Here they are, and here they are. Financial disclosures, no one has anything to report. And then here are your learning objectives. I'm not going to read them, but I think you can all see those. And I'll turn it over in just a second, but if you are applying for AAPC credit, write down this code, 84707YE, as in Ed, and D as in dog. The checkout code for this section is 569872. I'll be around, so if anybody needed those and didn't get them, just come see me. You can enter that in the mobile app with the checkout button. So thank you very much for attending. Thank you, and thank you all for attending. I am going to go back to the learning objectives for just a second, because I do feel they're important for what we're about to talk about. The first one is to evaluate the return on investment achieved through participation in the AOE Benchmarking Survey. We hope to be able to give you some insight into how we use it in our practice and the types of information that you can gain from participation. Discover how orthopedic practices use benchmarking data to improve their performance. It can be invaluable in a lot of cases. And to assess the operational metrics available and how you can use them in orthopedics in different ways. So why is benchmarking important? You know, without benchmarking, do we really know how we're doing? How do you compare to other practices? Are you doing well? Are you not doing well? It's very important, and it allows you to identify things you're doing well and things you're not doing well, your strengths and weaknesses. And those are hard to identify if you're only looking, you know, in a very closed area and only looking at your practice and not seeing what other people are doing and how they're performing. And you can use the data to improve, you know, your operations, your efficiency, patient satisfaction, and your revenue cycle management and the things that play into that. And then important for everybody in here, I'm sure, is compensation. You can use it not only for your physician compensation, but we'll talk about how you can use it for yourselves for practice administrator compensation. So why do the AOE benchmarking survey? There's a lot of surveys out there. You know, there's MGMA. There's other sources. So why should you participate in the AOE benchmarking survey? Well, number one, of course, it's orthopedic specific. If you're doing MGMA, you may be doing it. You know, there's just a lot of specialties thrown in there. Orthopedic, the AOE survey is orthopedic specific. You can go by all practice sizes are represented. Just in our group up here, I represent a very small group. It's five physicians. Beverly represents a group with over 50 physicians. And Chris, how many are in your new group? 12, 15. So there you've got three very different ranges. And you'll see some examples of how that does make a difference with some numbers when you see numbers that come across on the internet and some of the things, the information you may be getting, that may be not as accurate as when you actually drill down and look at things at your practice. Some of the stuff you see in Becker's, you know, they just throw a number out there and that's, you know, you're not sure where they're getting the data with the AOE. You're getting it from orthopedics. We have the online reporting option, which is very nice. You have different options on how to report it in your big group with ortho form. It integrates into the AOE survey because ortho form groups have to do it. We have an online version that walks you through it. Step-by-step gives you instructions. If you're not sure, maybe what data goes into a certain calculation, it'll help you through that. Or if you're, you're pretty savvy and you have a pretty good idea, there's an Excel version where you just fill out the Excel version and submit it and it'll populate to the survey. So we offer a lot of different options on how to complete the survey. But I think that one of the biggest things that really sets it apart from MGMA is the fact that we have filters for custom comparisons. I'm going to show you a couple examples of why that can be very important. When you start looking at different things within your practice and being able to drill down by geographic area, by state, by physician, by population in your area, number of providers and things like that, that some of those other surveys don't offer. So to give you kind of an example right here, if you've been getting Becker's this year, you've probably seen about 15 different numbers listed for average orthopedic surgeon salaries in 2021. I've seen several different averages and, you know, it just depends where they're coming from. But the type of thing that the filters allow you to do, you can look up there. So the average orthopedic surgeon compensation in 2021 was 597,000. But if you go in and you look at a spine surgeon in orthopedics, that's 793,000 versus a general orthopedist, that's 582,000. And that's important when you have a doctor who comes in, who's been talking to his buddies and he's been, you know, out at his ski trip, CME meeting, and he comes back and says, you know, my buddy's making $200,000 more than me. This is just one of the filters that you can go in and look at. You say, yeah, well, you're a general orthopedist. And he's a sports medicine or he's a total joint guy. You can look by specialties, like I said, by provider type, a lot of different filters. And there's another one example here on the same metric. This is the same metric on physician compensation. Size of the group really makes a difference. You see one to five averages 485,000. 