If you’ve read more than one post in this blog, you’ll notice that we stress the absolute importance of having quality, organized, data to give you a clear picture of your practice’s results and enable you to make informed decisions regarding changes that need to be made.
We have spent considerable energy discussing the output of statistics and analysis, but none of that will make a difference if the data entered do not make sense. There’s the old expression: Garbage In, Garbage Out. The implications of this are rather obvious. If the data entered makes no sense, it’s difficult to impossible to make use of the statistics and summary of data. Here are some tips to increase the quality of your input data to ensure the quality of the output:
Enter everything into your practice management software
As an example, we see quite a number of offices that do not enter new patient appointments because some patients might not show up for their appointments. In a number of cases, entering a new patient requires including information that the front desk staff might not have or be able to get on the phone. So, they’ll maintain a new patient schedule on paper and if a patient shows up, that patient will get entered into the system.
That creates complications on a number of levels. Not only do you not get good information on how many new patients are interested in your office, you also don’t get data on what percentage are showing up. In addition, your chances of following up with no-shows to get them in drops substantially if you are forced to flip through paper to get the information rather than have that information available to you on one screen.
In response to requests to enter all patient information, I usually get the feedback that “the information is already on the sheets. If you need something, you can just look at those.” It’s 2014 as of this writing and I will not dignify that comment with a response.
One other note here. If you are not sure whether or not something should be entered, enter it. Storage space is cheap. Good data is invaluable.
Be consistent
One major challenge when going through data comes when Person A enters an event one way and Person B enters it another way. Again, figuring out the proper way to handle the data becomes extraordinarily challenging and you may get misleading data.
Here’s one example: we had a client where one front desk person entered long appointments as a long appointment (which you would expect) while another entered that event as back-to-back short appointments (long story as to why, but that’s not relevant here). Trying to do scheduling analysis became a real challenge as we tried to parse out longs, shorts, etc. Even if the office had entered back-to-back shorts as a matter of policy, that would have been much easier to figure out than trying to pick out which information applied to which entry person.
Limit categories
For one client, here were the classifications for a 20 minute consultation:
Cons (20)
Cons
Cns
Consult – 20
Consult (20)
Consultation – 20 minutes
Now imagine that you didn’t use a reporting system that consolidates the different categorizations and you simply reviewed your statistics based on the practice management software, you would have to add up 6 different numbers to get to one statistic. That’s way too much time compiling data and not enough time analyzing it. Moreover, you are more prone to errors here.
We see this a lot as the result of data not being seen or a new person wanting to ensure that the classification they set up means what they want it to mean. Whatever the case, culling the list of categories can make things much simpler for you to analyze. If you turn it over to someone like us to handle the compilation for you, you’ll have a much shorter wait to get your information and the related analysis. And in the end, that’s what we’re all after, right?
Want to make sure your data is entered properly and generates useful data? Let us know and we’ll do a free analysis for you. Just e-mail me at bpalmisano2@gmail.com.
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