Imagine coming into your practice one morning to discover that your entire staff has quit. There are no two-week notices, no leaves of absence, and no one has stuck around to answer your questions—they all just walk out the door.
Would your practice be able to survive until a new practice administrator is found, or would it sink? Do you know how to find your practice bank account or how much money to expect from payers within the next month? Do you even know what it is that your practice administrator does on a daily basis?
This scenario may sound far-fetched, but for many physicians, it is all too real. Physicians who are just beginning a practice often place all their faith in a practice manager or administrator to control the business operations while they control the clinical functionality. Delegating administrative processes is a good step toward building your practice. However, problems may occur if there are no formal written systems to show “how we do things here.”
Systems can be created for anything and everything that you do. Every organization has systems—some are formal, and some are informal. A system is simply a series of processes that work together toward a common goal. For example, a personnel management system could be made up of the recruiting process, the orientation and probationary period process, process for maintaining personnel records, compensation process, and the staff evaluation and review process. If a process is documented in a way that clearly communicates the end goal and the steps needed to achieve it, the process can be executed by anyone—at any time and under any circumstances—and produce consistent results.
Creating formal processes and systems can help physicians develop a valuable practice that effectively runs itself. A practice that functions by systems, rather than by individuals, will produce consistent and predictable results that are more in line with the strategic vision and goals of the practice.
The first step to systemizing your office is to identify what it is that you and your staff do. Keep an activity log that includes all the things you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This log should include even the tiniest detail, such as answering e-mails. Once you have a list of all the activities that your practice executes on a day-to-day basis, create a flowchart of the “as is” process. Lay out each step in the process in order (you may even want to use sticky notes for an easy-to-manipulate visual). Do you notice any extra work? Is it possible to streamline the process? How many hands touch the process before producing the end product or service?
Now rearrange the process or delete steps to create a new, more efficient process. Finalize the process by creating a clean, formal flow chart documenting it from beginning to end and place one copy in a practice systems binder and another within reach of the work area where the process will be executed.
You aren’t quite done yet. Just because you have a paper with an efficient and formal process doesn’t make it happen. Individual habits can be easy and effective, but hard to break. A little extra encouragement may be needed to achieve buy-in from your staff and to get everyone performing the new process. Be patient and understanding, and listen to your staff. They may help you to identify any kinks in your new system and help iron out problems to achieve greater efficiency.
Now that your new formal operational systems are in place, let’s revisit the opening scenario. Your practice administrator and all your staff walk out the door, and although you don’t know what day-to-day operations need to be completed, you pull out a binder that contains detailed processes for completing financial transactions, ordering supplies, and even for recruiting and hiring new staff. You are still inconvenienced, but you can function and produce outputs consistent with those produced by the former office administrator. Even training your new staff will be more efficient.
For more information on creating and implementing systems in your practice, contact Itara Barnes in the ACR’s practice advocacy department at (404) 633-3777 or [email protected].
