Benchmarking—We’ve Come a Long Way
Richard Gerald Harris, MD
President, LUGPA; UroPartners, Melrose Park, IL
[Rev Urol. 2020;22(1):30–31]
© 2020 MedReviews®, LLC
As I’ve been considering my role as president of LUGPA, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what defines our special community and I keep coming back to the idea of benchmarking.
The very nature of LUGPA is that we are a group of groups. More specifically, we are a group of groups that rely on each other for the sharing of helpful information. And what better exemplifies that advantageous relationship than benchmarking and the wisdom that benchmarking yields.
Although the data revolution is not new, physicians and their groups have largely been slow to adopt data analytics techniques and tools. Shifts in payer demands and the ratcheting down of payments for services demands that physicians and administrators spend time harnessing the power of the massive amounts of data that their practices create and using that data to their advantage. This is a rich and valuable feedback loop for groups when insights based on data analytics provided on an ongoing basis can help physicians anchor their performance with a common denominator. That common denominator, or benchmark, is the aggregate performance of all their peers, both within their group and of similarly situated groups nationwide.
Data can be used to both improve clinical performance and to identify new opportunities to provide more diverse and needed services to their patients. Groups are using the data to drive business decisions, create more efficient operations, reduce costs, and improve patient satisfaction.
Since its inception, LUGPA has made it a habit to listen to its members and respond accordingly. Lately, our members have indicated the desire to have comprehensive benchmarking capabilities across all the urology practices.
You may have seen LUGPA’s March webinar about benchmarking. For those who did not register for the webinar, you may not realize that it was not just another presentation containing tips on how to be better at benchmarking. It was a grand tour of all the benchmarking data that LUGPA has put together and made available to its members!
LUGPA has been collecting data via detailed surveys and conference calls for more than 7 years and, in 2019, LUGPA launched a new initiative with InfoDive to replace LUGPA’s legacy benchmarking tool.
LUGPA’s benchmarking program solution, InfoDive provides instant access to actionable information about practice performance. This web-based business intelligence solution creates practice-specific benchmarking and summary reports. Every practice can quickly and easily analyze productivity and financial metrics when comparing their practice with peers in their specialty community. Although using InfoDive is important, it’s part of the solution, not the complete solution. The complete solution requires each practice to set clear strategic goals, identify critical business questions, and track performance against those goals.
InfoDive gathers information from participating groups’ practice management systems (PMS) to produce the best benchmarking data reports available about independent urology groups. Some of the main categories of information included in this package cover productivity statistics, performance quality, and financial metrics.
LUGPA’s benchmarking program gathers data from the entire patient treatment journey and allows practices to analyze the quality of care holistically. For example, practices can track how many patients receive a biopsy and analyze how many have a complication from it. This gives practices the opportunity to dive deeper and explore the roots of a problem and understand how to avoid it in the future.
One of the more valuable external data sources incorporated into the tool is the Medicare public use files. When you use information from InfoDive, you can also see Medicare fee schedule and Relative Value Units (RVUs) data. These highly accurate statistics show you the comparative value of what you are producing in Medicare terms and your physician productivity as it compares with others’ data.
Some of the data assets that InfoDive includes are billing and collection, general ledger data, and product costs, including drug prices. These data allow you to analyze your margins and cost recovery and can even help you move from fee-for-service to value-based payment models.
Not sure what you should do with all these data? The system provides comprehensive views that give you the strategic reporting that isn’t available in your existing PMS.
All these data lead to one desired outcome: progress. The data help you identify performance improvement opportunities and insights about changing your practice patterns.
This incredible benchmarking tool enables hundreds of urology practices across the country to manage their time, stay competitive, and lower administrative costs while introducing the latest therapies into their practices.
Best of all, LUGPA groups that participate in benchmarking data collection will receive access to the benchmarking information at a reduced cost.
I encourage you to watch the hour-long product demonstration webinar available at http://bit.ly/LUGPA-InfoDive.