Posts Tagged ‘Dallas’

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Happy New year

Saturday, December 31st, 2011
New Year's Eve

Image by besighyawn via Flickr

From all of us at UPB, have a safe and happy New Year. It’s now 2012, I hope those Mayans were wrong!

And please don’t drink and drive, it’s not cool.

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Merry Christmas

Sunday, December 25th, 2011
Santa Claus with a little girl

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From all of us at UPB, have a Merry, Merry Christmas.

And please don’t drink and drive, it’s not cool.

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Raise your prices

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

Something to think about for 2012: It’s time to raise prices. If you are privately negotiating with insurance companies, show them your quality data and ask for higher reimbursement. If you use an IPA, find out what they are are doing to get you better pricing. The rest of the world is not going to charge you less becuase you are charging less.

Also, where is there growth in your practice? Are there more cash pay patients, more with higher reimbursed insurances (top 50%) or more with lower reimbursed insurances (bottom 50%). Think of it this way. Your practice is like a garden. Are you growing more weeds or flowers?

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Tax Planning Tip

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

If you file your IRS taxes based on calendar year, it’s time to sit down with your CPA and figure out what you must do to maximize deductions and defer income. DO this one right now. You can have a phone meeting if everyone is too busy to meet in person. Don’t wait – schedule this meeting right now.

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

WASHINGTON - OCTOBER 26: Internal Revenue Ser...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

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Happy Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 24th, 2011
The First Thanksgiving, painted by Jean Leon G...

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Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Go Detroit Lions!

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Are you happy?

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

Most people are not happy. 9/10 people say that are not happy with their bodies. A majority of people are not optimistic about the future. A lot of doctors are afraid of the direction that medicine is taking them.

I have a simple idea to put forward. Your reality is your representation of the events of your life so far. You make projections about your future based on your beliefs right now. But the whole of your life hasn’t played out yet.  When he was in his early 20′s Billy Joel was suicidal. He was sick and tired of playing in piano bars around New York for a bunch of drunks and he felt that he would never become famous or successful. On top of that he met the love of his life and she dumped him. Now he thought he would never ever win the love of anyone nearly as beautiful as her.

So Billy checked himself into a mental institution. That was his wake up call. The problems Billy thought were so unbearable were nothing compared to what everyone else there had. Billy actually began to feel grateful that he was relatively healthy and highly functioning. So he left and rededicated himself to his music. The rest is history.

Whether or not you are happy or not depends on (1)

All My Life (Billy Joel song)

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what you focus on about your life and (2) the meaning you attach to that.

Decide to be happy. If you can’t be happy, what else is there?

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Standards

Sunday, November 13th, 2011
Nine Standards

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One of your main jobs is to continually set higher and higher standards for your practice. No matter how good you already are keep asking yourself, “how can I make this better”? Keep setting higher standards until everyone who touches your practices would like to work in it.

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book. His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators – within 3 years… guaranteed. Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Happy Hallowe’en

Monday, October 31st, 2011
In front of haunted house during Halloween sea...

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Have a happy, fun, scary, playful, outrageous, safe, but not too safe Hallowe’en.

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Roll up concept

Saturday, October 15th, 2011
OS market share - Janurary 2010

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One of the  most lucrative business tactics is called a “roll up“. They are common in the world of large and medium sized companies but not common in individual medical practices. A roll up happens when one company buys out a competitor and serves the competitors customer base using its operating infrastructure. It makes sense because you increase market share but reduce overall costs by eliminating duplicate systems. How could that work in a medical practice?

Well for starters you could apply a similar concept called an “aggregation”. In an aggregation, competitors maintain their brand identity and market share but use a common infrastructure. Is it hard for you to hire good staff? Well how about teaming up with other practices that share the same problem and starting a staffing agency? The partners in the agency can get the first crack at new candidates while overhead costs are offset by placement of staff in outside offices. Pretty nifty, huh? 

There are a lot of strategic alliances available to doctors and we are involved in several right now. If you’re interested contact us to see if we have anything available for you. The downside to these types of alliances is that you need quality people to actually run the enterprise. So if the partners are sharing expenses but there is nobody in charge of running the new venture it will probably fail. Success doesn’t happen by accident or location, it happens because of successful application of proven business principles. 

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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Holy cow I can’t believe how much that is costing me!

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
Robbery (film)

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That is what you will probably say when I expose the debacle that is your front office. I’m telling you it is ugly. Here’s why:

1. Finding good help is harder than ever. Turns out a generation fed a physical and mental diet of junk food is not as hardy as we would like to think. This generation of workers is hard to train and hard to motivate. Bemoan it if you will, that is the fact.

2. In one office, we counted 5 patients a day were lost to the scheduling process. Mainly it was calls answered too slowly or lost to voice mail. At $150/encounter, that is costing the office  $198,000 per year. Houston… we have a problem.

3. Nice guy/gal front office people don’t want to collcet deductibles/copays diligently at the time of service. They are too busy trying to be best friends with your patients. I don’t know anybody that wants to pay me to be their friend. If I did, I would immediately stop associating with them. Easily this is costing you $25,000-$50,0o0 per year.

Can you afford this much waste? Are you operating a charity clinic – intentionally or otherwise?

Look, you simply can’t afford to have your front office staff set the bar for your success. Measure their progress, train them and get rid of them if they can’t get it together.

Or better yet, get smart and outsource this training/measurement/management function to us so you can sleep at night. And pay your bills too.

Seriously, dude, get on this.

David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book.  His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed.  Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.

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