buildmymedicalpractice
buildmymedicalpractice
Hey, I'm Dr. Deb from the "15k a Day Doc" and I want to talk to you about scheduling for productivity. Scheduling is really important to your practice and to your bottom line.
Oftentimes people don't think about scheduling as a priority and we don't teach people how to schedule. Remember they don't come into your practice automatically knowing your schedule.
It's your responsibility to teach them how you want patients, where you want them, how long you want them and who your patients are. That takes a little time for them to learn, but it's our duty to teach them what we want our schedule to look like.
You can have major holes in your schedule and your staff thinks that's okay. Then you're shocked that your schedule has never been so empty. Unless you share that information with them, they don't know.
Last year in my practice, I was so overwhelmed, creating a lot of different things and bringing new providers. I made the comment to one of my front desk people that I'm so overwhelmed and I don't have time to get anything done. I need some holes in the day. It was just a passing comment.
It wasn't a "I want holes in my day schedule" but that's how she took it. She thought she was doing me a favor by leaving gaps in my schedule so I had time to work on different things. I was wondering "what's happening to my patients?", Thinking that they don't want to see me until the two of us were able to get together, and we were able to figure out exactly what was happening. We both realized what we had done were for the right reasons, now she understands taht leaving a gap costs money and creates a financial hole.
Always look at the flow of what's coming, at how many calls you are getting, how many new patients you are scheduling, how many follow-up patients you are scheduling.
It's important to know your numbers.
Set goals for your team, they need to know what is expected of them. How many new patients your practice needs a week. How many follow up patients need to be scheduled.
How much money you need to bring in weekly. It is everyone's responsibility to contribute to the success of your business.
We set weekly, monthly and annual goals for our team. We review them every week with our team and monthly at our office meetings.
You need a plan for where your clients are going to come from and which provider is going to see the new clients. You need to be able to track who schedules the patient. These tasks can be tracked by your office manager.
When you schedule changes abrubtly and you didn't do anything, look at your scheduling staff. Someone is usually messing with the schedule. That should be fixed immediately.
How many people do you want to see a day? Set the schedule so that you can get this number in during the time youw want to work. Do the same thing for all of your staff.
If you have multiple services set a schedule for each service. Determine how many people you need on the schedule for each sercive. If you just leave it to chance you won't make your goals.
How are you going to get these people on your schedule for these services? If there is a gap can you move patients around to allow a larger block of time to get an extra new patient on the schedule?
What type of advertising are you going to do? Are you going to reward your patients for a referral? Are you going to advertise on TV, radio, social media? How are you going to track this advertising/
Are you going to attend health fairs, co-brand talks with other businesses? Provide lunch and learns?
You should set this up annually and then evaluate it quarterly.