13 to 20, the average was 567,000. And the over 20 was 615,000. So you can do that. You can filter it by size and specialty. So you can look at only spine surgeons in groups over 20, or only a general orthopedist in groups 13 to 20. You can use multiple filters to filter through the information and get quality data that you can provide to your physicians. So how have I used the results in my practice? There was a time I took over my practice. I've been with them a long time. But in 2013, I'd been the CEO for two years. And we were having our quarterly business meeting. And prior to that, my practice, how we benchmark was just against ourselves year over year. We'd look at what was the first quarter this year compared to the first quarter last year. And if overhead had gone up, we could drill into that and get an idea. And one of my physicians came to me and said, well, this is all good to know we're doing better than last year. But what does our data mean? How are we doing compared to group across town, a group on the other side of the state, a group on the other side of the country? How does it compare? What are we doing well? And what can we be better at? And I couldn't answer. I just did not have an answer. You know, at the time, the number everyone threw out, if your overhead was over, was 50% in orthopedics, you were doing well. That was a number everybody just kind of went by and everybody kind of, you know, the average compensation back then, I think was in the 490 to 500 range, you know, but again, that's specialty specific. So I couldn't answer him. And one of my other doctors, he's my doctor. I'm sure you all have one. And if a band-aid costs a dollar, he wants to know why we don't get it for 99 cents. I mean, he questions everything, but he came to me and he said, you know, Terry, you can tell me anything you want, but if I don't see the data, it means nothing to me. You can tell me that wall is black. And if you show me data that says that wall is black, I'll believe it. So that got me thinking of, you know, what do we need to do to be able to improve our practice, to see how we're really doing? Because we thought we were doing well. So I went out, and that first year I purchased the AOE. You know, I had not participated, so I went out and I purchased the result. And it was very eye-opening. There were some things we were doing well, you know, and you could kind of know that. You know in your practice, you know what's making money. You know what's not. But it also allowed you to look at why you're doing well, why you're making money. And then there were some things that, you know, were very eye-opening. And so now I had the data, and he said I need to show him the data. But, you know, there's a lot of doctors, you know, I'm sure you don't want to. If you've done the benchmarking survey, there's a lot of information in it. There's a lot of reports. So I had to come up with a way, very short, concise, in how to show them the data. Everybody knows their practice. You know what your doctors want. It's what they come in and talk to you about, you know, every other day, some of them. So I created this. This is an individual physician dashboard. This is what every one of my doctors gets every year after we get our AOE benchmarking results. They each get an individual one, and it's color-coded for them to make it easy. And so on the right-hand side is where they, the far right is where they were for the year. And then whatever color it's highlighted is where they fall within that metric. And there's other metrics. Again, you know your practice, so you know what's important, what your doctors want to know. So obviously this doctor was doing very well. He was in the 90th percentile in a lot of areas, 25th percentile in his overhead. So he was doing well. Other doctors in the practice, not so much. And one thing that this did, this goes to the individual doctor, but it spurred a lot of discussion among the partners. They started sharing information. And a big one for us was new patient visits and total number of office visits per physician. I had, for some doctors, that thought they were seeing the same number of patients running the same schedule as others. They were off by 1,500 to 2,000 visits per year compared to others. So they started looking at the templates for the schedules of the doctors who were doing well. And it spurred a big change in our practice where almost all of my partners changed their templates based on this to get more in line with what the top performing physician was doing. And this is actually, this model has been incorporated into the benchmarking results. We now have some dashboards that show the key components from the survey, so it's a lot easier to find when looking through stuff. So again, that was the individual physician dashboard. This is what they get on a clinic measure. And this deals more with the things we do, you know, MRI