Independent Imaging Centers and Business Impact of Glassbeam Analytics

Independent imaging centers face a mountain of challenges to deliver consistent services to their patients at the lowest possible cost with a high degree of reliability. Much of the problems stem from an approach that can roughly translate to pouring new wine into an old bottle. From the supply side, it means constant limping with machine breakdowns with a – ‘fix-it-when-it-breaks’ – culture. It also means over-provisioning the exam room capacity to avoid patient care disruption or making inefficient scheduling decisions from disparate IT systems that do not talk to each other.  And from the demand side, it implies hiring more sales reps in the field to solve for revenue loss due to depleting referrals from Physicians, or flying blind with an inability to accurately predict revenue leakage in the referral business well in advance.

In this post, let’s explore how an independent service provider changed its existing operations narrative to turn around its business, resulting in the recovery of thousands of dollars in revenue.

A bit of background into business challenges

What we have noted in our long interaction with many independent imaging centers is their strong sense of mission to provide quality care. And their sense of committed purpose to become the enablers for ‘quality care outcomes’ that the healthcare industry is yearning to achieve.

However, as much as these imaging centers are a perfect go-between healthcare providers who do not wish to invest in a dedicated imaging outfit at their facility and patients seeking the services, there are significant financial pressures to stay afloat in the current healthcare business landscape. There are also the productivity challenges of increasing patient throughput, better machine utilization, and the need for greater visibility into where the future business is going to come from.

A blind spot exists in how the relationship of an imaging technologists’ interaction with machines performs or the physicians referring network leads to new business. The current framing of how and why Imaging Centers invest where they do – needs an accessible approach to view the entire operation from the ground up to the executive desk through a single glass plane to understand productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. That’s the path a leading Independent Imaging services provider network is charting with Glassbeam. It’s taking long strides by using advanced analytics to accurately estimate time-to-service machine breakdowns before an incident occurs, forecast machine utilization patterns, and increase its Physician referral business multifold.

Our Customer’s Command Center

Reduce referral leakage and increase referral volume

Ideally, we want history to repeat itself when it comes to physicians referring patients for imaging services. Without data into the past performance of referring physicians impedes a quality decision, say for instance, do we add more osteoarthritis specialists to the network as we see rising demand from patient population data where the imaging facility is located? Are our current Cardiologists or Neurologists referring more or fewer patients in the last 3 or 6 months, for Example?

In essence, understanding the underlying reason for a drop in referrals from a particular physician/specialist or ways to increase referrals from low-performing physicians has led to several improvements at this service provider network. The comparative performance of various physicians as seen below from our customer’s Referral Summary dashboard has led to increased business and prevented loss of business by understanding whether the quality of examination performed was not up to standard (resulting in losing future referrals by a particular physician).

Physician Referral Performance and Leakage Analysis

Here’s how Clinsights can be the efficiency imperative to your Physician Referral network:

> Create a data mosaic that combines past physician referrals and imaging technologist examinations

> Enable comparative analysis to understand imaging technologists performance with peer groups

> Forecast business plans on the average referrals performed by physicians, in particular, MRI or CT tests, and create a follow-up plan and a roadmap to increase patient throughput

> Identify top-performing examinations and fill the gaps in understanding why some examination procedures are being performed at competitor facilities

> Enable a merit-based culture that incentivizes the best performance among imaging technologists

As the next step, a short demo on how you can see the impact of Clinsights using your data will help understand if we are a good fit for you. Take the next step. Ask for the personalized demo.

In a future post, we will look at how Imaging Centers can recover millions of dollars of revenue with better utilization of its imaging fleet.

Stay tuned.