The goal of The Practice Solution Magazine is to provide practice owners with practice management information that will assist them in achieving success.
Our research staff continues to find that embezzlement is an issue that is still prevalent in practices nationwide.
More than likely, you’ve heard the horror story about a colleague whose trusted employee embezzled money from his/her practice. To preclude this from happening to you, there are steps that you could take to minimize the risk of embezzlement.
We recommend that the following procedures become a part of your normal routine, as they will help to safeguard you from embezzlement.
Do you ever get to the end of the day and realize that you didn’t get half of the things done that you intended to get done?
Do you find yourself giving endless streams of orders and then having to spend time following up to make sure everything was really done?
Do you often have to redo work because it was not done correctly the first time by someone else?
Is scheduling a problem?
Managing time in a healthcare practice is an art. Unique problems arise because, as the doctor, your main priority is treating patients.
Since dealing with staff bickering and personality conflicts can be a major source of stress in an office, knowing how to deal with it can be extremely useful. When you let employee situations linger too long, bad things happen, and you can end up losing not only the problem employee but other good employees as well.
Dealing with staff can often be a confusing and complex subject. Certainly, if a staff member was overtly unwilling, refusing to do what was expected, gossiping, constantly complaining and so on, this is a staff member you wouldn’t tolerate. On the other hand, what a pleasant job it is to work with someone who does exemplary work, follows policies, requires little supervision and consistently pitches in to help. Clearly this is a staff member to treasure.
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.
Practice owners bring on new employees for a variety of reasons. Often, when practices are undergoing expansion in production and income, they require increased staffing. Or, due to poor past hiring procedures, practice owners find that they have to replace employees who are poor performers. There is a natural attrition rate as well when a staff member moves out of town, gets a higher-paying job, etc.
Many past Practice Solution articles have been written on numerous aspects of our successful hiring procedures, including testing, how to conduct proper interviews, how to weed out unqualified candidates, legally acceptable and unacceptable questions to ask, etc.
Are you as confident in your ability to get a steady flow of new patients into your practice as you are in your ability to provide high quality technical care?
You should know that successful marketing follows a proven technology that, when applied correctly, will get results with the same predictability that you get clinical results on your patients.
In order to function most effectively as a team, agreements must be known and adhered to for smooth, efficient coordination and cooperation. This is also known as “policy.” As long as people know what the rules of the activity are, and those guidelines are clearly presented as being in the best interest of the activity, the policies will be followed, resulting in a smoother operating environment.
Performance evaluation is viewed as a process to ensure a high quality of service to the patients and clients of the practice by fostering personal and professional growth of the staff.
A performance evaluation does not necessarily mean that the employee will be receiving an increase in pay. That is not the purpose for the review and should be addressed as a separate issue at another time. This way the evaluation is not linked to a pay raise.
Why do some practices seem to run smoothly while others struggle with confusion, bottlenecks, and constant interruptions?
One of the key elements of a successful practice is its level of communication.
This communication level is not just how people talk to each other. “How” is important, but there is more to it than that.