Your house has a structure. Most new homes use metal framing, and some older homes are supported by wood beams. The basic components of your house’s structure are the foundation, floors, walls, beams, and columns. Similarly, your practice has a structure. The foundation is your vision, values, and team agreements.
Built on top of the foundation are key systems that support the structure of the practice. When excellent systems are in place, a practice thrives. Let’s review a few of these important systems:
Morning Huddle. The morning huddle creates an opportunity for patients being seen that day to receive great care, improves team and patient communication, identifies potential roadblocks and obstacles during the day, provides a quick snapshot of how the practice did the day before, what the day ahead is looking like, and a forecast for future. An effective huddle is a time for your team members to share details about the schedule, specific patients or procedures, and other important information with each other and the doctor.
Telephone Skills. I am amazed by some of the new patient phone calls I listen to where team members do not get the patient scheduled. Does your team have a consistent, predictable way to get a patient scheduled while on the phone? The person asking the question is the one in control of the conversation. If your Scheduling Coordinator is answering more questions than they are asking, then they may not be in control. That will result in fewer new patient phone calls turning into scheduled appointments.
Scheduling to Goal. Speaking of the schedule, we coach our clients to ensure every day is productive. This is done by setting a daily production goal for each provider and optimizing the schedule every day. An effective scheduling system will allow you to reach your goals, decrease stress, keep the doctor in one place at a time, and ultimately take the very best care of your patients. Scheduling to Goal will also enable you to start on time, stay on time, and end of time.
Recare Effectiveness. You can measure recare effectiveness by dividing the number of periodic exams (D00120) in the last six months by the number of active patients you have. There are many different ways to measure active patients, and we define it as the number of patients that have visited the practice in the last eighteen months. If your recare effectiveness is anywhere below 80%, you have a great opportunity. You can leave the job of reactivating your hygiene patients to your patient communication system, and you will get some results. However, you will get much better results by reaching out directly via phone and text.
Financial Policies and Arrangements. A quality financial policy documents your approach from collecting money from patients, when to provide discounts, and when to use third-party financing. This system enables you to ensure integrity with the patient, maintain a high collection to production percentage, maintain manageable accounts receivable balances, and keep delinquent accounts to a minimum. How clear is your practice on how to collect money from patients? What is your current collection percentage and Accounts Receivable ratio?
Interested to learn more? For a deep dive into these key systems and others, join Fortune Management’s Don Khouri at their CAMP Structure event on March 24th in Natick, MA. Six CEs will be offered. You can register at the following link: https://lp.fortunenortheast.com/camp-structure-natick-22