Ochre Health Bruce increases billings with Cubiko
Ochre was born in the bush, the group of practices began in 2002, when two doctors came together in NSW outback town of Bourke. Today, Ochre Health is a leading provider of healthcare to rural, regional and urban communities around Australia. They operate a network of over 60 medical centres across five states and territories and partner with more than 400 doctors.
Ochre Health Medical Centre Bruce is an accredited health hub practice that provides high-quality care to the community. The practice is based on a university campus in Canberra, with over 28 doctors and a large nursing and allied health workforce. The practice enjoys support and business planning from Ochre Health head office. Ochre Health Medical Centre Bruce regularly engages with their community with proactive and preventative health measures, such as their recent campaign around Heart Health Checks and reducing cardiovascular risk in their community. They employ a large team of nurses, including a dedicated Chronic Disease Management (CDM) nurse.
"Life before Cubiko, Monday's were a nightmare. Every week on Monday our practice managers would prepare reports. A practice like Bruce, it would take over a day to produce reports and generate into an excel spreadsheet."
We sat down with Maria Haider, Practice Manager at Ochre Health medical centre Bruce, Area Manager Melissa Rixon and Regional Operations Assistant Zoe Davis to discuss their time with Cubiko. We learnt a lot, not just about how Cubiko has impacted their work, but also about the amazing practice they run, how Ochre Health support the practice day-to-day and the community engagement they do for proactive patient care.
The Opportunity
Before Cubiko, each Practice Manager at an Ochre Health practice would spend their Monday’s collating business data and reports for practice improvement and head office visibility. “Life before Cubiko, Monday’s were a nightmare”, laughed Melissa. This would take Ochre Health Medical Centre Bruce the complete eight hours of Monday to fill out.
Across the group, head office lacked insight and detailed analysis into each practice, and a consolidated view of how those practices operated. It was time consuming and difficult to maintain their vast network of spreadsheets. “I couldn’t access every one of the practices in my area’s Best Practice instances all the time, if I saw a report showing billings were down, it was difficult for me to quickly understand why that may be.” Melissa Rixon.
Ochre Health needed a Practice Intelligence Platform that could:
- Support them in providing quality proactive care
- Provide financial and business insights into each practice individually, as well as the group as a whole
- Save time in reporting
- Simplify the process of accessing critical business information
- Help their practitioners provide their base patient care
The Solution
Ochre Health implemented Cubiko across all 60+ of their practices Australia-wide.
Focus towards goals and celebrate success
Ochre Health support their practices across Australia with business planning and goal setting. One great example of this is the weekly practice manager meetings that take place between area managers, operations assistants, and practice managers across the region. In these meetings, the team uses Cubiko to assess and discuss their practice’s performance.
“I love the accountability of revenue insights. We use the weekly summary, our Ochre Pulse, and review it on the zoom call. We ask each practice manager to talk to the results and there’s always a good reason as to why a gap in revenue might exist. The highlight and positive side is celebrating success. Like Ochre Health medical center Bruce, that has had its highest revenue weeks since inception,” says Area Manager Melissa Rixon.
Ochre Pulse, the Cubiko summary dashboard built for Ochre practices is described as the “health check” of that practice. The team work towards a common goal and celebrate the ups and down of running a complicated and expansive organisation.
Data for pro-active patient care campaigns
Ochre Health Medical Centre Bruce, regularly use Cubiko and other systems to find patients that may be eligible for specific items. These reports are then used to reach out to patients in the community and undertake campaigns for proactive care. For instance, Ochre Health head office supported Maria in a Heart Week campaign which included:
- Educational material in the waiting room of the practice
- Flyers sent out to at-risk patients
- Lists of patients who may be eligible distributed to practitioners for discussions about risk factors and potential future appointments with patients
“I’ve been asking our nurses to check Cubiko for certain items, such as the Heart Health Check, Item 699. I think (Cubiko) is a really great idea for the doctors as well.” Maria Haider, Practice Manager.
Action from data insights
One of Maria’s favourite metrics, is billings vs target. “It’s simple, but it’s great to look at. I can see, oh we’re down compared to our target, let’s see what we can do there to get back on target.” The team at Ochre Health Medical Centre Bruce then look at Cubiko and the service opportunities today, for instance care plans or flu vaccines, to act on billings and look to keep it on target. “We can also indicate to some of the doctors, that we have a patient today and they could potentially be eligible for this billing.” Maria Haider, Practice Manager.
Zoe Davis, Operations Assistant, uses Cubiko metrics across practices to support them in managing the day-to-day. “I have my favourites set up, every day I look at the total billings for this week against the rest of the week or the financial year. From that, I look at consulting utilisation and booking utilisation. Finally, I analyse the debtors. If a see the revenue is down, I can then see it’s why because utilisation is down.” Ochre Health support staff use Cubiko’s data insights to keep a pulse on practices and help when needed. “For example at one our practices I could see our utilisation and future utilisation were down. Then we ran a marketing activity for that practice and within a few weeks we can see billings are back on target.”
The Results
8 hours a week saved per practice manager
With automated reporting for Head Office, Practice Managers at Ochre Health now save 8 hours a week in administration time. Using that time to run quality programs and engage their patients.
Increase in Billings by over 10% year on year
Ochre Health Bruce through COVID vaccines and pro-active patient care campaigns were able to increase billings over 10% year on year. Just one simple example of this with Cubiko: $300 in billings were uncovered per week through Unbilled Appointments metric alone.
Last week with Cubiko I was able to recuperate $300 in unbilled appointments just looking at one week, first by finding them in Cubiko and then rectifying them in Best Practice. Quite a bit of income that was also potentially missing for the doctors as well that we were able to help with.