Are Practice Management Consultants Worth Hiring?

This is a guest post from Chip Hart. Chip is a frequent contributor to PediatricInc and former co-host of the highly revered Pediatric Management Awesomecast. When Chip isn’t protecting independent pediatric practices against evil conglomerates, naysayers, and the League of Shadows, you can find him at PCC doing… something (I’ve never figured out what is it that he does at PCC, exactly). 

---

I will never forget the scene. I was the lonely consultant in the dark and shag-carpeted basement “conference room” of a large pediatric practice and was giving them a stern lecture about their pricing. The practice hadn’t updated its prices in years and was undoubtedly losing money. Lots of it.

Working really, really hard.

After my explanation of RVUs and why 105% of Medicare wouldn’t cut it, the senior partner – well, the loudest one, anyway – looked me in the eye and said, “OK, that sounds smart, let’s just raise our prices.” It was the response I was hoping to get.

The youngest and newest partner jumped in quickly, “What?! How can you listen to this guy?”

Uh oh, I thought. His voice cracked, “…I’ve been telling you this same information for almost two years and he just waltzes in here and says ‘Correct your pricing.’ and you do it just like that?”

I honestly thought he was going to cry in frustration and relief. 10-minutes of back-and-forth among them ensued. I just stayed out of it. At the end of the year, the additional $250,000 they collected erased the discomfort and awkward part of the memory for them.

I didn’t forget, however. I remember sitting there thinking, “This poor practice lost hundreds of thousands of dollars simply because they were unwilling or unable to listen to themselves. They had to hear it from someone else.”

HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?

The answer is both obvious and convoluted. I have often said that the most important and difficult task for any small business is to find and hire good people. Unquestionably, this challenge extends to the hiring of practice management consultants.

Pediatric practices successfully hire consultants all the time without a tremendous amount of consideration – realtors, attorneys, I/T – but when it comes to getting help on the inner workings of the practice, the majority of pediatric offices too reluctant to ask for help.

And when they do ask for help, it’s often ineffective.

Every practice I visit codes imperfectly, yet some practices lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a result of their inability to address the problem.

Most practices could use help negotiating with insurance companies, yet remarkably few of them do. Many practices need help with a compensation model or managing a challenging partnership, yet most of them just live with the problems and hope it will go away. And so forth.

Physicians, unfortunately, are uniquely susceptible to mis-using consultants, even if it is simply to not use them enough.

You expect most vendors and consultants to try to take advantage of you – all doctors are rich, right? – while having trouble admitting that you cannot solve all of your own problems.

Combine those aversions with the impecunious nature of most pediatricians, and there is no surprise that I meet practices every week who would rather lose another $15,000 this year due to a poorly designed superbill and bad pricing than pay a consultant half that amount to fix the problems.

HOW AND WHEN DO YOU KNOW YOU NEED A CONSULTANT?

There is no magic formula, but try these parameters on for size:

• When there is an issue that your partnership cannot resolve, or when a neutral third party can facilitate a necessary change in your practice, consider a consultant.
• When you are not an expert in the matters that affect your practice or if there is simply another party who might be more effective and efficient at addressing the matters, consider a consultant.
• When your practice is losing more money on an issue than it would cost you to fix, consider a consultant.
• When the amount of money you would pay a consultant is less than the amount of money you would generate seeing patients, consider a consultant.

Those last two examples are often conjoined in a death spiral of inaction. Many of you don’t want to pay a consultant $20,000 to renegotiate a contract increase of $50,000 annually because “you can do it yourselves.”

Yet, you don’t do it. Or you start the project and sink 10, 20, 40 hours into the task – often worth more to the practice than what you would pay the consultant – and then never complete the job.

Pediatricians, as business owners, are notoriously bad at examining the return on their potential investments and usually focus far too heavily on only the costs.

Pretending to be 100% self-sufficient serves no one except, perhaps, the insurance companies. Your patients don’t benefit, your lifestyle suffers, and you leave money on the table.

HOW THEN DO YOU HIRE A PRACTICE MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT?

First, hiring a consultant involves a lot of common sense. You want a written contract that spells out the terms of your obligation.

The terms should clearly outline your expectations, identify the fundamental goal, and determine conclusion of the contract. Ultimately, it involves a relationship of trust and confirmation. Some suggestions that go beyond the generic:

1 – Pediatric practices are different, don’t let a potential consultant tell you otherwise.

Most medical practice consultants live in the Medicare world and look for “alternative income sources” that just don’t exist in pediatrics.

More importantly, the attitude and (often unspoken) philosophies of pediatric practices differ from other medical specialties. Find someone who knows pediatrics.

2 – Work with a consultant on one or more smaller projects and build up to a strong relationship.

Before you leap into that full payer-mix and negotiation mission, see how well you work together on something smaller, like simply reviewing the state of your existing contracts. If you are not getting the kind of performance you expected, better to have not committed so heavily.

3 – Don’t be afraid to use different consultants for different needs.

Just as you may not be an expert on RBRVS or pediatric compensation models, your consultant may not know it all, either.

Although some consulting resources pride themselves on their breadth of experience, depth is usually more important. A good consultant might look at your practice and identify work that needs doing. A great consultant can identify work that needs doing, but suggests another resource.

4 – Even after you have chosen a consultant, keep an eye out for conflicts of interest.

Although they are impossible to avoid and sometimes even lead to efficient work (like one consultant recommending another), conflicts are often poorly revealed in the industry.

5 – Use your network of pediatric peers to help vet your consulting needs.

Surely, if your potential consultant expects to work with you, he or she can provide you with pediatric references whom they have helped with similar issues. SOAPM is an excellent place for a sanity check.

In the end, the practices who invest in themselves are, almost always, the top performers. You’ll see among best performing practices, that many have engaged – and continues to engage – consultants on matters that are outside their expertise.