When we last left our story, we were talking about the “corporate” problem: the #1 destroyer of group dental and orthodontic practices. So, what do you do about it?
First of all, keep our initial discussion on group practices in mind. Know your weak areas and shore them up. In my experience, for a majority of owners of group practices, handling the pure business side represents a weakness, especially as the size grows and the business issues become more involved. This may be because doctors do not have the training to handle this side, have more of a focus on patient care or simply don’t want to deal with that side of the practice. The reason does not matter. And this is not a criticism in any way. Just what I’ve seen.
And this desire to have someone else handle the business side is why I have a job, OCA grew to the point it did and because you see a number of management companies, service companies and consultants out there. They fill that void in business services. Some of these companies are very knowledgeable and some plain suck, but that is not the point of our discussion here. We want to show you some tools to handle it on your own. If you still feel uncomfortable with that side of the operation, by all means look at some outside help. But for now, check out our discussion and talk to us about it.
If you do plan to have staff to handle purely business (aka “corporate”) functions, you need to apply these techniques:
Embrace technology
This is what I see time after time: a practice expands from one office to 7 or 8 and continues to handle all of their business procedures in exactly the same way. This just multiplies effort and cost and doesn’t take advantage of the scale that your business has reached. Here’s an example. Every practice needs to pay bills. For a one office practice, bills get mailed to the office and one person (maybe even the doctor or doctor’s spouse) usually handles the coding, payments and follow up on problems. With a larger volume of bills, even with offices spread throughout a state, they still handle things the same way and get buried in mounds of paper. Instead, a practice should look at setting up a service like Bill.com* and integrate it with their accounting system. Bills now get sent to a website where they are stored and a low cost person can handle coding. Then, with a click of a button, you pay everything that looks right to you after review of a summary screen. Then, your accounting software is automatically updated.
This saves substantially on people time, removes the need for a filing system and improves accuracy. There are new, useful products for small businesses introduced every day. Find them and use them. Using technology properly can create huge cost savings and other, previously unforeseen benefits to your practice. I cannot stress the importance of this enough.
*We use Bill.com in our Mexico and Japan operations and it works well. Depending on your practice, this may or may not be the best system for you.
Take time to consider new hires
Let me give you a typical scenario: your financial accounting person comes to you and says, “I am working like a dog (one that works presumably) and am still falling behind. We need to get another person in here now.” In this case, the normal reaction is, “Absolutely, let’s get that monster.com ad up right away and get the hiring machine cranking.”
Instead, consider a different reaction. Ask, “What kinds of things are taking up all of your time?” If you simply sit down to understand what is at the root of the problem, you may find that the solution isn’t hiring a new person at all. Hiring without understanding might just perpetuate an existing problem.
Let me give you an example. In one practice, the accounting staff went from 1 to 3 people even though the practice had stopped adding new offices. When we asked the accounting staff what was taking up so much time, the head person replied that she spent most of her day matching receipts issued to the payment in the accounting system. The practice had not activated the feature within its practice management software to issue unique numbered receipts across many offices. Once this was activated, that duty was eliminated. 2 of the accounting staff were then reassigned to more patient-centric tasks. And yes, the solution was that simple. Things like this happen all the time, but problems grow out of hand because no one takes the time to sit back and ask whether or not the task makes sense and can be done better. See “embrace technology” above.
Don’t be fooled by heavy work periods
Every quarter, we do a full accounting of results for each office and team in the system (doctors and staff). Then, we put together our analysis and goals for the upcoming quarter. Despite the technology and systems we apply to the process (and there are a lot), we like to have human involvement at this point to do the heavy duty analysis and verification of results. So, for a week or two after the end of the quarter, there is more human time required than normal. So, folks in the office push hard during this time and, as business grows, we regularly hear that we need to bring someone else on board to handle the workload. The problem for us is that it makes no sense to hire someone to be involved 8 weeks out of the year (2 weeks each quarter for 4 quarters). That 8-week outlier is not representative of the workload each year. What do they do during the other 44 weeks? These are the decisions that you face.
In our case, we were able to analyze the process and automate a couple of pieces of the process and use a temp agency to fill in short term work. Eventually, we hope to grow to the point to which we might need an additional full time person, but until that time arrives, we will continue to progress with improving systems and utilizing lower-cost solutions to get through the busier times.
More to come on this topic. Please keep it locked in to www.MyPracticeEngine.com. As always, if you are experiencing a problem with your back office in a group practice setting or individual practice setting, let us know by clicking here. Our services are available to you with no contract, fee, or long term commitment.
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