CPT codes can help solve scheduling woes
Study helps determine ideal patient hour’
If you look at how your patients are distributed according to CPT codes, you can determine your "ideal patient hour" and come up with an efficient way to schedule them, declares Doug Hough, PhD, a partner in Arista Associates in Fairfax, VA.
An analysis of your CPT codes can point out the types of patients each physician in your practice is seeing and help you come up with a schedule that makes the best use of each individual physician’s time, he adds. You can determine how many patients each physician is seeing for limited visits vs. extended or comprehensive visits, and the number of new and established patient visits.
"If you look at the distribution, you can construct what your ideal patient hour is so that if you’re seeing a lot of patients for extended office visits, you can schedule fewer patients," he adds.
For instance, if 80% of your patients are CPT codes 99213, 99214, and 99215 (intermediate, extended, and comprehensive) and only 20% are minimal and brief visits, you should schedule five patients in an hour, expecting that three will take 15 minutes and the other two seven and a half minutes each, Hough says.
Hough suggests analyzing the visits scheduled in a typical month, not the busiest or the slowest month. "A good practice ought to be looking at the distribution of CPT codes for billing purposes, anyway,"
Your analysis should include a separate analysis for each physician in the practice. "Each physician has a different patient load and different requirements, and each physician takes a different amount of time depending on his or her practice style," he says.
For instance, a CPT 99213 should be a 15-minute visit, but some physicians take 20 minutes while some take 10 minutes, Hough says. "Younger physicians typically haven’t been broken of the habit they learned as a resident: It takes half an hour per patient. But established practitioners have different practice styles, and their schedules should reflect it."
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