If you know anything about the MGMA organization, they’re probably most well known for all the data they have around medical practices. Whether you’re looking for Provider Compensation Data, Medical Practice Claims and A/R data, or basically any data needed about medical practices, MGMA is the place to go. Given this, it was no surprise that MGMA would come out with their “Quantifying COVID-19: Measuring the Pandemic’s Impact on Medical Practices” report. The report is available as part of their MGMA DataDrive for those interested in purchasing the full report.
We got a look at the report and wanted to share some of the highlights. In fact, MGMA did a recent webinar sharing insights from the report and here were 6 key takeaways from the presentation:
1. Patients came back for care in summer 2020 after safety worries, deferred visits
2. The recovery was short-lived due to the fall 2020 COVID-19 surge
3. Telehealth surged, then ebbed, then grew again with new waves of COVID-19
4. Slow periods for productivity were opportunities to catch up on collections
5. Supply costs were up dramatically, but cuts elsewhere lowered overall spending
6. Staffing struggles persist due to quarantine, childcare and a tight labor market
There’s a lot of things to chew on in this list. Some of this was pretty obvious like the fall off in Spring 2020, partial recovery in Summer 2020, and the challenges in Fall 2020 as COVID surged again. However, seeing the numbers of how many medical practices had patient drops (97%) and how many dropped more than fifty percent (71% had that much of a drop) is still hard to see and process.
The question then is how are we doing as far as recovering. Here’s some stats from the MGMA report as far as medical practice recovery:
From the looks of the data, most healthcare organizations are recovering, but some are still hurting as compared to prior to COVID. I do wonder if the drop in patient volumes is a choice some practices are making. It’s not hard to imagine some practices choosing lower volumes as the doctor needs to stay home more with the kids or other circumstances that require them to take a smaller patient load (ie. COVID burnout).
I’ll be watching the telehealth stats, but in my opinion it’s still early to know how much telehealth is going to stick at medical practices. Also, it was pretty amazing to see that even though supply costs for things like PPE went up, operational costs at medical practices actually went down. Seems like much of that was attributable to layoffs and furloughs.
Medical staffing challenges are going to be important to watch as well. This stat from the report shouldn’t be a surprise, but it illustrates how challenging staffing a medical practice will be going forward.
MGMA did also offer the following factors for surviving the pandemic’s impact from interviews they did with healthcare leaders:
- Fast and effective response to relief/aid offerings
- Stability in staffing
- Finding the right telehealth fit
- Rethinking patient payments and collections
- Sustaining engagement with patients
- Taking care of each other
The question then remains, what will be the factors for medical practice success going forward. While I don’t think we’re likely get more relief and aid for medical practices, the rest of the list above seems like a great roadmap for success for medical practices as we start to come out of the pandemic too. What would you add to the list?
If you want to check out the full report from MGMA, you can purchase it on their MGMA DataDrive. The full report includes a bunch of detailed charts including changes in physician compensation that would likely be useful for many healthcare organizations.
