Top Strategies for a Thriving Practice
Today, I am sharing the top things that we have seen that make healthcare practices succeed. As we all know, it does get very challenging to run a healthcare practice today. You have to have the right people, you have to have the right processes, and you have to have the right focus to be able to grow and meet the needs of both your staff, your patients, as well as yourself in order to be successful.
Knowing these may help relieve some stress, grow revenue, and help your practice continue to give you that fulfillment that you want.
It is so important that practice owners have a focus around what they want from the practice? What are the priorities of the practice? Is it stabilization? Is it growth? Owners should outline their focus, write it down and share that vision with your staff.
If you are the practice owner, you should have a clear vision and a list of priorities you want. This may take some time to create, if you haven’t already. It’s a matter of just sitting down and writing it out so you have a clear picture, then you can communicate that clear picture to your staff. Maybe you have one that was done previously, is it still relevant? Should it be tweaked?
Many successful businesses take time to do this, because it gets everybody on the same page, everybody's aligned to where you're going, what the plan is, and how you will get there.
First: Goal Setting
Start with yearly goals. Identify three major goals for the year. This could be expanding your practice, improving patient satisfaction, or just increasing revenue by a certain percentage.
Break those three into quarterly goals. Then you have quarterly objectives. For example, if one of your yearly goals is to increase patient satisfaction, then a quarterly goal could be to implement a new patient feedback system.
You've got to understand what's going on in order to improve it. Quarterly goals allow you to take those yearly high level objectives and break them down so that you can be task oriented. Next, take those quarterly goals and put them into actionable monthly tasks, making sure that you're giving those tasks an owner.
Let’s say you’ve set a goal to improve patient satisfaction, and you've made this quarterly goal to implement a new patient feedback system, monthly you're training the staff, then on a weekly basis, you should be reviewing and discussing the feedback and discussing improvements.
If you haven’t done this yet for 20256, it's never too late. You can still sit down, set those three goals, figure out how you're going to finish up quarter two and progress throughout the year.
Second: Hiring the Right People
As an outsourced billing company, I cannot stress enough that hiring the right people really matters for any company.
Where we have seen practices struggle is staffing. Not having the right staff in place can be detrimental to your practice in many ways. It’s best to have one or two key people who bring the right culture, who understand the office dynamics, who understand health care and health care practice management. Staff is key to a successful practice.
When you're hiring for any role, there should always be a list of expectations and responsibilities for those roles. Write these down, or type them out and this helps to create the job description. Where we see practices fail they either don't have the right skill set, they're not clear on the expectations of what is expected of them, or they're not able to communicate in either direction. The right leader or the health care teammate isn't able to communicate where they're struggling or how they're not feeling aligned with the company's culture and goals for the year.
Be sure that when you're hiring for the right person, that they not only have the technical skills, but that they have the personality traits and the values that align with your practice. And so sometimes that means sitting down and really thinking about what are the values of our practice? What is the mission statement?
What do you value most when it comes to team culture and office culture? How do you identify someone who can fill that role? Because you want to understand how you work, how you're expecting staff to work, and make sure that those two things mesh together. Job descriptions should be clear and detailed.
It’s a good idea to have a mechanism to weed out the prospects that are not team players. How do you weed out those that are truly interested? Find a truly good fit? The team players versus the overflow? Consider using an assessment test for work ethic and personality type.
A new hire should be clear on what is needed every day, how they need to be interacting with the staff members and patients. Are they in charge of other people? What are your expectations on meetings, on daily tasks, monthly tasks, quarterly goals? Do they have the tools that they need to be successful?
What is expected during a meeting? What is expected to be accomplished in that first 90 days? All of this needs to be in the job description and you must have metrics in place to gauge the success. This gives them the answers that they need in order to know what they should be doing, but then also allows them very clear things for them to do and also feels good to them to be able to have something that they've succeeded in because they've known clearly what they're supposed to be doing.
Third: Making Solid Decisions
You can have a leader in a practice who's afraid to make decisions. They need so much data, they need so much information in order for them to make a decision. This can cause a lag in decision making. The flip side is
making decisions too fast. There needs to be a happy medium for effective decision-making.
Decisions that are based with a mix of data and intuition avoid the trap of over-analysis, so there should be a calculated approach of what are the decisions the owner needs to make and what can be decided by the staff.
