Do You Actually Know Your Numbers?
Three numbers run your revenue cycle. Most practice owners cannot name one of them.
Your denial rate. Your clean claim rate. The share of your accounts receivable sitting past 90 days.
These are not accounting trivia. They are the vital signs of your practice. A doctor would never treat a patient without vitals. Yet owners run million-dollar practices without ever checking theirs.
Here are the lines, so you know what good looks like. MGMA benchmarks say your clean claim rate should run 90% or better. Your denial rate should stay under 5%. Your aging claims past 90 days should stay under 15%.
Now the uncomfortable part. If your aging claims past 90 days is over 20%, you do not have a payer problem. You have a follow-up problem. If your denial rate sits in double digits, you do not have bad luck. You have a front-end problem. The numbers do not flatter anyone. That is what makes them useful.
Why do so few owners run them? Because nobody taught them to. Billing feels like something that happens in the background while you do the clinical work. Claims go out. Money comes in. As long as payroll clears, the system must be working.
It is not. Money coming in is not the same as all the money you earned coming in. The gap between those two numbers is where practices quietly bleed. Denied claims that never get reworked. Each one costs $52.74 in labor to fix, according to the 2026 Availity Abrasion Index. And most of them should never have been denied at all. Change Healthcare research found 86% of denials are potentially avoidable. Small balances written off because nobody wanted to chase them. Claims aging past 120 days until they expire.
Then there is the Friday night problem. If you have ever spent a Friday night in a payer portal, chasing claims you already earned, you know the real cost is not just money. It is your evenings, your weekends, your attention. Five hours a week at your effective rate is an expensive staffing plan with one burned-out employee: you.
So here is the one useful idea for this week. Pull the three numbers.
Your denial rate: denied claims divided by total claims submitted, over the last 90 days. Your clean claim rate: claims paid on first submission with no rework. Your aging claims past 90 days: dollars over 90 days divided by total aging claims. Your practice management system can produce all three. If you cannot find them, that tells you something too.
Compare each one to the MGMA lines. Wherever you miss, you now have a job list instead of a vague worry. That is the whole point of measurement. It turns anxiety into assignments.
Knowing the numbers is step one. Fixing what they reveal is step two. That is what our Practice Health Check does. It is an annual physical for your revenue cycle. A Practice Wellness Expert spends 2 to 5 days taking your practice's vitals across all seven stages: Credentialing, Human Resources, Patient Registration, Eligibility and Benefits, Payment Posting, Aging Follow-Up, and Claim Submission. You get a wellness score plus a detailed report of what is working, what is missing, and exactly what to fix.
And if you want to understand the system behind the numbers first, I am teaching it live. On Thursday, October 29, 2026, from 12:00 to 1:00 PM Eastern, I am running a free webinar: Group Practice Billing Blueprint. Thirty minutes on the six-stage billing system, fifteen minutes on the Practice Health Check, fifteen minutes of live Q and A. Every attendee gets a free copy of my book, The Billing Blueprint, and attendees get 15% off a Practice Health Check.
Pull your three numbers this week. Then come learn what to do about them.
Comments