Glossary

Clinic finance and growth, in plain English

Definitions for the terms that come up most in our reports and on calls with clinic owners. If a term you care about is missing, email us and we'll add it.

CCM (Chronic Care Management): Monthly Medicare-billable program for patients with 2+ chronic conditions. CPT 99490 baseline plus add-ons. Reimbursement is recurring and adds up fast for primary care panels with high Medicare share.
RPM (Remote Patient Monitoring): Reimbursement for collecting and reviewing patient physiologic data from devices (BP cuffs, glucometers). CPT 99453, 99454, 99457, 99458.
TCM (Transitional Care Management): Bills for managing a patient in the 30 days after hospital discharge. CPT 99495/99496. Frequently under-billed because the workflow is post-visit, not in-visit.
AWV (Annual Wellness Visit): Medicare's preventive annual visit. Standalone billable code plus opens the door to add-on preventive services in the same encounter.
Payer mix: The percentage breakdown of revenue by payer type (Medicare, Medicaid, commercial, self-pay). Drives revenue per visit and contract leverage.
Scope of practice: The procedures and services a clinician is licensed and credentialed to perform. NPs and PAs are often utilized below scope, leaving billable work on the table.
RVU (Relative Value Unit): The unit Medicare uses to weight clinical work. Productivity, compensation, and capacity planning are usually expressed in RVUs.
Modifier 25: Appended to an E/M code when a significant, separately identifiable evaluation happens on the same day as a procedure. Audit-risk if overused, revenue-loss if avoided.
Referral leakage: In-scope revenue lost when patients are referred outside the practice for procedures or services it could perform itself.
Local SEO: The discipline of ranking in Google's local pack for geographically-modified queries like 'family doctor near me' or 'urgent care Austin'.
Google Business Profile (GBP): Free Google listing that controls how a clinic appears in Maps and the local pack. The single highest-leverage local SEO asset for a clinic.
EEAT: Google's Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust framework. For medical content, named clinical reviewers and verifiable credentials materially affect ranking.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Core Web Vital measuring how fast the largest visible element loads. Under 2.5s is the target. Slow LCP hurts both rankings and conversion.
Conversion rate (CVR): Percentage of website visitors who complete the intended action — booking, calling, or submitting a form. Median for clinic sites: 2–4%.
Schema markup: Structured JSON-LD embedded in pages that tells Google what an entity is (Physician, MedicalOrganization, FAQ). Increasingly important for AI Overview citations.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Optimizing content to be cited by AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews). Favors clear definitions, named experts, and structured data.
Provider utilization: The percentage of a clinician's available billable hours actually billed. Anything below 75% in a fee-for-service clinic usually points to scheduling or scope problems.
Capitation: A payer arrangement that pays the clinic a fixed monthly amount per attributed patient, regardless of visits. Inverts the incentives of fee-for-service.
MGMA benchmark: Median performance data from the Medical Group Management Association. The standard reference for comparing clinic financial and operational metrics against peers.