Your practice may be considering adding office hours to accommodate patient requests for more convenient appointment times and to increase revenue. But before you do, you need to carefully weigh the pros and cons. Here are some issues to consider.

Focus on Patient Convenience
Too many practices maintain hours that force working patients to take time off from work to make their appointments. The traditional 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. hours may be fine for patients who are retired, work shift hours, or are full-time students, but they can be tough on those who work during the day. Opening your practice an hour or two earlier, staying open later four evenings a week, or offering weekend hours would be a huge convenience for many patients.

It’s important that you determine whether you’ll have sufficient patient volume to absorb the additional hours you are open. One way to help increase patient volume is to promote your practice’s new hours through patient e-mails, website updates, office signage, and press releases to the local media.

Look at the Economics
Will it be financially worthwhile for you to extend office hours? We can help you run the numbers. For example, if practice overhead is $1,100 per work day and the average reimbursement per patient is $85, it takes about 13 patients per day to cover the overhead. For each additional patient, the practice incurs only variable costs before paying its providers. Once all costs are identified, a projection can be made of the potential profit associated with seeing more patients.

Evaluate Staffing Issues
If the demand exists, it might make sense to add a part-time physician to see patients during your additional office hours. You could reduce provider labor costs by having a physician assistant or nurse practitioner see the bulk of the patients.

Copyright 2015 by DST. All rights reserved.

The general information in this publication is not intended to be nor should it be treated as tax, legal, or accounting advice. Additional issues could exist that would affect the tax treatment of a specific transaction and, therefore, taxpayers should seek advice from an independent tax advisor based on their particular circumstances before acting on any information presented. This information is not intended to be nor can it be used by any taxpayer for the purpose of avoiding tax penalties