Reports – Nuisance or Necessity?
EZClaim Reports – Written by Stephanie Cremeans of EZClaim
Have you ever gone to leave for a meeting, you’re right on schedule or maybe even a couple of minutes early, you go to grab your keys – but they aren’t where they are supposed to be. You feel a mild wave of stress, ok … if they aren’t here they have to be in my jacket pocket. You reach in, nope – no keys. Now the stress turns to a sense of urgency, you have to leave, right now, but where are the keys? You start running through every possible place you may have stashed them – you dart from here to there, back and forth until you finally stop yourself. You take a second to calm yourself and retrace steps, you have your “a-ha” moment and walk directly to your keys.
If you are a report user – chances are you’ve experienced a similar scenario when you run your daily, weekly, or the dreaded month-end reports when something seems off. Report users depend on the integrity of their reports, they are the key to making decisions, tracking productivity, and understanding the overall health of the practice. Running a report that “just isn’t right” brings about the same feeling of losing your keys when it’s time to walk out the door. Much like the scenario above, you grasp at straws to figure out what went wrong – but it seems that report problems escalate the stress levels at warp speed! Next time that a report seems “wrong” try to stop yourself from diving into panic mode and take a minute to consider some logical problems that may be throwing those reports off. Yes, some of these suggestions seem so obvious, but just like the lost keys – we can miss the obvious when we are missing something so important.
- Start by making sure that you are running the correct report:
- Are you comparing numbers from a previous period? If so, make sure you’re running the same report with the exact same criteria as the one which you are comparing.
- What are you doing with the report? Is this for compiling information, is this a work tool? The answer may make a difference when looking for the correct report, in EZClaim a customized grid may even work better than a predefined report.
- Check your dates:
- Check the dates of the criteria you are using – is your data to be compiled by transaction date, created date, exported date? Are your dates too wide open or too limited?
- Do you have transactions entered with incorrect dates? Future dates or a transposed number such as 2002 rather than 2020 can be overlooked, but cause problems with reporting.
- Consider factors within the practice that would affect a big fluctuation for the period in question:
- Were there providers on vacation or a holiday that affected practice volume?
- Are there outstanding credentialing or enrollment issues that would have slowed or stopped payments?
If you don’t have a set of reports that you monitor, I highly recommend that you consider making this a priority in 2020. Watching specific data sets, or key performance indicators gives you the information you need to spot a problem before it is out of control. You can monitor provider and billing productivity easily, making sure your revenue is being collected in a timely manner. EZClaim provides several reports and customizable grids that can give you the details you need, right at your fingertips.
For tips and tricks and other helpful information about the EZClaim reports, visit our online help manual or contact EZClaim sales. You may also follow us on Facebook or LinkedIn to stay up to date with our most recent happenings!