Knowing how to monitor and measure productivity objectively is the underlying secret of success for any practice or business.
No doctor would decide on a treatment plan without properly examining a patient and performing whatever tests are necessary to determine the proper course of action. Gathering specific metrics is part of the examination process.
Without similar production metrics for the various management areas of your practice, you are operating the business side of your practice blindly.
Here are some key practice management issues that require statistical answers, not opinions or “it seems better” answers:
-How well is your receptionist doing at his/her job?
-How many patients are showing, versus canceling or rescheduling?
-Is your treatment plan acceptance getting better or worse, or is it even in a viable range?
-What is a viable range for this aspect of your practice?
-Is your receptionist doing a better or worse job of keeping patients to their schedule than last year?
-Is your recall procedure working as well this year as last year?
Running the business side of your practice successfully requires a means to measure, and thereby “see” factually, what is going on throughout the practice. Just as you could not drive your car without its various gauges operational, you cannot run a business without having proper productivity measurements to refer to.
We suggest a very specific management by statistics system that eliminates opinion and guesswork by assigning a relevant statistic to act as a guideline for each practice area, as well as for the staff member responsible for the area.
How do you determine the correct metrics for an area or job position? Look at the actual product that should be produced by that position or area.
In sales this is usually easy to see. For example, the product of a car salesman is a sold car and his statistic would simply be the number of cars sold.
But what about a receptionist in a healthcare office? What’s his/her product? And what statistic measures that?
Here are suggestions for product and statistic for a practice receptionist:
Product: A patient who arrives at the agreed upon time.
Statistic: Percentage of kept appointments.
or…
Product: Sufficiently full appointment book to keep the office at or above its needed production target.
Statistic: Percent of the appointment book filled.
Here’s another example of naming a product of a position–one for your collections area:
Product: Patient/client fees collected at the time of service.
If the area accomplished this product regularly, the income of the office would be in good shape with very low receivables.
There are several statistics that would give you a good measurement of how the area is doing:
a) Total collections received.
b) Total accounts receivables over thirty days (Use a reverse graph, with zero at the top).
c) Ratio of collections to services.
When managing by statistics you have a way to identify, correct and revert “down” areas.
For example, if the gross income statistic of the practice has taken a dip, you can usually look at the other statistics of the practice to find out why. You could find that the percentage of kept appointments has been going down. If fewer people are keeping their appointments, less income will be generated.
Now you have an actual target for correction. Find out what is causing fewer people to keep their appointments, correct this problem and you’ll get more people arriving to their appointments and your gross income will go back into the proper range.
Don’t let a staff member tell you “people just aren’t coming in” or “I’m doing everything I can, it’s just gone down.” Don’t accept excuses or opinions. Find the point at which the statistic started to drop, and then find out what changed.
Maybe a new front desk person was hired who is scheduling appointments differently. Maybe the front desk person changed what they were saying when scheduling appointments. Maybe you changed your hours of operation and that has affected scheduling. Whatever the case, find out what changed and revert it.
All this does not mean that you take the important human element out of your practice. People are more important than anything else, as it is staff, working together as a team, that makes a practice environment pleasant and highly productive. Having a proper statistical monitoring system in place helps your staff know how they are doing and protects the good producers. That makes for a happy and productive place to work and enables you to take care of your staff.
You must be able to monitor the amount of productivity of each area and job position or you won’t be able to manage the practice as a whole, and build its success.
If you feel you would benefit from a one on one consultation on any practice management questions or concerns, please fill out the form on this page and we would be more than willing to assist you.