When writing pieces, I generally do not find anything more useful than taking a real life situation and relaying the results of examination of that problem into the wild for public consumption. Our latest example comes from a dental practice on the gulf coast of Mississippi.
Here, a dentist has a practice in a startup phase. It is in that limbo phase of being larger and more mature than a startup practice, but not quite to the point of constant busyness. There are some heavy activity periods and still others where there are no patients in the office. This office is in a shopping mall so it tends to get more walk-in traffic than a practice that might be seen at an office that is located in a medical complex or out of the way location. A potential patient might be moving from the Apple Store to the Disney Store, see the office sign or remember that they need a cleaning and stop in at the front desk. For this reason, the practice will occasionally have some pretty busy times if a few folks come in at once without an appointment.
The doctor in the practice worries, and properly so, that patients will come in, see a line or find they are waiting too long. They will decide to delay the appointment and maybe make that appointment with another doctor closer to home. To deal with this, the doctor suggested that we place extra staff at the front desk at all times. So, if things got busy, all patients could be handled and no one would be lost.
Of course, if things did not get busy AND front desk staff wasn’t using that time to do things like market to potential new patients, that would result in cost just running higher.
A much better solution would be to give the tools to the existing staff to enable them to handle more patients. We’ll get into more detail on each of these, but specifically:
Training
Training takes a bunch of different forms. You -- as the practice owner or manager -- can bring a consultant or trainer into the office for hands-on evaluation and improvement techniques. You can refer your team to manuals or online videos with critical information. And there are a host of other things: team meetings, personal observation, demonstrations, guest speakers, etc. The point here is to continually take steps to make your team better at what they do.
Before just haphazardly training to fill in gaps that you see, organize the process. At the very least, meet with the staff before you start working every day, if only informally, and talk through some issues and opportunities you are seeing.
Technology
One time consuming process almost always tends to be filling out those new patient forms. While those are very important, most people would rather be doing other things (in our example above, doing some more shopping at the mall) than writing their name and address on a piece of paper. If you had an online form or a simple app, people could fill out forms easily, have fields automatically populated and submitted. Plus, the front desk isn’t limited by the number of clipboards and pens it has available at the time.
Taking it down a step, what about a simple technological improvement: the camera? No, not for spying on the front desk, but for some quick observation. If someone on the clinical side glances at the camera and sees that things might be backing up, someone can go up to the front to briefly assist with the crowd. Here, a simple, inexpensive item saves the cost of an additional person working on a part or full time basis.
Repetitions
Everyone has seen that front desk person who easily handles any situation that comes up. Multiple insurance for each of two divorced parents who are fighting over the division of payments? No problem. Chances are very good that this person has seen a volume of complex cases in the past. This comes from having more and more chances to deal with situations. Keep in mind that experience doesn’t necessarily equal useful repetitions. If a person has worked at the front desk for 30 years in a strict private pay practice, that person might be lost in a strict Medicaid office.
So how do you enable a person to have a range of experiences even without a massive volume practice? First, as painful as it may seem, you need to let the person deal with situations and work them out. In so many practices, a relatively new person will completely tap out if a complicated patient situation arises. They will wait until the manager shows up to handle things. Instead of that, provide guidance or a walk-through to the person, but let that person remain involved. Second, if a difficult situation arises, convey the problem and solution to the rest of the group. That way, each person gains new knowledge that can be useful if and when a similar scenario arises.
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