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IS THERE A JOB DESCRIPTION FOR AN OWNER OF A HEALTH CARE OFFICE?

July 29, 2010 By 1 Comment
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Clients new to Silkin Management Group often don’t have job descriptions for the various positions in their office. And, for certain, if they have some job descriptions they never have one for the owner of the practice. In fact it usually has never crossed their mind to have one.

The owner of the practice is the most important person in the practice. He/she is the one who sets the goals and is ultimately responsible for everything that goes on in the office and the success or failure of the office.

We provide all Silkin Management Group clients with an extensive office policy and job description manual covering all positions in the office INCLUDING the owner.

Here is some of the key points any owner should have as part of his/her job description:

PURPOSE:

To set the direction and the pace of the practice and demands the products of the organization are achieved.

To establish the practice and see to it that written policy is applied so that the purpose of the practice can be achieved.

To keep the group solvent and functioning.

PRODUCT:

Utilization of his/her Office Manager to obtain those products through proper alignment of actions which bring about continued prosperity and well being of the practice and its staff.

STATISTICS:

• Number of Active Patients
• Cash to Bills Ratio

If you would like more information about our copyrighted 400 page Job Description and Office Policy manual, contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also find out more about Silkin Management Group by visiting our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Bill Hickey
Silkin Management Group Consultant



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WHAT ANNOYS YOU ABOUT YOUR EMPLOYEES?

July 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Part 3

Handling problem employees is a huge area of help that Silkin Management Group clients and prospective clients are interested in. In Silkin Management Group’s blog site of July 20th & July 21st we introduced Part 1 and 2 of a 5 part series on things staff do to drive their bosses crazy and what to do about them.

In Part 1 we went over the “clock puncher”, the low responsibility staff member. In part 2 we discussed the staff member who spends job time doing personal things and disturbing other employees.
Here is a third type of staff member that can cause irritation to their boss:

“I know you already told me a few times, but can you tell me again, how do I do this?”

These employees just can’t seem to learn anything and are always asking you to solve their problems. They rarely, if ever, offer solutions. They just don’t take the intuitive to seek answers or work out solutions to problems by themselves. Even if you have an easy-to-understand and comprehensive job policy manual put together, they’ve just never read it, but instead bother you and the other staff members with questions that are clearly answered in their job materials.

Solution: For starters, make very sure you have a comprehensive Office Policy and Job Description Manual. Then check the employee out on their job description by asking them to perform some of the duties covered. Do this on a gradient basis, taking the easiest first. If they have trouble with the easy stuff, you know you are going to have trouble generally. More basic, do some literacy testing PRIOR to hiring.

Silkin Management Group provides job description and office policy manuals to its clients as well as various tests for screening applicants. If you’d like more information about this contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Lyn Ribisi
Senior Analyst’s Assistant
For Silkin Management Group



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WHAT IS THE HEALTH OF MY BANK

July 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Although Silkin Management Group is not an expert on the status of the banking system, we certainly are interested in the health of the banks we deal with and that our clients use. In fact we do get asked by Silkin clients if we know how to determine the health of banks given the record number of bank failures over the last year or two.

To that end we found the following information that we thought we’d pass along to Silkin Management Group clients and non clients alike. We hope you find it useful.

To check the health of your bank go to http://www.bankrate.com. Go to the section on the first page that says “Safe and Sound Ratings.” They have a service there that ranks banks with 1 to 5 stars. If your bank has 4 or 5 >stars, you should be fine; if it has 1 or 2 stars, you should move banks. If it has 3 stars, you are in somewhat of a grey zone frankly.
You shouldn’t be immediate danger, but keep an eye on the ratings or consider moving banks.

Although your accounts are insured, it could be a lot of unneeded trouble for you if your bank fails.

Dave McKevitt
Silkin Management Group Consultant

For more information about Silkin Management Group, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com.



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THERE ARE SOME GOOD LAWYERS AROUND!

May 19, 2010 By 1 Comment
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Silkin Management Group has worked with thousands of clients in the health care profession throughout the United States and Canada for close to 30 years. One of the areas that we continually train and consult our clients in is dealing with employees. Hiring the right staff is a technology unto itself. Hiring the wrong staff can be very costly, so time spent learning how to attract and pick the correct staff is very important. Training staff and dealing with some of the common workplace problems can also be a challenge.