and PT, and some other things. And again, we took our overhead. At this time, our overhead was running about 56%. And since we've been doing that, the highest our overhead has been has been about 45%. Last year was about 43%. So looking at these things and making changes, it forced some older doctors to take a hard look at themselves. And, you know, you can't be in the 90th percentile in compensation and the 25th percentile in production. It's just not going to work. And a lot of older doctors have trouble understanding that, that when they slow down their practice, they need to slow down their draws. But again, when you show them data and you're in a room with a bunch of doctors and you've got one guy who's kind of dragging everybody down, it can force some hard conversations. But in today's day and age, you've got to do everything you can to help the bottom line. So this has been just a very effective way for us to use the data in a lot of different situations to affect change in our practice. And I'm going to turn it over, Chris, now about he's kind of taken some of this idea too, and done some custom for his practice. Thank you. And I actually, Terry and I have been working on the committee for many years, and I actually got this idea, Terry presented, I don't know if it was two years ago or last year, what you just saw. And so I, and as an update as well, I am now at Bell Summit Orthopedic and Neurosurgery. And so when I came on, I started in December. I didn't have a good feel and a sense of how the clinic was doing. And so since I had access to this data for AOE, I was able to plug in the numbers. And so basically what I provided for each doctor based on, you see the upper left-hand corner, the subspecialty. So this particular one is sports. And the lower table is essentially the AOE data. Okay. So I could, in theory, just drop that lower table. Maybe it's just a bit extra noise, but I wanted to give the docs a sense of what, you know, how they're doing and what's interesting because it's, you know, as Terry mentioned, there has not been a whole lot of understanding basically of how they're comparing. And so many of the docs came to me and said, yeah, I am just, I'm killing it. You know, they're busy. And in this particular case, you know, he's doing well, but some of the docs, you know, when I shared with them that it was interesting to see the responses when I shared with them, yeah, you're about 40, 45% of the national average, you know, one response was, well, there's some work to be done. And another response was, which you'll get as well as I don't believe these numbers. So the responses vary. Our intent here, my intent here was to take a look first with the patient visits, the new patients, surgery case cases, and then the ratio of surgery to new patients. And then, of course, we have the work RVU, the collection, collection for RVU, total overhead, total compensation, W2, and then total compensation. And this would include if you have an ASC, which can vary greatly. So this is going to be ASC plus if you have MRI, plus if you have PT. And so this was kind of an indicator of, Hey, you know, how are they doing now? One thing that I did add, and I have to admit it wasn't me, but if you take a look at the third column to the left, the percent of AOE instead, because AOE is going to report on 25th percentile, 50th industry average, median 75th and 90th percentile. And I didn't like the fact that I couldn't drill down even further. So I dug deep. I sought someone out with a whole lot more know-how and experience, which was our youngest daughter. She has a degree in math and she was able to quickly show me some formulas to kind of modify this. So basically for that top line, for example, percent of AOE. Let's see here. Yeah. So the percent is 65%. And so instead of saying, well, yeah, you're above the median. I don't know how much above the median. We're able to drill it down to a specific percentage, which I think is helpful. And that has been fairly consistent across the board. So, yeah, you know, one thing that I just ran into is I am still trying to get a sense of what's going on in the clinic, but I noticed that our APPs didn't have a whole lot of collection. And so I've taken a look at that and I, you know, ran some numbers compared to the work I've used and whatnot. And indeed we are, we're not utilizing our mid-levels as we should. And so that brings up a whole lot of the questions, the process of everything else. How do we, you know, utilize them in surgery? I mean, they're very much big on having the PA there in surgery. And I'm kind of going more of the philosophy, hey, they're going to be far better off or we all collectively are if they're seeing patients and generating patients who need surgery. So, so there's a lot of nice data and bits of information there. So, you know, again, Terry and I have been doing this for years with, you know, putting on, you know, some of these, you know, conferences and whatnot with AOE, with, you know, the benchmarking. It's great to have Beverly. Beverly has great experience in this as well with the larger clinic and a lot more data. And heavily involved with ortho form. But I think a very common thing is, you know what? I don't have the time. I don't have the