Practice Management Alert

Plus, teaching your providers to talk about their colleagues may pay off in a huge way.

Whether you’ve been managing a practice for years or are trying to jump into a new career, knowing where to focus your energy can ensure that your office runs more smoothly.

Making small tweaks in your scheduling process and your clinicians’ communications can have outsize effects on your day-to-day flow, say Judy Wilson, CPC, COC, CPCO, CPPM, CPB, CANPC, CDEO, CPC-P, and MariaRita Genovese, CPC, in an AAPC HEALTHCON Regional presentation in Charleston, South Carolina, in October 2021.

Know That Scheduling Underscores Everything

As a practice manager, you’re used to wearing several different hats, so organization is crucial to keeping everyone and everything going. Scheduling is the inflection point of affecting everyone in the office, from clinicians to staff to, especially, patients. Patients get some of their most formative impressions of an office from their experience scheduling appointments, and scheduling obviously affects the day-to-day experience of the office as a workplace.

Make a template for scheduling, and make sure everyone knows how to use it.

“Everybody’s schedule is different. You can’t expect people who make those appointments to know that one clinician likes to have a half-hour patient visit; this person needs an hour; this person needs 40 minutes,” Genovese says. “You’re going to create chaos when you do that. You must standardize a template. If you all decide that a new patient is 60 minutes with 20-minute interval, everyone has the same way to do it.”

Consider scheduling from the perspective of access, and make sure you enlist the people who are actually doing that work. “You have to have the people who work it help with the solution. It can’t be all about the leaders putting their heads together,” Genovese says.

Market Team-Based Care

Clinicians try to balance being individuals with lives outside of the office alongside providing patients consistent and thoughtful care. But if patients believe that they should only ever see one particular clinician, you may be setting yourself up for patient disappointment and more chaotic scheduling. Patients are disappointed and may even deceived if they show up for an appointment with a clinician they’ve never met before.

There’s a brilliant workaround here: Make sure your providers (and other staff) are talking about the value of team-based care, Genovese recommends. This provides the transparency that helps patients feel secure and valued, while also allowing an office to function more easily, because you don’t necessarily have to schedule particular patients with particular clinicians. If patients know that the clinicians in a practice all work together and take care of patients collectively, then many seeds of misunderstanding are eliminated.

Ultimately: “Access to care relates to ‘will you recommend this practice,’” she says.

Don’t Neglect the Other Parts of the Practice

While scheduling patient care constitutes the front end of your office scheduling, the back end is where you make sure you’re making money.

Think about scheduling in terms of employee schedules, too.

“Employees need to know their role in the office,” Wilson says. If managers and staff are on the same page with expectations, a lot of potential issues may be curtailed before they even become problematic.

As a practice manager, you should be overlooking the billing to make sure the services your office provides are accurately recorded and communicated, Wilson says.

If any of your employees are remote, don’t forget or disregard them. “Remote employees need to know what they need to accomplish,” she says. Check in and make sure employees are fulfilling their responsibilities to keep the office running without veering into micromanaging.

While knowing the ins and outs of the practice is the ultimate goal, practice managers can help make their staff feel better prepared to do their respective jobs by really leaning on communication skills and attention to detail. Those traits, along with technical and analytical skills, really constitute must-have qualities for a practice manager, Wilson says.

Knowing all of the job functions, being able to monitor employees without micromanaging, always demonstrating respect, offering empathy, and being adaptable and open to change are also important, she adds.

Regardless of the situation, the practice manager should be able to establish clear expectations for each employee, provide feedback, and genuinely listen, Wilson says.