We’ve spent so much time on the group practice roadmap for a couple of reasons: first, it is a tremendous opportunity for those who are willing to take on the challenge of substantially growing their business. Second, we live this type of environment every day with our own group practices. We love doing this and want to share our experience and evolution within the process with anyone who is willing to give us a read.
Of course, we constantly see new issues and opportunities and learn new things every day. In the following paragraphs, we’d like to share some things that we’ve learned from some actual experiences over just the last few weeks. I find that it’s always helpful to show some real world applications of what we’ve written about. Hopefully, you’ll see parallels with your own experience in the past and future and be able to apply the lessons herein.
The importance of communication
The story: In a couple of offices in Mexico, we experienced a noticeable decline in new patient contracts during the third quarter. As part of our investigation of the problem, I contacted the doctor and asked him what he was seeing. According to him, new contracts were falling off because no advertising was running. With this rather surprising piece of information, I spoke with the person handling the marketing for the area. She informed me that the offices had been running advertising and provided me with sample of TV, radio, print and moving billboard ads that had been running with a new price promotion we had discussed. My own investigation showed that ads had been running.
The real problem: We found that the advertising had generated calls to the offices, but when those potential patients called and asked about the promotion, the response was “promotion? What promotion? You must be thinking about some other practice.” Simply put, we had not effectively communicated the marketing program to the doctor or staff, confusion reigned and business fell off. An e-mail was sent, but probably ended up somewhere in Internet hell. Whatever the case, the potential patients went looking for a better deal elsewhere.
What we learned: No special lesson here, but when it comes to changes – especially changes in a marketing plan – make sure that you communicate and ALSO hear back from those involved. Note that I said that you don’t need buy-in from everyone in the group, but they should understand what is going on so that a united front can be presented to patients.
The importance of technology
At a recent staff meeting in Japan, we introduced our program to send push notifications and text messages to offices to notify them of problem areas and to patients to confirm appointments, send recall reminders, etc. Of everything that we discussed, this was most warmly received. In fact, a number of managers spent considerable time dealing with complaints about robo calls or making routine confirmation calls themselves.
In addition, among both the staff in treatment offices and the business office, a material number of people confessed to not reviewing their reporting sites while even more admitted that they did not generate reports from their patient accounting software for purposes of reviewing practice performance.
A couple of lessons learned here:
- Even with the best of reporting websites, you will still have a number of people that will not visit the sites to see where the problem areas lie. It’s just too easy not to – especially when that website doesn’t have the latest pop culture updates. And fewer people generate reports from the systems to review them – unless that’s part of their ongoing job responsibilities. On the other hand, you can’t help but look at your phone when it dings (or plays the Battle Hymn of the Republic or whatever).
- Using an inexpensive technology like a text message for your patients can, if not used excessively, provide a valuable service to them and show that your office is cutting edge and striving to improve for them.
We’ve offered to set this up for folks at no charge and I am certain that there are a number of other quality entities out there that provide the same service.
The importance of knowing what is going on
The story: We are in the process of correcting the accounting processes at a group practice. The accounting staff currently consists of 6 people including 1 hired to handle petty cash verification and replenishment. Because petty cash transactions are in cash and there tend to be numerous transactions each month, someone on the accounting staff (not the doctor) found it prudent to hire someone to monitor and verify each transaction. But here’s the thing: the practice has 28 offices and each office has a $200 petty cash fund. So, the highest petty cash balance outstanding is $5,600 at any given time. For almost 30 offices.
If someone is stealing from the petty cash fund, there are ways to identify discrepancies through various devices and tools to zero in on the problem, but if someone is sneaking in an order for $5 chicken poppers on a $20 Papa John’s pizza order, does it honestly matter? Do you really need to have a person dedicated to monitoring it full time?
The takeaway: Yes, protecting your cash is extremely important and there’s probably nothing worse for your practice than someone who steals it. But you also need to be realistic about the relative importance and size of cash balances.
We’ll be talking much more about this in a future case study as well, but this is just one example of things that we regularly see on the business staff side.
As always, we welcome your comments and questions. Please feel free to contact us whenever from wherever.
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