time. And I guess my only response to it is, you know, and some people like just to buy the book, buy the data. And the problem is the data isn't going to mean anything to you unless you do it yourself. And so if you're just going to buy that thinking that you're just going to buy the data, you're going to have to do all the work anyway, to have make any sense of it. And I guess my perspective is, you know, I could say I don't have the time or am I going to just simply make it a priority? And I get, I get we're all busy. I get we're all busy, but it's something I just simply have had to power through at times. It's certainly not convenient. It's not at a convenient time. And we got a question in the back. That is correct, and that's the same with OrthoConnect as well. So, all of that. Yeah. Great, I'm going to turn it over to Beverly. So in my practice, our orthopedic surgeons are all A students, and when you tell them through benchmarking information that they are below average, they are primed to change strategy and operation to improve. All of our physicians are data-driven, they're decision-makers, and respond well to hard numbers and comparisons of peer groups. Best practices, information backed by data, is management's best tool. And we use the benchmarking data of success and failure of peer groups to push initiatives or kill non-core mission projects. That's from Dr. Bush-Joseph, who's in my practice. Do any of your doctors, do you feel that they would be the same, they would feel the same way? Yeah. From Dr. Frazier-Jones, President and Managing Partner of the Orthopedic Clinic, since we started using data from the AAOE Benchmarking Survey, we have used it to analyze service lines, production, compensation, and efficiency within our practice. Thanks to the data from the survey, we've made changes in our practice that have resulted in increased volumes, higher revenue, and decreased overhead across the board. It's invaluable to be able to cut through all the noise and get the data from a source that's 100% orthopedic-focused. And this goes back to what Terri was talking about, where you can apply all those filters. Many of them, you know, it's even location-specific, whether you're in Central U.S. or Eastern or Western. That makes a big difference in compensation, revenue. There's a lot of differences. Even in Florida, I know the Medicare population is a lot higher. There's a lot of differences that happen in location, as well as with size of practice. Is there anything that you all are struggling with data-wise, like looking to find data or anything that you want to have access to that you don't currently have, that you might be able to find in the benchmarking data? Great. What about you, Terri? I know you had some experience with that when you... Yeah, I mean, we've used it. Can everybody hear me? Oh, here. We've used it a good bit in analyzing service lines, when you start thinking about adding PT and adding MRI, and you're trying to create proformas. You know, I was at the group discussion yesterday, and someone raised their hand and said, is anyone making money in PT? She said, I've heard that you can't make money in PT. Well, across the board, most people can make money in PT. And if you go to the... When you're creating a proforma, you can go in and you can look at your state, and you can see what the average revenue per patient is, per patient visit, what your profit is. So we've used it a lot in analyzing service lines. And if it's something we want to bring on board, we looked at podiatry. It didn't work for us, but we used the information in the survey to kind of vet that out. We use it to make changes in ancillary. We thought we were doing very well with our MRI, but when we looked at the survey that first time, we were paying a lot more than the average for our reads than a lot of people would. So we went back and negotiated our reads down to be more in line with what the average was. But that's information we'd have never known if we hadn't... You can talk to another practice that you know somebody, but to be able to have... We had 101 practices in the survey for 2021. And that's across section everywhere from Alaska. We have a member here from Alaska, all the way down to the tip of Florida. So you're getting a broad spectrum of information from across the country, different sizes. And you can use that to look at things and to make decisions. Not saying you have to use it to... It's hard and fast. This is what it has to be. This is what the survey says. But it does allow you to look at things from different perspectives, see what you're doing well and make changes. And physicians are creatures of habit, and it's hard to get someone to change. When you start talking about how these changes can affect the bottom line, like my managing partner said there, by being more efficient and increasing revenue, that drove down overhead. And of course, what's that going to do? If your overhead's going down and your revenue's going up, your compensation's going up tremendously for your partners. And that looks good for everybody. So it definitely has been useful for us from that perspective in terms of looking at different service lines and looking at what we can improve in. And we continue to improve. We've done