and see how they measure up against their peers.
“Once practices figure out what they want to measure, and obviously they want to measure things that they’re not doing so well, they can look for opportunities for improvement,” said Diana Berich Brieva, DHA, MBA, CPC-A, the CEO of Ambulatory Care Consultants, which partners with medical practices to optimize operations and increase revenue.
Benchmarking your practice against others shows you how your numbers stack up to other practices’ metrics by percentile – for instance, whether your revenue is in the 25th, 50th, or 75th percentile against similar practices.
The 2024 MIPS Value Pathways (MVP) for Advancing Cancer Care is a new CMS program with specific metric criteria. The voluntary program has a Nov. 30, 2023, deadline for practices to sign up. The purpose of the program is to help practices identify areas where they can improve. Also, oncology societies such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) have developed metrics for this specialty.
Still, for many practices, it’s essential to develop your own metrics according to your patient population and available resources, explained Dr. Brieva.
Here are seven popular oncology metrics that many practices track to measure success.
1. Productivity
Every practice may think about productivity differently depending on whether it focuses on new patients, revenue, business development, or a combination. You can measure physician productivity in many ways: by the number of new patients per full-time employee (FTE), work relative value units (wRVU) per FTE, which measures physician work, and established patient visits.
Some clinics measure for wRVU for chemotherapy administration and per-hospital visits as a percentage of total patients as well. “We’re a community-based oncology practice, so we don’t use RVUs, but we do use other production numbers,” said Emily Touloukian, DO, an oncologist-hematologist and president of Coastal Cancer Center with four locations around South Carolina. She is assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.
“There are lots of quality programs out there that measure how well oncology practices are meeting guidelines. The one we’ve participated with since its inception is [the] Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI) through [the] American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO),” said Dr. Touloukian. “Basically, it’s a chart review and extraction of various indicators in accordance with quality measures.”
Pontchartrain Cancer Center, with four locations around Louisiana, tracks the number of new patients in hematology and oncology by location and provider. They also track follow-up patients. New and follow-up patient metrics are broken down by visit code.
“The E&M code tells me the level of acuity that the physician coded for,” said Kathy Oubre, MS, the CEO of Pontchartrain. Patients with complicated cases get a higher-paying code since clinics get paid differently for each code. Ms. Oubre tracks the codes by provider and says if they bill every patient with the same code, it can put your practice at risk for an audit, even when it’s the lowest billable code.
In the 2019 ASCO survey, the number of new patient visits reported by participants averaged 301 visits per FTE. Established patient visits averaged 3,334.
“When we talk about metrics and how we measure things and how successful our practice is, productivity also has to do with how satisfied the people working for you and with you are,” said Dr. Touloukian.
“If you’re not providing a supportive workplace for your physicians and employees, you’re not going to be successful,” she said. “You’ll end up with doctors coming and going every 2 years, employees quitting all the time, and a need for retraining.” Instead, if you can create a welcoming, sustainable environment where people are happy to come to work, physicians aren’t burnt out, and get to spend time away from the clinic to recharge, productivity will be more successful.