pediatric benchmark

Wow, I've got some awesome data today.  So awesome, it even trumps a series of important pediatric RVU and H1N1 announcements (care of the helpful people at the AAP) and Jill Stoller's NBC debut.

What would trump that kind of information? 

I love pediatric benchmarks.  Knowing the real underlying behavior in my clients' offices helps me speak to them and understand them better.  There's a particular joy and insight to finding data that challenges the status quo understanding that physicians have of their own offices.

A long time ago, PCC came up with the concept of an important pediatric clinical measurement, the Sick-to-Well Visit ratio.  The concept was straightforward: how could we encapsulate, in a single number, a practice's focus on providing preventive care?

The ratio and another (intentional) use - it's a really good indicator of the financial health of a practice.  There are exceptions - queue Lynn Cramer - but unless a practice has a strong chronic disease management program in place, I can tell a lot about a practice based on this simple number.

I am, again, in the back of the room at our Coding and Practice management event and listening to Dr. Tuck. I have to steal a line or two from him, he’s got some good ones. Dr. Lander is next.

I’ve noticed some real changes in the audiences I speak to over the last few years. Today, when I ask, “Who uses RVUs to set prices?” most of the hands go up. Even 2-3 years ago, almost none went up. I like that.

I have been a little remiss in my blog duties lately - "work" intervenes. As I type, I am attending a class on dashboard design with Igor. We've been fascinated by what we have learned during our development of our PCC dashboards - if you want to check out a sample, go for it (name: demo, password: pccsales). This is a shot of our new Pediatric Financial Pulse while we work on the clinical one.

After some discussion, Igor and I have agreed that we could make a cool spreadsheet tool for non-PCC customers to calculate their own Financial Pulses. Although you would have to calculate a number of the figures yourself, and we can't do all of the measurements, it would still include all kinds of PCC's magic pediatric benchmarks, etc. And the price would be right. We'll see how that goes, I have to get started on it.

New topic - phreesia.com. It came up on the SOAPM list. The concept is interesting enough, but we have the constant challenge of things like this:

Phreesia's educational content is derived from two separate sources:

We have sponsored content provided by some of the most prominent companies in the health care industry.

I certainly don't blame Phreesia (someone has to pay the bills!), so I'm curious to hear from anyone out there who is using them. Cool? Not cool? Comments are anonymous if you wish, but you can always write me directly.

By request (check the comments), here is the latest Pediatric E&M Distribution data from PCC. You can't get it much fresher than this - a few million E&M CPT codes, from May 2007 to May 2008. I had a good, in-depth, analysis earlier this year.