stuff and we think we're doing well, and then the survey comes out and we're not doing as well anymore because healthcare's ever-changing. It changes year to year, and then with regulations and reimbursement, you never know where you fall. So you need to be on top of it. And this is just a great tool to do it because, like I said, it's orthopedic-specific, and you can just look at it from so many different, the filters and everything. So that's why, before I turn it back over to Beverly to ask some more questions, you've got four members of the data council here. Is there anything in your practices that you, like Beverly said, data-wise that we could be helping you with? Because if you tell us, we're really struggling with this, if it's not in the survey, we can look at getting it added. So we're very open to that. Or if you see one of us and want to say something. Yes? Is it scientifically intuitive how to go through the work and how to find out the data? And if it's support, would that need to be contacted? For support, you can contact AOE, and they will, if they can't help you, they'll get you in touch with a member of the council. We've all done calls with people. And yes, it's very, you can enter, you go to the reports you want, it's got all your filters listed. You can pick your filter, and then it's going to come up in a graph or a table, and it's going to show you the percentiles, and then you can see if it's in a graph and you want to see the table, you can click on it, and it's going to show you several years. And it's going to show your practice. If you've done the survey and your data's in there, it's going to show where your practice falls within the survey. Following up on that, though, if you do utilize the report, and if you see something that doesn't seem right, if you see something that, hey, this isn't, because there have been times I get a bit confused, even though I've been doing it for some time, you know, speak up, drop AOE a line, because, you know, we need that feedback. We need that feedback. But, you know, as far as some of the uses as well, I was at a conference a few years back and an orthopedic surgeon was up speaking. And he said, he made this claim that, you know what, orthopedic surgeons don't care what they make. And he said, well, they don't, they only care what the other guys make. And so there's, you know, there is some truth to that in some aspects, right? And so something that we have really, because, you know, coming to a new clinic, I get a lot of feedback of, and I know none of you have had this, so that's why I'm bringing it up, because it's so unique. And that is, you know, the compensation isn't fair. And so for all of you, you know, for a few of you who have had to deal with that, you know, one of the approaches I take is basically, okay, so you're a total joint doctor and a total joint doctor's, you know, what's the median work-art view for a total joint doctor? Oh, it's this, okay. So you fall within what range of that? And then what's the median salary or compensation of a total joint doctor? Oh, you fall within this range. And I, you know, look, it's not as if, oh, it's super easy and that solves everything. But I do think that is a way to take a look and say, you know what, you're probably doing okay. If there's a, you know, there's a correlation there and that, because, you know, as practices typically are becoming more and more diverse and more subspecialties are being added, it becomes more and more difficult to find that balance of, quote, fairness. And so turning to the data can help that. Now, of course, the trick is, okay, what type of formula, what type of complaint can get you there? That's a whole nother discussion, but at least it's an area, if there's some sort of correlation that does help ease that quite a bit. So that's one of the main things that I basically started with, with that, using that data. I wanted to bridge on that. So my CFO just asked me a couple of weeks ago, we're looking to hire a new physiatrist and we wanted to know what the, you know, the median compensation was for the physiatrist. So I was able to go to AAOE and print out the data for him. And then we've also had recently our sports PCP docs saying they're not making enough money. So I went there again and printed out the data from AAOE and it helped inform the decisions on, you know, how to approach those doctors and how to write the contract for the physiatrist. So we've used it many times. You know, it really goes back to, like I said, my doctor said, just show me the data. You can't argue with the numbers. And to talk about what Beverly said, you know, I use it a lot with my PAs who think that they should be paid like doctors. Even though my PAs, I'm ashamed to say, are some of the highest paid when you look at the survey. They've got it pretty well. But it's very good. To me, it is a great education tool for your providers to do like Chris was talking about, to educate them on, you know, like I said earlier, if you're the 25th percentile for production but you're in the, you know, 75th percentile for salary, there's something there that's not sustainable. And so to me, that's a tremendous help. All right. So how have you used the benchmarking survey to justify or increase your