Physicians Practice - February 2008 - (Page 24)

EFFICIENCY 1. STUDY THE PROCESS Start by being the scientist that you are and simply study some of the processes in your practice that seem to bog things down. Have you ever seen the 1950s movie “Cheaper by the Dozen?” Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, featured in the ﬁlm and book, took this concept to its extreme in the high rosy days of the late industrial revolution. Frank, for example, studied bricklayers. Watching carefully, he managed to reduce the number of motions required to lay a brick from 18 to about ﬁve. You can apply the same approach to scheduling, billing, or managing reﬁll requests. It’s ﬁne to be a little less obsessive about it than the Gilbreths. Just taking some time to step back and bring awareness to the problem can go a long way. “People just run in [to work] and start running around,” Judy Capko, author of “Take Back Time: Bringing IN SUMMARY Efﬁciency is the name of the game for medical practices these days. Here are some speciﬁc ways to work smarter, not harder: • Take some time to review each step in processes that keep your practice from running like a well-oiled machine. It’s easy to keep going at a frenetic pace, but well worth it to instead look at what you do to make things better. problems or handle appropriate clinical tasks. register, make appointments, and ﬁll out personal histories, for example, online. • Delegate to staff. Ask them to solve • Delegate to patients. They can • Set and focus on goals. You can have goals for the year, the week, the day, and even for each exam. If you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll know what to prioritize. save time may not work for you. There are no rules. • Know yourself. What helps another • Don’t be afraid to be a little 24 inefﬁcient if it makes you happier. Time Management to Medicine,” points out. “People need to reﬂect a little on what went right or wrong in the day so they can avoid the same crises reoccurring. You won’t identify it unless you reﬂect.” Capko recalls working with a frustrated dermatologist. The poor fellow wanted to sail smoothly from exam room to exam room, but every time he left one patient, he had to stand around, looking for a nurse to tell him which exam room to go into next. It was the same story every day; all the yelling in the world wasn’t ﬁxing it. So, Capko got the nursing staff and the physician in a room and together they walked through the processes in their practice. They even role played, with some staff playing patients. They got everyone’s perspective on what was going wrong and came up with two easy ﬁxes. “He’d been living with this problem for …years,” says Capko, “and the solution was a slam dunk.” First, the team realized nurses could never be omnipresent, so they agreed to start using a roommanager function they discovered in their EMR. By putting a portable computer in the nurses’ station, the dermatologist can now see where he needs to be by pressing a button. The practice also invested in larger monitors in the exam rooms. One reason nurses were hard to ﬁnd was because they were forced to retreat to a back room to complete charting. The monitors in the exam rooms could only display eight-point type, too tiny to read easily. Watch, too, for wasteful process you hardly even notice anymore. “It’s just like you don’t realize your wallpaper is getting old because you live with it. You live with something so long, you don’t realize it’s not working,” Capko offers. How many steps are in your scheduling process? What, exactly, happens to a denied claim? Consider actually writing down each step and thinking about what you can eliminate. Donald Wetmore, a timemanagement guru who founded the Productivity Institute in Stafford, Conn., ﬁgures it’s worth the time it takes to work through it. “Even if it takes you an hour to ﬁgure out how to save 10 minutes a day, you reap long-term beneﬁts. Huge increases in productivity do not require huge efforts. Physicians are already incredibly productive; it’s a matter of small changes.” 2. HAND IT OVER Here’s another way to be more efﬁcient without sacriﬁce: Stop doing all the work yourself. Delegation is key to managing your time. Wetmore used to be a managing partner at a law ﬁrm. He was spending all day answering questions and managing problems for staff and colleagues. He got out of the muddle with two techniques. First, he simply asked people to hold their questions until after 4 p.m. Folks were often able to solve the issue before the end of the day without him. Second, he used “reverse delegation.” Say a manager had a “monkey on her back” trying to work around a conﬂict in scheduling seminars. Wetmore’s impulse was to say, “I’ll take care of it.” But “after a day or two [of taking all the monkeys] you become a zoo keeper. If you allow people to come and dump on you, they will dump on you. People want to go the line of least resistance. Instead ask, ‘So what do you think? I have conﬁdence in you.’ Most people that practice that reverse delegation thing ﬁnd they can eliminate a lot of those things they’d otherwise get caught up in.” Wetmore calls this “reverse delegation” because staff are expected to ﬁnd their own solutions, not just perform pre-set tasks. Asking your staff to solve problems doesn’t just reduce the load on you; it also builds their conﬁdence and means they will be more likely to affect positive changes in the practice. More literal delegation is another option. Ask your staff to do more. “I don’t think we use our nursing staff to the max. And busy as they are, I WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | FEBRUARY 2008 http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Physicians Practice - February 2008

Physicians Practice - February 2008 Contents The Bigger Picture: Your Future is in Your Hands Letters Physicians Practice Pearls: Creating an A+ Practice Noteworthy Cover Story: Conquering Time: 5 Keys to a More Efficient Practice In Balance: A Family Affair Technology: Making EMRs Work in the Exam Room In Practice: "I've Got Some Bad News" The Tech Doctor - The EMR: Savior or Poseur? Ask the Experts NEW! Healthonomics: How to Handle Health Savings Accounts The Administrator's Desk: Finishing School for New Managers Human Resources: Is Your Partner Impaired The Great Practice Makeover: Too Well-Liked for His Own Good? Coding Idealab: 'Why I Blog' Classifieds Advertiser Index

Physicians Practice - February 2008

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