May 22, 2019 4:29:59 AM
Benjamin Pure
What makes a medical practice successful? Thriving doctors’ offices combine financial profitability with excellent patient outcomes and employee satisfaction. Managers of the most successful practices have a vision of what they want to accomplish, and determination to pursue it. They know how to set the right priorities, and achieve them using the available resources. In other words, they have mastered the difficult art of being productive.
Finding Inspiration to Make Your Doctor's Practice More Productive
If you are looking to find your productivity sweet spot, have a look at those famous quotes. They might inspire you to review your planning strategies, optimize time and resource management, and streamline processes with modern tools, services, and IT solutions.
7 Productivity Quotes and How to Apply Them to a Doctor's Practice
“It is not enough to be busy… The question is: what are we busy about?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
The healthcare industry is a labor-intensive and stressful work environment. Managing appointments, handling emergencies, dealing with distressed and anxious patients - your staff has their hands full.
Thankfully, today, there’s a slew of technologies and solutions that can relieve healthcare employees of menial tasks, allowing them to focus on critical duties. These include electronic patient records, call forwarding, pre-registration solutions, patient flow management systems, and many more.
"Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first." ~ Angela Ahrendts
Healthcare leaders pay close attention to patient-centric services, and rightly so. However, in the constant pursuit of patient satisfaction, it is easy to oversee the needs of one’s employees. Interestingly, healthcare is one of the most hazardous industries to work in.
Medical staff is constantly exposed to health risks and injuries and have to endure heightened stress levels each day. That’s why prioritizing occupational health is imperative to ensuring that your employees remain motivated, engaged, and healthy. Especially that their wellbeing has a direct impact on your patients.
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” ~ Stephen Covey
Quite often practices are following routine, day-by-day execution mode, just to tick things off an enormous to-do list. To empower your workers to become more productive, try adopting a more top-down approach.
Outlining critical objectives first will help you maximize value in various fields of your practice’s operation. Take some time to determine top priorities, and decide which tasks can be postponed, ignored, or delegated.
“Focus on being productive instead of busy.” ~ Tim Ferriss
That’s a piece of sound advice from the world’s chief productivity leader. How to implement it? Start from writing down procedures that take up most of your and your staff’s time. Can you simplify or automate some of them?
Harnessing automated workflows will immediately allow your admin and medical personnel more time to concentrate on their prime responsibilities. Tasks that can be easily automated include staff roster management, patient admissions and discharge, or helpdesk responses.
“Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.” ~ Peter Drucker
Medicine is one of the fastest evolving fields, and successful practices must keep up with its progress. Facilities need to systematically review their processes and incorporate technological advances into their workflow to address the ongoing changes in healthcare.
Technology is a major driver for enhancement. It helps doctors gather actionable data about patients to continuously assess treatment methods and allows admin staff and managers to streamline and facilitate all basic procedures from admission to discharge.
“Stressing output is the key to improving productivity while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.” ~ Paul Gaugin
Every business, also a medical practice, is about achieving tangible results. And you can only see they are tangible if you’re able to measure them. What tools and metrics do you use to evaluate your practice? How is the progress of your medical and non-medical staff being assessed?
Developing clear-cut performance indicators across the entire healthcare spectrum provides a greater sense of accountability to your staff and leaves room for optimization. Examples of top performance benchmarks may include the number of admitted patients per period, patient satisfaction, wait times, claims denial rate, or employee turnover.
“Long-range planning works best in the short term.” ~ Doug Evelyn
Planning ahead and waiting for positive outcomes can be frustrating at times. However, sometimes there’s no workaround for achieving highest-grade results. Let’s talk prevention, for example. Instead of solely focusing your efforts on treatment and emergency aid, offer preventive services to your patients and reach out to your local community with prevention programs.
By delivering long-term, preventive, and holistic care, you will improve treatment outcomes and show your patients that you truly care about their health. They will repay you with their loyalty and a long-term commitment to your practice.
Low Effort, High Productivity of Healthcare Facilities
Running a modern healthcare facility involves a number of challenges, including task overload and an excess of unpaid duties. By reviewing the existing policies, following productivity recommendations, and using smart solutions, you can raise your practice’s productivity and enable your team to work less while achieving more.
And if you’d like to immediately incorporate some of the above productivity tips to provide efficient healthcare services, specialty call forwarding is a great starting point!