compensation? Anyone here? Would anyone like to know about that? I've used it every year just to show what, you know, salary increase is, bonus, and that kind of thing. And I think it's been really helpful. We were two smaller groups at first seven years ago. And we were 102 years before. So it was a new role. I think the salary was a little eye-opening. But to say, okay, here's the median for everybody is super, super helpful. And I just went through this. I'll go one step further. I used the survey a lot, you know, in my time there to justify my compensation. But I went a step further this year when the discussion came up. You know, they asked me for a list of what I currently, you know, because they don't know. They own the practice. They don't know what you're making. I mean, they really don't. They just see it on a line item at the quarterly meeting. But I gave them a list of that. And then I showed them the AOE data from 2021 that showed, you know, for groups our size, where I fell. But then they said, again, so what does that mean? So then I pulled out the physician compensation and physician overhead and showed them that they were all in the 90th percentile for physician compensation for a group our size. And our overhead was in the 25th percentile. And I got a very nice raise because they figured if they're in the 90th percentile, that they needed to bump me up to be closer to that for a group our size. So it's very useful. Again, the data is everything. And having that when you go into that, you know, when employees come to you, that's the worst. When people come to you for a raise, you know, you don't want to talk. You just don't. It's bad because you're worried about the bottom line. Imagine when you have to go. I even had one of my doctors, my managing partner, the first time I went through it, he said, well, I'll be honest with you. I'd hate to have to come in here and ask this group for a raise, you know, just knowing the physicians. But if you have the data, like I said, it worked out very well for me this time. So I've definitely used it. Have you, Chris? Yeah, I certainly have in a number of ways. I mean, some years it would be tied to, hey, if the overhead percentage is a national average, my bonus would be at the national average for, you know, the group's similar size and then also the basis, you know, for the base salary. So there are a number of ways to do it. It just kind of depends on what the needs are. But, yeah, absolutely. And I think for the rest of us, too, as you get down into more details of, you know, lower-level employees, that information is helpful. But then, you know, we have to be careful, though, too, when we start talking regionally. You know, you want the data set to be as big as possible to be as, you know, more accurate. And so some of those things have some regional issues, but certainly, and I know we're trying to collect more data currently on kind of general staff, but that certainly can help because that data is fairly hard to get out there. I don't know how many of you have tried to do that, but it's, you know, what they typically do, these companies, they will say, oh, so you come from a, you know, a community of 50,000, and they'll just pick random places. They're not necessarily picking the community you come from. And so when I found that out, I was a bit more leery of the data I was getting, which was quite expensive, too, by the way. So, you know, the hope is more data can certainly be collected that just drill down further into the weeds with that. No, certainly. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And you just have to take into account that, hey, it's, you know, but then again, what else are you going to use? You know? When you pull up the data, like we were talking about in the report, it's going to show you four or five years. It's not just going to show you 2021. It's going to go back. So you'll be able to get it. Because like you said, it's definitely... I mean, in Alabama, where I am, we were shut down for basically 30 days on surgery. And I know some people were shut down for, you know, six to 10 months. So my numbers are going to be very different than a lot of the people. So we had a lot of talks about that with the council, especially in 2020. You know, in 2021, a lot of people had recovered or were back to some sense of normalcy. But 2020 was the year that really we thought we'd see some skewed numbers. And actually, it really didn't turn out to be that bad. What suffered was we did have less participation because a lot of clinics said, I'm not going to participate because my data is not going to mean anything because it's going to be skewed. So that hurt us. But we rebounded a little bit last year. Like I said, we were up to 101. Well, there's, we've had, Vicky is in the back, I think, Vicky, we had, what did we peak at, about 170 a couple years ago? And so you all know that is Vicky Sprague. Vicky is with AAOE and she's the person if you had a problem, you would probably email Vicky and she would either get back to you or get in touch with us. So speaking back to a little something that Chris said about kind of the time involvement and you know, does it take a long time? I just completed my 2022 data. It took me about six hours total, but