Member Exchange Helps Practices Cope with Industry Pressures
Non-competing radiology groups and imaging centers have formed an alliance to help each other improve performance and respond to marketplace challenges, such as cuts in Medicare, private payer contracts, and the Deficit Reduction Act. This group, the Member Exchange Community Alliance (MECA), is organized through the Radiology Business Management Association (RBMA). While the RBMA publishes a variety of valuable benchmarking surveys, the alliance digs even deeper.
"The MECA groups take benchmarking to the next level because they generate conversations with the better performing organizations, allowing practice leaders to find out how the high-performers are achieving superior results," explains Joseph P. White, principal-in-charge of physicians and medical groups at LarsonAllen.
These 10 to 12-person teams openly share financial, staffing, compensation, and lending information. To foster a trustworthy environment, the groups consist of practice administrators from differing geographic regions, and they sign a confidentiality agreement to ensure data protection.
The information behind the data has been illuminating, prompting questions as to how some groups operate so much more efficiently compared to others. A lot of financial information is shared, including:
- Income statements in a comparable format
- Revenue per full-time equivalent (FTE) radiologist
- Overhead percentages for all expense categories
- Procedures by modality
- Revenue per procedure
- Expense per procedure
- Number of procedures
- RVUs produced (both work RVUs and total RVUs)
- Number of days worked per year per FTE radiologist
- Number of hours worked per day per FTE radiologist
- Number of procedures per FTE radiologists
- Number of procedures per day worked
Discussions of conducting site visits are underway. They want to "see" the best practices in operation.
To learn more about the MECA groups and the information they share, access the full article written by White in imagingBiz, an information service of the Imaging Center Institute.
If you have questions, please contact us.
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