Under a data-based contract such as Medicare Advantage, your PCP’s time is the most valuable real estate your system can build on—are you treating it that way?
In my professional work, I’ve noticed the trend is moving away from risk-sharing with primes under their Medicare Advantage contracts.
I’m told this decision is based on the idea that Medicare Advantage is a pure data play.
Collect the data, book the revenue.
With competitive bidding for Medicare Advantage plans right around the corner, this is a mistaken approach—but if you have a short-term outlook, It’s understandable.
It’s even supported by recent studies, which I mention in this week’s newsletter.
What’s not understandable is the decision to employ this strategy and not use scribes for all your primes.
Scribes are usually used in high-margin, high-capacity environments, ERs for example, where the more patients a clinician sees, the more money the system makes.
The only time they’re consistently used in primary care is when the physician is also an executive.
That’s beyond foolish. An FP or an IM practicing under a Medicare Advantage contract is the highest-margin, highest-capacity environment of all.
Yet few health systems routinely provide scribes for their PCPs.
And those that do, inexplicably still leave risk coding to the clinicians and don’t train their scribes at all.
The high-functioning practices I’ve encountered have one scribe for each exam room. The patient is checked in, data extraction is performed by the scribe, and the clinician moves from room to room to actually deliver care. They often never even touch the computer.
Their patient satisfaction scores are usually very high—as is their revenue (though not as high as it would be if they risk-shared).
If you’re going to go all in on a data-based healthcare contract, you have to remember that under this new system, the PCP schedule is the highest-margin, highest-capacity environment of all.
And act accordingly.