I didn't do it all at once. You know, I did a little bit at a time. One thing that's important or one thing that's going to be different is it depends on your role within the organization and what you have access to. For me in a smaller group, 80 employees, I have access to everything, you know, pretty much all my compensation data was the stuff I pulled for my end of the year reporting. So I just saved that in a folder, you know, my P&Ls and then my, you know, I've got access to the 401k stuff and the W-2s because I, you know, obviously doing everything. But if you're in a bigger practice like Beverly, you know, Beverly is probably going to have to call five or six different departments to get all the information because she may not know some of the human resource stuff. So that can be the kind of the challenge just depending on your role in the practice and how much access you have to the information. You may have to involve other people within the practice to get some of it. So, I'm hearing from you, it's very bad at the time. I think we have to start answering questions that we didn't have. If you have a question, we want to hear from you. Definitely an investment. We use the benchmarking data for a lot of different things. Can you tell me about how you created a culture that supports data-driven versus emotional-driven decisions? Yeah, I mean, coming to the new practice, I think I came to realize that a lot of decisions were emotionally based and there wasn't a bunch of data to either justify it. And so, going forward, it's trying to just simply change that mindset of let's try to justify these decisions and come to a conclusion via data. And sometimes the benchmarking survey is going to help. Other times, with adding new positions and everything else, it might not be as effective as far as the need, but there's data that could be pulled off for that. But yeah, there are a number of areas that just let's see if it all makes sense and just take a pause, so. And like I mentioned earlier, it can be very difficult when you have to go to a member of your practice who's been there 25, 30 years, when you're talking about emotional versus data-driven, and you say, look, you're just not doing it. Financially, you've got to make some changes. That can be very difficult, but you just have to stick to your guns and your decision. Again, if you're basing it on the data, it's really hard to argue and the key is having good data. And I think the AOE survey provides the best data for those of us in orthopedics. It will be better data, going back to the question there, if we can get more people to participate. That's obviously the goal. And I do agree with Olivia that sometimes I think it would be better to look at from the number of physicians, more than the number of practices that participate. Because Beverly and I combined are two practices, but that's 60 physicians. There's a big difference between comparing two practices with four physicians. So the data is only as good as the data we get and we need as much as possible. And I understand it's a time commitment, but to me, it's been so invaluable to my practice and to getting things turned around and getting our revenues up and our overhead down. Does anyone have any questions or comments or any, you're curious about the survey or just have anything else to add? I would just encourage everybody to do it. I mean, it's a lot of work. It takes a lot of time, but it's so beneficial. I mean, I've more used it for ancillary comparisons. So, you know, our DME and PT, when I compared it to everybody else was not great. You know, so you're able to talk to other people and find out, okay, what do you do that we're not doing? And I tasked the managers of that area to network with their peers and find out, you know, what is it? Is it, you know, units per visit? Is it what you're billing for when PT patients are coming in? Is it the DME? You know, is it a contract issue or is it, you know, what we're doing? I mean, there's all kinds of interesting things. And, you know, I like numbers, so it's worth the time and effort and space to do it. And I saw a lot of hands for us. So if anybody who's not doing it, to do it. Yes, help our numbers. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good plug. Thank you. You know, some ideas for you who are doing the survey or are going to start it, some of the things I did, and I'm sure Terry and Beverly have, and maybe some of you have some ideas as well, is there are a certain number of reports that are needed. And so what I did is, so as you, you know, see what data is needed, I created and kind of customized those reports, put them in a folder, you know, and called it AOE Benchmarking Folder. And so I just have to go in and change the date span. And so those reports, suddenly I'm not searching for them, they're just all right there. Number one, or two, with our accounting system, I ended up, and of course, kind of starting all over with a new group, but what I did in my old clinic was, I did a lot of the accounting, you know, the accounts, chart of accounts based off some of these questions of expenses. Because at the end of the day, you know, I really don't need to know, to customize it around the survey was far easier, I felt. And so when those