We have worked with a several attorneys over the years as well as referred clients to a variety of lawyers when an employment issue raises its head. There is one attorney whom we have dealt with on employment issues for the entire time we have been in business. He is an expert in employment law and advised us in our early years in the development of our extensive 400 plus page office policy and job description manual. He writes very good articles on employment law, and I wanted to start passing along his advice and wisdom to those of you reading Silkin Management Group’s various blog sites. To that end, today I will begin presenting some of his written advice and add to it over time on our various Silkin Management Group blog sites.

If you are having any employment issues, I highly recommend his services. Although we all make lawyer jokes, there are a few good ones around. This is one.

Larry Silver
President Silkin Management Group.

Visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com for more information about Silkin’s services.

AVOIDING WORKPLACE HELL

For Heaven’s Sake: Document, Document, Document!
Written by Tim Bowles

Lawyers are in sales, they are not in management. They don’t sell widgets to consumers of course. Rather, competing attorneys each “sell” a conflicting reconstruction of events and actions to juries and judges, with the most plausible version of such occurrences the winner.

This firm defends employers daily on lawsuits for, you name it, (alleged) discrimination, (purported) retaliation, (supposed) harassment, (asserted) unpaid wages or overtime, and just about every other workplace accusation imaginable. More common than not, management’s inappropriate or illegal behavior is not the source of such court battles. Rather, suits often generate and grow from company failures: i) to have and follow simple, written policy; and ii) to promptly and fairly document workplace misconduct and its resolution.

Pile on the clichés and maxims if you wish. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” isn’t bad. “If it isn’t written, it isn’t true” is better.

An employer which does not structure workplace production, organization and procedure around sound, sensible, easy-to-understand written policies is prone to finding itself sooner or later in the midst of an expensive court controversy. If written policy does not exist or if it is not followed, if disruptive incidents and the fair addressing of them are not documented promptly and consistently, then that disgruntled, and perhaps disreputable, employee and his/her lawyer can easily invent practices and versions of events to fit their sales pitch.

Very few jurors are employers. Almost all of them have been former employees at one time or another. At the end of a trial over alleged employee mistreatment, it will be these sworn-to-be-neutral citizens who will gauge whether employer or worker is telling the more credible story. For a business, no written policy and no documentation in these circumstances are a recipe for very expensive disaster.

For the actions employers can take to avoid this nightmare scenario, including access to our workplace forms and model personnel handbooks, please see our article “Why Written Policy is Good Policy.”

Contact Information:

Law Offices of Timothy Bowles, P.C.
One South Fair Oaks Ave., Suite 301
Pasadena, CA 91105

Phone: 626-583-6600
Fax: 626-583-6605
Email: information@bowleslaw.com



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Handling a Difficult Staff Member Part II

February 11, 2010 By 1 Comment
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In a article posted yesterday on one of Silkin Management Group’s blog sites, which you can access here, I discussed how handling staff is, by survey, one of the areas that doctors need the most help with in their practice. In that blog I gave an example of a doctor running across the following scene:

You (the doctor) round the corner and overhear Jessica, your front office employee, saying to Julie, your assistant, “Omigod! You just have to see Brian! He’s sooooo totally hot! I gotta show you his Facebook page!” Then off they go to her computer and spend 10 minutes looking at Facebook and chatting.

What do you do?

First, you have to be sure which one is the bad apple. Although Jessica might be the one that seems to be distracting the staff, and she’s the one that garners many staff complaints, you better take a moment and examine the situation a bit more closely. Sometimes office appearances just aren’t what they seem. How do you measure a staff member’s worth? It’s easy to get thrown off by a friendly smile, a quick wit or worse, accept one excuse after the other when mistakes are made.

