In a article posted yesterday on one of Silkin Management Group’s blog sites, which you can access here, I discussed how handling staff is, by survey, one of the areas that doctors need the most help with in their practice. In that blog I gave an example of a doctor running across the following scene:

You (the doctor) round the corner and overhear Jessica, your front office employee, saying to Julie, your assistant, “Omigod! You just have to see Brian! He’s sooooo totally hot! I gotta show you his Facebook page!” Then off they go to her computer and spend 10 minutes looking at Facebook and chatting.

What do you do?

First, you have to be sure which one is the bad apple. Although Jessica might be the one that seems to be distracting the staff, and she’s the one that garners many staff complaints, you better take a moment and examine the situation a bit more closely. Sometimes office appearances just aren’t what they seem. How do you measure a staff member’s worth? It’s easy to get thrown off by a friendly smile, a quick wit or worse, accept one excuse after the other when mistakes are made.

You might hear from various staff such things as, “We like Amy,” or “Bill is a great asset to the office.” Or maybe you hear, “Yvonne isn’t doing a good job. We don’t like her.” Or perhaps it’s, “Fred just doesn’t fit in around the office.” Possibly you go home and tell your spouse that the stress at the office is getting to you and wonder what is causing it. Or you might confide in a colleague. You go to seminars. You read the trade journals. You may even hear similar stories of woe. You just don’t know which way to turn. You don’t want to lose all your hair or take an early retirement. You consider firing the bunch of them, but that could be jumping from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

If you had a tool for measuring the value of the work a staff member produces, you would be way ahead of the game. This is exactly what Silkin Management Group helps its clients with. The answer is having measurable metrics or statistics for every position in the office. Larry Silver, President of Silkin Management Group states, “The only way you can effectively manage your staff is to accurately judge their production and contribution to the practice. If you have exact statistics for each employee, then and only then, can you make correct, unbiased decisions.”

With such a system in place you might actually find that Jessica, the gal with “extra-curricular” activities during the work day, is your highest producer, and you find that she has generated the most income for the practice. Or you might find that grumpy Jean, does a great job on the phone with recall and reactivates many patients.

Conversely, once production can easily be seen in black and white, you might find that the “most popular” staff member, has the lowest productivity as measured by his/her statistics. And, in uncovering that employee, you have just found the staff member that is causing most of the trouble and wasting most of the time and money around the office.

Now what? You can either train, discipline or fire this person. But which route to take? Silkin Management Group has the answer to that too, but that is a subject for another day. For now, using correct statistics that properly show the productivity of the expected product from each job position, will take you a long way.
For more information about what we do at Silkin Management Group, how we help clients with staff and other practice management issues, visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257.

Lyn Ribisi
Silkin Management Group
Appointment Coordinator

Several of the consultants here at Silkin Management Group have been writing about various ways to measure productivity in a health care office. You can see what has been written by visiting some of Silkin’s other blog sites including: How do you Measure the Productivity of all Areas of an Office?, More on Measuring Productivity, and Here’s More Ideas on Measuring Productivity. I was invited to put my “two cents” worth on this subject since it is such an important aspect of the management of any business.

As has been discussed, the first thing you need to do with any area or job position is to determine exactly what the product that area or job should be producing. This may take some figuring out by carefully inspecting the job or area in terms of what you really need coming out of the area. Previous blog articles discussed this concept in terms of a receptionist and treatment plan presentations. I’d like to present what Silkin Management Group has found very workable for the management of the collection area of a health care office.

What is the product we’d expect out of this area? How about:

Patient fees collected in a timely manner.

It seems like that would be an excellent product for the collection area to accomplish. If it accomplished this product regularly, the income of the office should be in good shape with very low receivables.

Now, how would one best measure that so one could actually manage the area by a metric? There are several stats that would give you a good measurement of how the area is doing:

• Total collections received.
• Total accounts receivables over thirty days. (Graphed as a reverse graph with zero at the top.)
• Percent of collections to services.

Needless to say, one would have to use some “smarts” when looking at the second statistical graph as it would also to be compared to the production in an office. Obviously if the office’s production was rising, the total receivables would likely be rising too, so a comparative analysis would have to be made. The third statistic above helps with this.

The third statistic is based upon a formula that we’ve worked out that compares several month’s collections to several month’s worth of services, with a time factor built in depending upon the type of practice, how much insurance is used and some other factors.

There are a variety of stats we help our Silkin Management Group clients with so that they can easily and properly manage their practice. The information above gives you more data about one area. I hope it is helpful.

If you are interested in any management help with your practice or business, feel free to contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website: silkinmanagementgroup.com

Best regards,
Dave McKevitt
Consultant
Silkin Management Group