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What would happen if GE or IBM or EDS started running medical practices? Let’s say they bought 500 practices in a bundle and one of them was yours. What might happen?
Well, first of all you would probably have a really cool EMR. Know why? They would be using it to mine all the metrics they could out of your practice. They couldn’t possibly make a case to invest money into growing your profitability until they understood the untapped opportunities in your practice as well as the constraints and capacity. They could discover those answers by making small changes in your practice and then tracking the results through your practice’s metrics.
Practice metrics should be grouped by profitability, quality of care and customer service. So when you hire that expensive new billing company or that dedicated phone nurse, you look to bottom line profitability as well as your brand to see if the move paid off. And if your latest move is costing more than it’s bringing in or will likely bring in the near future, you have an opportunity to act intelligently to optimize that choice or eliminate it and start over.
IBM didn’t get to be IBM by superstition, luck or being “nice guys”. They got to the top by making reality based and money based decisions. They let reality guide them in their decision making.
The one area where doctors consistently fail to do this is in their marketing. Doctors will continue to run pricy magazine ads with no clear idea of the inital or continuing lift it brings them. I’ve seen it done over and over. It happens because there are no metrics track the success of the ad campaign. No metrics, no one to challenge the doctors’ decision to spend the money. That’s a recipe for disaster.
My practice is metrics intense. I know the numbers and I make a lot of little tweaks to get better performance out of my people, my processes and my marketing. That’s the only way I know to ensure success. If I came into your practice as a management consultant, the first thing I’d do was to identify the key 5-10 metrics and put a system in place to track them weekly and monthly. Until we get a dashboard to guide us, I don’t want to put my foot anywhere near the gas pedal.
Okay, here’s your homework: Identify the top 5-10 metrics in your practice and send them to me in an email. It’s due by the end of next week. If you send me something that looks well thought out, I may offer you a free hour of consulting. Don’t do it for the bribe though, do it so you can run a sane practice.
David Zahaluk, MD is a practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book. His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed. Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.
Related articles
- IBM, Nuance Envision Watson Helping Doctors (informationweek.com)
- Does IBM Deserve a Spot in Your Portfolio? (fool.com)
- Once Doctor In Massachusetts Quits Practice Over EHR – He Stated He Just Couldn’t Get The Hang Of It (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
Tags: Business, Customer service, Decision making, Health care, Healthcare, IBM, Medical record, Physician
