Independent physician practices are continuing to dwindle in numbers. Nearly 80% of all physicians were affiliated with hospitals, health systems, or corporate entities as of 2023 — a marked increase over 74% in 2022, according to the Physicians Advocacy Institute. Likewise, the American Medical Association (AMA) found that from 2019-2022 the number of physicians employed by either a hospital or a hospital-owned medical practice increased from 29% to 41%.
Significant challenges that independent physician practices face include the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) payment reductions for 2025. The CMS 2025 physician payment rule conversion factor decreases by 2.83% from 2024, while the physician fee schedule conversion factor is down from $33.29 in 2024 to $32.35 for 2025 as well. These reductions have the AMA saying providers face “an unsustainable trend,” and the Medical Group Management Association explaining that CMS’ final rule throws “the financial viability of physician practices into question.”
To survive amid these challenges independent physician practice leaders must ensure their teams are capturing and collecting as close to 100% of their charges as possible or they risk sacrificing their financial sustainability, independence, and other benefits of private practice.
To learn more about how Ingenious Med is helping independent physician practices maximize revenue, schedule a demo today
Looking to the future, medical practices can minimize risk and optimize financial viability by implementing point-of-care solutions that are effective at accurately capturing 100% of charges and associated revenues, minimizing denials, and leveraging actionable productivity and performance insights.
Five ways that Ingenious Med can empower independent physician practices to generate and collect more revenue in the near-term are to:
- Use advanced point-of-care charge capture tools
- Improve charge note reconciliation and decrease missing bills
- Enhance productivity by gaining rapid insights into patient volumes
- Use real-time smart analytics to monitor and enhance performance
- Improve healthcare workflows through automation
1. Use advanced point-of-care charge capture tools
Many independent doctors practice at multiple facilities that use a range of EHRs and technology systems that may not communicate with their own practice management system. Even those fortunate enough to have a single EHR may have to deal with multiple instances of that same EHR or use cumbersome charge capture tools that tend to miss complex, high-dollar charges. That can seriously impact cash flow and revenues.
Making revenue cycle management (RCM) even more difficult, EHR vendors have been adding inexpensive but lackluster charge capture features to their platforms. While their price point may at first seem attractive, they lack robust real-time analytics and reporting and as a result are creating a charge capture conundrum that leads to physician practices drifting away from their financial goals.
What independent physician practices need instead are comprehensive charge capture tools for revenue optimization. Ingenious Med’s robust point-of-care charge capture tools empower practices to:
- Reduce the complexity of medical coding with automated menus that prioritize the most used codes
- Track patient care episodes via real-time census and appointment data feeds
- Avoid or reduce denials
- Speed reimbursement turnaround times to improve cash flow
Learn more about Ingenious Med’s cutting-edge technologies for: Revenue Optimization | Data Intelligence | Value-Based Alignment | Extending the EHR
2. Improve charge note reconciliation and decrease missing bills
Automated charge tracking and analysis tools quickly uncover and address gaps in the revenue stream. Practices can also apply reliability science to optimize revenue with Charge Note Reconciliation and Document Viewing capabilities to reduce reimbursement delays, audit risk, and denied claims in independent physician practices.
Ingenious Med’s advanced software functionalities empower practices to:
- Lighten clinician workloads with automatic prompts and intelligent code filters
- Automatically identify and prevent missing charges and assign missing bills to the right provider
- Alert providers to missed bills via in-platform chat, visual indicators, and push notifications
- Improve resolution of charge issues using mobile push notifications and secure messages
- Enable revenue cycle staff to track and directly address missed charges in real-time
3. Enhance productivity by gaining rapid insights into patient volumes
Physician practices have had to adapt to far greater volume shifts in recent years. That makes it more challenging than ever to appropriately manage clinician staffing levels so practices can meet productivity targets without contributing to stress and burnout. At the same time, the industry’s ongoing workforce challenges make it essential for a medical practice to have a point-of-care solution that can deliver timely insights into patient volumes and physician workloads.
Ingenious Med’s actionable practice performance insights equip practices to:
- Deliver timely point-of-care insights into patient volumes and physician workloads
- Present that information to practice leaders via an intuitive dashboard to monitor workload and productivity
- Identify trends to inform planning for dips and surges in patient volumes
- Track and report quality measures to advance value-based care initiatives
Looking for more insights about your organization’s revenue cycle performance? Use the Ingenious Med RCM Scorecard to determine where you are most effectively achieving key revenue cycle metrics — and identify areas in need of urgent improvement.
4. Use real-time smart analytics to monitor and enhance performance
Ingenious-Med funded research shows that 78% of executives leading physician practices, hospitals, and health systems want smart analytics incorporated into their RCM solutions. Specifically, the leaders are looking for smart analytics to improve their organization’s financial performance by identifying under- and over-coding instances to help capture more of the 11% of revenue survey respondents are leaving on the table.
Ingenious Med’s practice optimization and provider performance analytics enable physician groups to optimize productivity and allow providers and administrators to share real-time data to uncover trends that identify underlying issues. The technology enhances a medical group’s ability to:
- Evaluate and standardize performance across the entire organization or among individual providers
- Demonstrate value to hospital partners and payers during negotiations
- Catch revenue cycle flow issues before they impact the bottom line
- Identify areas of opportunity to improve performance with real-time dashboards
- Track and visualize KPIs across charges captured, RVUs, individual LOS, readmissions, and other metrics
5. Improve healthcare workflows through automation
Our research also illustrates the evolving mindset of healthcare finance and operations leaders when it comes to the promise of artificial intelligence. In 2023, survey participants were merely optimistic that AI could at some point help improve revenue cycles. But in 2025 leaders are now strategically investing in the technologies to improve their revenue cycles. Eighty-five percent say AI can perform well at managing RCM processes, two-thirds are planning to leverage AI for coding and denials prevention, and 73% agree that AI will be widespread in revenue cycles within five years.
As the utility of intelligent and automated RCM technologies becomes increasingly apparent, in fact, the technologies are gaining wider adoption. MasterCoder, which uses semi-coding automation, is one of many tools in the broader Ingenious Med revenue cycle portfolio that equips clients to improve coding accuracy, reduce denials, and augment their workforce so people spend more time on complex tasks, operate efficiently, and maximize revenue — all essential to practices’ financial viability and sustained independence.
Related Insights from Ingenious Med:
Too Many EHRs Hurting Your Revenue Cycle?
Case Study: How TeamHealth Built a ‘Hospital Medicine Productivity Program’
The Untapped Power of Revenue Cycle Management Tools: Care Team Collaboration,
The Urgent AI Opportunity in Revenue Cycle Management: Creating a Competitive Advantage,
Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of an Ingenious Med article that was first published on April 4, 2023.