Three eClinicalWorks Reports Worth Reading Every MonthInsights

Most practices run reports and still cannot answer basic questions. Three reports, run the same way every month, cover most of it.

Every practice management system produces more reports than anyone reads. The problem is rarely a shortage of data. It is that reports get run differently each time, so the numbers cannot be compared month to month and nobody trusts them enough to act.

Three reports, run consistently, answer most of what an owner needs to know.

In the builds we work in, this is report 36.14. Report numbering varies between versions and configurations, so confirm the equivalent in your own build before standardising on it. What matters is the content: charges, payments, contractual adjustments, payer withholds and refunds in a single extract.

That is everything required to calculate net collection rate, the one collections measure that keeps its meaning when a fee schedule changes. It also lets you separate contractual adjustments, which are contractual, from write-offs, which are choices and are where avoidable losses hide.

Not the summary. The version that shows each payer against the aging buckets, so you can see whether the over-90 problem is one payer or all of them. Read it as percentages of total A/R rather than dollars, because dollars move with volume while percentages show the pattern.

This shows whether collections per provider are moving, and it surfaces charge lag when a provider's charges consistently land in the month after their visits.

This is where most reporting confusion starts, and the answer is not one or the other.

• Group by transaction month when the question is about cash. What did we collect in September, and how does that compare with August? Payments arrive months after the visit, so a cash question grouped by service date will never reconcile to the bank.
• Group by service month when the question is about a cohort of visits. What did the work we performed in April eventually collect, and how long did it take? This is the only way to see net collection rate for a period of care, and it needs enough run-out — usually 90 to 120 days — before it means anything.

Problems arise when the two are mixed inside one report, or when the same report is run one way in January and the other way in February. Pick the grouping to match the question, label it on the output, and keep it consistent month to month.

• Use a rolling twelve months. A single month is noise; one large payment or a batch of adjustments swings it by several points.
• Exclude test and internal payers, and apply the same exclusions every time.
• Save the parameters. A report run from memory is a new report each month.