Here are 5 seemingly unremarkable insights worth saving and remembering. They emerged from analyzing anonymized Ambiki data this year and might help you rethink operations at your speech therapy private practice.
The clinic cancels more visits than the families do.
31.8% of missed visits are clinic cancellations. No-shows are only about 10%. Now combine that with this: the median therapist works 3 days/week, nearly a third work only 1-2 days, and 31% of therapist headcount is new hires. The attendance problem may be partly a staffing problem.
A visit is ~13x more likely to be cancelled than a claim is to be rejected.
Cancellation rate: 17.5%. Claim rejection rate for practices with billing history: 1.3%. We worry a lot about billing. But the schedule is where a lot more revenue leaks.
Recurring visits are where the risk is.
Standing weekly appointments are missed about twice as often as one-off visits: 26.5% vs. 12.6%. Yet recurring visits make up about two-thirds of the schedule. Only 20% of patients with an 8-visit mandate actually reach all 8. What strategies do you employ to improve attendance?
Same software. 8.4x difference in documentation speed.
Fastest quartile of practices: 2.8 minutes to sign a note. Slowest quartile: 23.2 minutes. Meanwhile, the busiest therapist within a practice handles about 2.6x the daily sessions of the least busy. That makes me suspect slow documentation is often more of a process problem than a people problem.
The coveted after-school slot is also the slot most likely to fail.
4-6pm visits are missed about 40% more often than mid-morning visits. And missed-visit rates climb almost every hour throughout the day. Interesting side note: documentation also surges late in the day. One hypothesis: late cancellations may be creating the windows when therapists finally catch up on notes.
Save this post. Then bring one of these five to your next operations or strategy meeting and ask: "What would we change if this were true in our practice?"