Solid, efficient, effective practice management is one of the most important factors that determine the success of any office—no matter the size or location. You can be a great, well-loved doctor and have many patients, but if your practice isn’t well organized and managed, you cannot serve them to the best of your ability. Too much gets lost in the shuffle.
Let’s be honest: if your office struggles with practice management, you already know it. Like I’ve said many, many times before, the problem is that practice management isn’t taught in medical school. You haven’t learned it before now. As a result, most practices struggle with a lot of the same problems. In the first blog of this series, I covered one of three very common issues: accountability. Now I’d like to cover another—and it’s closely related to the first.
Your Staff Needs Clear Objectives
You can’t really hold your staff accountable for the efficiency of the practice if they don’t have clearly defined objectives for their jobs. If your front desk staff or your medical techs don’t know the exact goals they’re working to achieve, the tasks they need to complete, and the specific protocols to complete them, how can you expect them to follow through? They simply can’t.
That’s why you need clear, defined, and written-out objectives for every single position in your office, from the front desk to the medical assistants to the billing and marketing teams. What does this do for you? It empowers your staff by taking all the guess work out of what is expected of each employee and giving them goals to aim toward.
Doctor, take time to determine exactly what role each position plays, and how the position helps you meet your goals. From there you can look at each of the individual tasks that position normally does and determine what your staff should be doing to reach their objectives. Then you need the specific, step-by-step protocols of what is expected in the various situations the staff members are likely to run into, so they are always prepared and know what to do to achieve the objectives you have laid out.
This is how you keep each person accountable for the function and well-being of your practice. After all, doctor, you can’t do it all. You need your staff. But you also need them to do their jobs right. At Top Practices, we know implementing all this is much easier said than done, especially when it means making drastic changes to the way your office runs. That’s why we’ve established the Practice Management Institute to help doctors with the practical aspect of getting management under control. If you’d like to make a real difference for your practice management, check out our programs! You can e-mail us for more information at [email protected] or call (717) 725-2679.