I’d like to continue our discussion this week about things we can do when our practices slow down. Last week we talked about several things that can be done to bring in more patients (and revenue) to the practice. But besides seeing more people, what else can we do when we are slow?
This is the time to catch up on other things. It seems like at home I spend most of my time running around taking kids to ball games or school programs or birthday parties or any of the other 15 things that are going on. But every once in a while we have a few free days. That is when I can work in the yard or tinker in the garage or fix the back fence.
The same holds true for your office. When you do have time, use it to get caught up on things that need to be done. But remember one important thing: This is not just time for you to get things done. Use it for all the staff. If they are paid to work, then make sure you provide them with work during their down-time.
The first thing to keep in mind when doing this is to load up your schedule. What does that mean? In our office, most of the providers see 6 patients per hour or 18 patients per half day. That means if I only have 20 patients schedule during the day, I don’t want them spread out so that I’m seeing 3-4 per hour.
The receptionist will ‘stack in’ patients at the beginning or end of each half day. That means if I am only seeing 10 patients this morning instead of my usual 18, 4-5 will be seen in the first hour and 5-6 during the last hour. That gives me a whole hour in the middle where I can work effectively on something else. There is nothing worse than having 7 minutes of free time between every patient; it is much better to have no free time for an hour then have 30+ minutes to get something else done.
Once you have fixed your ‘light schedule’, then it is time to give work assignments to everyone. I’m sure you have plenty to do at your office, but let me share some of mine that we’ve come up with:
We have needed to re-do our new patient letter. You know, the letter that you send out after you’ve seen a new patient in order to welcome them to your practice. We have several new providers and I wanted to include a short bio on each of them. So I had each of them write their own paragraph then instead of me trying to find time to write a new letter, I asked our new providers to do it. They had free time during the day anyways so it wasn’t an inconvenience.
I’m terrible about doing staff evaluations. But now we have 16 full-time employees and it really needs to be done. So I put one of my very responsible nurse practitioners in charge of employee evaluation sheets. Get them designed in such a way that we can give objective evaluations and (if needed) room for improvement.
Another thing we’ve started implementing is weekly in-service and training sessions. With this many staff, we’ve gotten to where we need to have staff meetings every 3-4 weeks just to go over necessary items. But the other times, the 4 providers rotate teaching. We each pick a topic then teach our staff as if they were medical students. We go over diseases, treatments, side effects, and try to think of things that could come up during the normal office day. This keeps our providers up-to-date with the current literature but also gives our nursing and office staff more training and education than they otherwise would have.
Im sure you all have many other things you’ve tried in your practices. Please let me know some of them and I’ll pass them on.