Your initial or flagship clinic might be the go-to place for care. But now that you manage multiple locations, it’s up to you to ensure each one is just as successful.
And if your other locations are lagging behind, it could tarnish your entire brand.
Keep reading to learn helpful tips for practice managers to increase productivity. Get it right, and patients won’t be the only ones that are happy.
1. Streamline communication
To ensure the best possible patient care, your team needs to have seamless communication. And for some, that starts with the culture.
Chad Jensen, Office Manager at LaTouche Pediatrics, says that at LaTouche, keeping consistency from location to location is incredibly important. “We have a main office where all the managers work and we also have smaller satellite locations. We make sure that all the staff at the satellite locations have to work at the main location too.”
Chad goes on to say that by having staff work in the main office, they organically build a cohesive culture together.
You can’t grow your clinic without assessing your communication flows — both are intertwined.
Are your staff preoccupied with manual busy work when they could be providing better patient service? Are there missed calls to your patients? Is there miscommunication between you and your team?
Here are three tips to help you communicate better.
Make communication easy. Implement a central communication tool for your staff so they can receive real-time updates directly on their phone. Emails can easily get lost in the mix, especially when insurance companies are sending in new orders or processes.
Streamline payroll and timesheets. Having issues reporting back to your staff why their payroll is wrong? Skip the drama and ensure timesheets and payroll are correct every time. Use a simple staff scheduling tool and let your team focus on providing a better patient experience instead of chasing down payroll corrections.
Centralize your onboarding. RSVP Vet can hire 30 to 40 technicians across three states at any given time. They found simple tools, like JazzHR allows them to communicate more clearly throughout the entire hiring process. “And once they’ve been hired,” says Taylor Hollingshead, Operations Administrator at RSVP Vet, the veterinary industry's leading staffing agency. “We use our staff scheduling tool and documents tool which allow us to send documents and calendar invitations all in one place.”
2. Schedule your staff smartly
One of the hardest things to do in any small business is scheduling staff. Luckily, technology can help keep your team or teams where they need to be.
Use a staff scheduling solution that lets you build schedules in minutes. Easily fill shifts based on employee availability, training, and cost. Look for a tool that lets you send schedules to your team via desktop or mobile.
When it comes to owning a healthcare business, you need to work smart. That means having the right tech to optimize your business growth.
New technologies will improve over time, and adopting them will require a learning curve. Still, you can be confident that getting it right can mean the difference between a busy appointment schedule — or no appointments at all.
These are just a few ways to schedule your staff without the hassle.
Fill empty shifts with the right staff. If you or another physician prefer to work with a particular person, look for a solution that enables you to create preferred working schedules automatically.
Flex with demand. Your clinic likely has fluctuations in demand, especially during certain seasons. Your staff scheduling solution should be able to help you predict when (and where) you need staff so you always have the right coverage for the best patient care.
Go mobile. In healthcare, you can’t be tied to your desk. Look for a tool that has a mobile app so you can make changes on the go, wherever you are.
3. Track the right metrics
How do you find the time to track metrics — and what are even the right metrics to track?
Take a cue from LaTouche Pediatrics, which has been around since 1971. With three locations and 18 providers, LaTouche serves patients from birth to 22 years of age.
“We’re not able to help patients if we’re not able to run a business,” says Chad Jensen, Office Manager at LaTouche Pediatrics. “So, we think about patient flow. We measure how many patients each provider sees and we try to keep that at a certain level.”
But as a healthcare business, your metrics can also include things that relate to the industry.
“On the healthcare side, we look at immunization rates and some other evidence-based type benchmarks for pediatrics on whether we're doing those certain things,” says Chad.
Your metrics are going to be specific to your business, but here are a few common healthcare metrics you might want to consider monitoring.
Operational metrics. Your operations might include things like patient wait times or staff-to-patient ratios.
Financial metrics. It’s critical that you pay attention to money out the door just as much as you pay attention to money in the door. Look at things like employee pay rates and patient costs.
Internal metrics. Your internal metrics can be around how happy your staff are or your current staff turnover rate.
Add productive to your credentials
And if you want to continue to grow your brand — and increase efficiency — you need to remember why you do what you do. From processes to communication, there are various ways for you to increase efficiency across all of your locations.
Learn more tips when you download The Practice Manager’s Guide to Increasing Efficiency Across Multiple Locations.
