"The strategic planning philosophy says that a highly successful medical practice can grow into a highly successful medical business, which in turn can be the foundation for an inordinately successful medical enterprise that works apart from the Doctor-owner instead of because of the Doctor-Owner."
Michael Gerber
E-Myth Physician
Our last article about adopting a strategic plan for your practice briefly touched on the importance of developing different processes in order to efficiently operate your practice. Remember your motto "working on your practice not in your practice".
By adopting different processes within your strategic plan, it will assist in letting your employees know "how we do things here".
According to Nancy Smit, President of Baltimore medical consulting firm SHR Associates, the top ten reasons why medical practices fail to maximize revenues are:
- Front office systems and procedures
- Superbills contain inaccurate and outdated codes
- Fee schedules not updated
- Physicians/providers down code their "Level of Service"
- Accounts receivables are not working consistently
- No financial reconciliation procedures
- Staff to Physician ratio's are too low
- Physician productivity not maximized
- Customer service is not top priority
- Practices don't formally plan to incorporate ancillary sources of revenue
As you can see in Nancy's research, the front office systems and procedures is the number one problem in increasing practice revenues. The average medical practice assumes all their patients are happy and satisfied; however, the successful medical practice constantly evaluates all of their processes so it can provide additional patient fulfillment and satisfaction, which in turn assists in increased gross revenues.
Let's examine this area of front office procedures which includes patient greeting and scheduling. In order to avoid a bottleneck, your office may want to consider adopting a front office process which will consist of the following:
- On time scheduling process
- Telephone answering and call back process
- Patient greeting and initial document completion process
- File organization processes
- Follow up patient and appointment process
- Referral/reward patient and employee process
If we examine your front office process, is your receptionist following these tasks?
- Promoting your practice vision and mission statement?
- Assuring patient satisfaction?
- Organize all patient files?
- Smiling at all costs?
In order to assist with this process and tasks a one page summary could be adopted that will improve your employees efficiency and the overall productivity of the front office. This summary should include the following:
