate software as a service (SaaS) solutions can give you a bad case of software license sticker shock. You’ve likely implemented an array of tools that have overlapping or redundant features for which you’re paying sky-high monthly fees. For many practices, if you’re forking out roughly $32,500 per full time provider a year on IT software licenses, you’re swimming in the shallow end of the pool.

These cumulative monthly subscriptions can quickly become cost prohibitive for your practice. What’s the answer? Consolidate your tech stack with a single, all-in-one patient communications and office operations platform. And with a bundled solution, you enjoy better cost savings than you would by adopting individual ala carte tools that require your staff to use different logins and dashboards to complete any number of tasks.

Meanwhile, a one-stop shop platform gives you all the functionality you need to book more appointments, shrink no-shows, and expand your practice. You get features like:

• Automated appointment reminders and recall notifications
• Digital intake
• Two-way texting
• Patient marketing and education newsletters
• Telehealth
• Online payment reminders
• Patient surveys
• Review invitations/reputation management
• Multi-location management

Key Takeaways

Trim your operational costs—and your tech stack—by optimizing how your practice uses various next-level technologies. Tools that incorporate AI and machine learning can help staff members save time and work more productively while reaching more patients. Consolidating software licenses can also help you lower costs, expand your admin team’s capabilities, and shrink manual workloads so you can focus on the business at hand—growing your practice.