Productivity Improvement: Three Steps to Move from 25% to 90% Productivity

The term productivity, as used in the practice ot medicine, reters to a measurement of physician output over a specified period of time. Output can be a measure of such things as dollars generated or collected or the number of patient encounters, studies conducted, or procedures performed. A challenge faced when attempting to use gross or net income or volume of patients as measures of productivity is that the productivity measures of equally productive physicians will differ based on payer and patient mixes and on the complexity of the services rendered. This article discusses the use of the relative value unit as a metric of productivity and how the use of this metric levels the playing field.