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How to Turn Your Failing Infusion Center Into a Thriving One
Infusion centers can be an excellent ancillary practice, but only with the right management. An infusion center partner, like OI Infusion, can unlock your infusion center’s potential for profits and better patient outcomes.
You are a doctor. A physician. A healer. You took the Hippocratic Oath and you do whatever it takes to live up to it every single day. That’s who you are.
If you’re like many physicians, here is what you’re not: An administrator. A nurse. A billing expert. Someone with the time or the inclination to wade through quagmires of insurance denials and arcane billing issues. Someone with time to waste on quotidian management issues.
For someone like you, an in-office infusion center makes a lot of sense. When managed appropriately, they can drive patient compliance, improve patient outcomes and result in better quality of care. And, the benefits for your practice are tremendous: more patient convenience, lower workload for office staff, and a high-profit, high-growth, low-touch revenue stream.
Running an Infusion Center is a Full-Time Job
When doctors decide to try and implement an in-office infusion center by themselves, the hurdles they face are significant. Infusion centers require significant managerial oversight, and will invariably drain staff time and office resources.
Your staff (or worse yet, you) will sink countless hours into mind-numbing phone conversations trying to negotiate every minute detail of every single insurance denial and every single appeal — of which there are too many to count. That’s not to mention the hassle of hiring and retaining a qualified infusion nursing staff that meets your high standards, and managing a specialized billing team.
If that’s not enough, there’s the ever-present risk of a lawsuit from an aggrieved patient, which carries the risk of an enormous settlement and the guarantee of sky-high lawyers’ fees. Then there’s the risk associated with storing exorbitantly expensive biologic drugs — one missed appointment — one missed prior authorization, and your infusion center goes into the red for the month. At some point, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
But it only seems that way. Again, you’re not an expert in running an infusion business — you’re an expert in healing people. To you, an infusion center is just a tool that you can use to improve patient outcomes, and generate additional revenue at the same time. It’s not your calling, per se.
The Right Partner
That’s why it makes sense to partner with a company like OI Infusion to manage your infusion center. The workflow of an infusion center is wildly different than that of a doctor’s office or urgent care center, which means that it requires a whole different set of skills to run it. Precisely the skill set that OI Infusion has.
So instead of devoting your own bandwidth to overcoming the hurdles, it’s far easier, and far more effective to bring in an expert who knows what they’re doing and can hit the ground running. More than that, infusion center specialists like OI can handle every aspect of the turnkey operation: from staffing (finding nurses with the rare but critical mix of IV skills and bedside manner) to operations (relieving you and your staff of the administrative headaches associated with running a second business).
OI Infusion also takes care of all of the frustrating interactions associated with billing, accounts receivable, insurance appeals and variance review. We even mitigate the liability and legal risk associated with running an infusion center. The bottom line is that infusion center management is our calling. And partnering with our experts to manage your center frees you up to follow yours.