Mead Medical makes data-driven decisions with Cubiko
As a fully accredited General Practice, Mead Medical has been delivering exceptional and quality patient care to the Hills area, a 30-minute drive from the Perth CBD. Their clinical services are provided by a team of 25 independent contracts, all of whom are experienced and some of which specialise in different fields, including but not limited to Aged Care, Palliative care, Skin Care, Women’s Health, Obstetrician & Gynaecology and Anaesthetics. Mead Medical was honoured with the prestigious national award of the RACGP General Practice of the Year 2013/14 (National).
We used to guess what was going on. Our practice management system reporting was not consolidated. We had to go to so many different places to find the information, which took a lot of time.
Michelle Johnston, Finance Manager at Mead Medical Group, uses Cubiko every day to help their practice understand their crucial business performance, save time in reporting and provide insights to their doctors.
The Opportunity
Before using Cubiko, Mead Medical had “lots of spreadsheets”, says Michelle Johnston, the Finance Manager. After navigating the practice through the Covid period it became very apparent how crucial real time data was for the Executive Team when needing to make quick and decisive business decisions, especially in an environment that was unknown and sometimes changing daily. The practice had the data but found it difficult to get insights promptly as doctors and staff would move across their practices which made it complex to monitor cost and consolidate data. It would have been a full-time job to get live data. They did have insights into their medical practice’s financial and business performance, but because it was time-consuming to gather it was only done as part of the end of month reporting.
COVID-19 impacted the practice significantly as well as multiple Doctors commencing maternity leave, doctors relocating due to the change of DPA boundaries and the passing of one of our Directors, the practice group saw six full-time equivalent contractors leave within a short period of time. Being no longer able to recruit IMGs and being located in outer Metro has resulted In Mead Medical with very few options for recruitment.
Mead Medical wanted a Practice Intelligence Platform that could:
- Help the practice group attract and retain doctors
- Save time in reporting across the group
- Provide financial and business insights into the practices
- Forecast future billings
The Solution
Michelle believed “there has to be something out there that automates the data collection and provides insights”. Cubiko provides Mead Medical with dashboards of their consolidated data across their multisite group. Significantly reducing the time required to report on their practice’s business performance and providing forecasting metrics so they can plan for the future.
Future Forecaster
“Every decision has to be made with data” says Michelle. Cubiko empowers the practice team to look forward with data. Cubiko’s propriety forecaster uses historical billings and appointment data to model future scenarios. Mead Medical use this tool to help them navigate the future. Michelle
“We future model at least two years”. Mead Medical incorporates these forecasts into their business plan, and if things didn’t go to plan, it helped them ask why.
Management Reporting
Cubiko helps Michelle and the Executive team at Mead Medical prepare and deliver insightful reports. Using data to make decisions has always been an integral part of the culture at Mead Medical, as well as a transparent approach for our Contractors. With Cubiko, this process is much more comfortable, and they have clarity over the decisions which need to be made.
Data to retain and attract doctors
Michelle uses Cubiko’s metrics to provide insights into her contractor’s performance. “One way for us to retain doctors is to give them their monthly statistics. I went back 12 months just to show them how their metrics are running at both a location and consolidated level. A lot of GPs either don’t understand or have the time or visibility over their metrics. Now at a click of a button I can show them monthly and YTD:
- Total billings
- Proportion of CDM
- Average billings per patient
- Number of patients per hour
- Average patient wait time
Providing doctors with their data helped the practitioners get insights into where they could improve but also where they were doing well for their community and the practice.”
Mead Medical is also a training practice; using these metrics helped their registrars understand the financial aspect of general practice. Especially around patient wait time, which Michelle says due to the data, the registrars were “really mindful of how long patients may be waiting”.
The Results
Provide insights to doctors about their data
Mead Medical use Cubiko’s reporting to provide both their GPs and registrars insights into their performance. This helps attract new doctors as well as retaining their current doctors.
Saved 2 full-time admin days a month
Cubiko’s automatic near real-time data insights saved Michelle and Mead Medical two full-time admin days a month. With this time, Michelle and the team can spend analysing data instead of pulling it together from multiple sources.
Our administration department was burdensome on staff costs. When we lost doctors, we lost revenue. We sadly had to reduce our staffing levels in our administration department. Cubiko stepped in to help us do our job and navigate COVID-19.”