reports were run, because before, you know, I'm just trying to think of like, I would have to take, you know, like a building expense or something would include, you know, the rent, would include janitorial or something, and, you know, like two or three other things, maintenance. And so to kind of lump those together, then to actually fill out the report is just far easier. Otherwise I took the whole, you know, all the expenses and had all these, you know, lines and circles and add this to this and that to that. And I'm just thinking, why am I doing this every single year? You know, why don't I just have it, you know, mirror, you know, the questions. And then it got easier, until you go to a new clinic. So, yes. How do you find the spreadsheet to get started? I know we've already submitted the data. I didn't do it myself. Someone in accounting submitted our report for them. But I'm just curious if somebody wants to start, what's step one? The AOE should have sent an email out, but if you reach out to data at aoe.net and request a copy of the survey, they will get it to you. You request what format you want it from, if you want to do the online, or if you want to do the Excel spreadsheet, and AOE will send it to you. Or if you're an ortho forum, like we said, you can just submit it, what you do for ortho forum. One last incentive for those of you thinking of doing it. The AOE has added some incentives this year for, in the past, we've kind of done them at the end to encourage practices. This year, we've taken the philosophy of we're going to reward practices that get their data in early. Because the earlier we can get it in, the earlier we can have the reports. We hope to have them out in October, but sometimes, because the AOE can look and someone will start a survey, and they'll be 90% done, and they just haven't done that last 10%. So we try to give them the benefit of the doubt. But there are some nice incentives. If you go to, are they on the website, Vicky, at AOE? If you go to the AOE website, they'll talk about the incentives. And the sooner you get it in, the greater the incentives. I think some of them are free registration for the conference next year in Chicago, which there's a return on your investment for your practice right there if they don't, you get a free registration. So obviously, you've all been getting sold on stuff since you got here, and we are trying to sell you on doing the survey. But there's nothing in it for the three of us up here for you doing the survey, other than getting good data that's going to benefit all of us and help us all manage our practice, so. Does anybody have any questions? I think we finished a little bit early. Does anyone have any questions or we'll be around? Yes. Well, the actionable item leads you to the investigation. Like for me, with that visit issue, where we had that discrepancy in the number of visits, we started looking at it and it made people look at changing their templates, maybe their flow, maybe they had too many surgery follow-ups at a certain time and how could they better see patients. And then for me too, that MRI question, we saw that our, it didn't tell me that my reads were what was the problem. It just showed me that my average revenue per scan was below the average. So we started looking in what are our costs and I started talking to some people. I talked to some other people at MRI and found out that we were, our read fees were out of line and so that's what led to that. So you take the data, you use the data to identify what you're doing well and hopefully build on that, but you identify where there's a problem and then that allows you to drill into the problem and find what the cause is, talk to people and then hopefully develop a solution. So then when you do the survey the next year, you see a change and it will, like I said, it does show you, you know, you'll have a graph and it'll show you how you've progressed or if you've declined in an area when you get your results. Do we have another question over here? That is a group, what's the minimum, you have to have, is it 25 physicians, 20? It's for large practices. Yeah. Okay. I used it once. My problem with MGMA is a lot of those are hospital and institution-based, like, you know, for me, UAB is the big health system in the state, so a lot of the MGMA data is coming from hospital-employed physicians, and they obviously have different problems than we do, than private practice, so. We submit data to MGMA and we get the results for free. It's just it's a good way to see two different sets of data as well. We compare and contrast and we use it as well. Any more questions? Well thank you all. Well I will say tomorrow morning we have a benchmarking data entry class like it's going to talk go through all of the pieces that are needed to enter data and what you'll need what type of reports to pull and we'll give you some hints and tricks and tips as well tomorrow morning. Thank you. Yes. It's in the book. I think it was in code is three nine four six zero one. Thank you all again. I hope you'll participate.

AOE Benchmarking Survey

orthopedic practices

performance evaluation

data-driven decisions

operational metrics

financial performance

compensation structures

incentives for participation