What are the decisions an office manager can make versus a front office member? You want to have a calculated approach to inform these decisions. You want to avoid over-analysis, and not get in that analysis paralysis, you need to trust your staff, trust your intuition, trust your experience to make timely decisions. There's always a balance of getting input from your staff members versus making an executive decision.
Forth: Metrics, Metrics, Metrics
We were recently consulting a practice who was asking for help. They were really struggling with their billing team and what it came down to is they did not have any metrics. We found their software did not provide the level of metrics that they needed. Software is a huge part of the billing process and a huge part to your success.
There's a lot of free software out there. There's a lot of software that may have come with a practice that you were partnered with. But if it does not have the metrics that you need and an easy way to pull simple to complex reports, the practice is going to struggle. Things like accounts receivable, by insurance, by patient balance, by CPT code to look at revenue, revenue by different CPT codes or procedures is important. You can't skip this!
I highly recommend the practice owners staying high level with those reports and metrics. The right team members will get into the weeds.
Metrics should be trended month over month. You want to track everything and the five metrics that we talk about in the billing world are your clean claims rates, your denials, metrics around AR, which include patient and insurance, AR over 90 days, and also looking at things like revenue and expenses and profit margins and cashflow. All of this is what allows you to understand the financial health of your practice.
Now, you're going to want to think about operational metrics as well.
Things like patient wait times, appointment cancellations, staff productivity. These help you on the operational side of the business to be able to determine where you have opportunity, what goals do you want to set around those. If there’s no data, it's very difficult to clearly articulate what the yearly goals are.
What are some operational metrics to look at? Maybe you've never looked at appointment cancellations. That's a good place to start because it's something that you can easily implement with no-show fees or processes around appointment reminders. Another example of some metrics is patient satisfaction. Get those surveys out, get patient feedback, identify areas for improvement.
Revenue per patient is a big one. What is the average revenue generated per patient? How many patients were seen last year? What was the gross revenue? What is that on a per patient basis?
You could even look at that on your top five CPT codes across multiple payers. And so lots of different options here to be able to measure things.
The other thing is appointment utilization. How many appointments are booked? How many available slots? Look at optimizing scheduling within certain time points. How to manage new patients versus established patient visits, how to manage no shows or cancellations, and really be able to implement strategies to impact each of those.
Fifth: Taking Calculated Risks
Last but not least, is something I have noticed trends in different practices. And that involves taking calculated risks. When making a decision we always think, what's the worst thing that could happen, right?
For example, practices may be worried about implementing new software and they go through a hundred different things that could go wrong and/or right in the transition. Without really thinking through what are the things that are going wrong today with the current software, right? What lack of transparency do you have in metrics?
What struggle do you have with your billing process? What in your current software is impeding business operations? And when you're thinking about taking a calculated risk to move to a new software or move to a new billing team, you're not thinking about the things that you could improve.
It's just always worrying about what could go wrong. Chances are if you are considering a switch, there’s a valid reason, or multiple reasons. We've seen practices who have taken that risk and said, you know what, what I'm getting right now is not enough.
I'm going to take that calculated risk and I'm going to make that change with my software. I'm going to make that change with my billing team. We're going to have a well-planned out transition, and we're going to get to where we're going.
It's really important when thinking about risk, whether it's risk in hiring a new provider or staff member, risk with changing software or vendors, you need to do three things. Assess potential outcomes. Evaluate best and worst case scenarios. Timing.
If expanding your practice, it could increase revenue but also may strain resources or increase expenses. So you've got to really think through, is it the right time to expand your practice? Do you have the patient volume needed to add another provider or staff?
Have a plan for contingencies, planning for how to pivot if things don't go as expected or have a plan around what are the check marks that you want to check off in order to go to that next phase so you feel comfortable and confident that you're going to be able to do it successfully.
It’s all about risk versus reward! Weighing those potential rewards against the risks, if the potential benefits significantly outweigh the risk, then it may be worth taking the leap.
The success of any practice really hinges on things like clear goal setting, strategic hiring, informed decision making, but not having analysis paralysis, effectively using the metrics or creating metrics if you don't have any now, and of course the willingness to take on calculated risks. So by focusing on each of these key areas, both independently, if you're the physician owner or the practice owner, or with your leadership team is really important to build that robust and thriving healthcare practice, and of course be able to continue to grow your revenue.
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