You might hear from various staff such things as, “We like Amy,” or “Bill is a great asset to the office.” Or maybe you hear, “Yvonne isn’t doing a good job. We don’t like her.” Or perhaps it’s, “Fred just doesn’t fit in around the office.” Possibly you go home and tell your spouse that the stress at the office is getting to you and wonder what is causing it. Or you might confide in a colleague. You go to seminars. You read the trade journals. You may even hear similar stories of woe. You just don’t know which way to turn. You don’t want to lose all your hair or take an early retirement. You consider firing the bunch of them, but that could be jumping from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

If you had a tool for measuring the value of the work a staff member produces, you would be way ahead of the game. This is exactly what Silkin Management Group helps its clients with. The answer is having measurable metrics or statistics for every position in the office. Larry Silver, President of Silkin Management Group states, “The only way you can effectively manage your staff is to accurately judge their production and contribution to the practice. If you have exact statistics for each employee, then and only then, can you make correct, unbiased decisions.”

With such a system in place you might actually find that Jessica, the gal with “extra-curricular” activities during the work day, is your highest producer, and you find that she has generated the most income for the practice. Or you might find that grumpy Jean, does a great job on the phone with recall and reactivates many patients.

Conversely, once production can easily be seen in black and white, you might find that the “most popular” staff member, has the lowest productivity as measured by his/her statistics. And, in uncovering that employee, you have just found the staff member that is causing most of the trouble and wasting most of the time and money around the office.

Now what? You can either train, discipline or fire this person. But which route to take? Silkin Management Group has the answer to that too, but that is a subject for another day. For now, using correct statistics that properly show the productivity of the expected product from each job position, will take you a long way.
For more information about what we do at Silkin Management Group, how we help clients with staff and other practice management issues, visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257.

Lyn Ribisi
Silkin Management Group
Appointment Coordinator



Filed Under: Management, Statistics Tagged With: , , ,

Benchmarks Part I

February 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Is your practice meeting all your needs?
Do you have enough new patients?
Is your gross production in the highest range possible?
Is your net adequate?
Do you collect properly for all of your services?

Silkin Management Group has been delivering management consulting services to the health care field for nearly 30 years. The questions noted above are very common questions that we ask our clients and areas that we focus on to help them achieve their practice goals.

As part of working with clients in these areas, and given our extensive experience in the practice management field, we are often asked what are the basic benchmarks in terms of productivity, net, and collection percentages for certain professions.

There is nothing more frustrating than working all week or all month long, only to find that your production didn’t even achieve last year’s numbers. If you have some benchmarks to compare your productivity to, you’ll at least know where you have to go, if you are below them, or how well you are doing if you are above them.
Let’s examine the national benchmarks that we tell Silkin Management Group clients they should minimally be looking at achieving. These are based upon what we are able to achieve with our clients.

In Part 1 we’ll go over Production Benchmarks for a single doctor practice. In Part 2 we’ll look at Net Benchmarks and Collection Percentage Benchmarks.

PRODUCTION BENCHMARKS:

  1. A single dentist should produce minimally $80,000-90,000 a month. Really good producers can produce $120,000-$150,000 a month.
  2. A single Veterinarian should produce bare minimum $50,000 a month, but ideally $80,000 – 120,000 a month.
  3. A single Optometrist should be producing at least $50,000 a month and ideally $90,000 – 120,000 a month.

Silkin Management Group is a 30 year leader in the field of practice management. We can help you achieve your practice goals. If you are not achieving the upper end of the above mentioned benchmarks, let alone the minimum number, we can help.

Part 2 of this article will be posted February 8th on our blogsite located here:practicemanagementblog.com. If you’d like to find out more about Silkin Management Group and its services, contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257. You can also visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Lyn Ribisi
Appointment Coordinator
Silkin Management Group



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SOME IDEAS ON WHAT TO DO WITH A PROBLEMATIC STAFF MEMBER (Part 2)

December 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment
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In our December 11th blog, which you can access here, Some Ideas on What to do with a Problematic Staff Member Part 1 I presented the first part of my response to a doctor that had written to us through our “Ask A Consultant” feature of Silkin Management Group’s website. This doctor was asking for help with a problem staff member. The first part of my response had to do with having proper and adequate job descriptions and office policies in place. This is something we at Silkin work very diligently on with our clients. In fact we have a 400 plus page Office Policy and Job Description manual that we provide our clients with that can easily be adapted to their office.

Below is the second part of my response which had to do with hiring and training the right employees. I hope you find it informative and useful.

“The other underlying issue I see here is having the right people in the first place and having them properly trained. There are three key steps in this process.

  1. How to attract the right kind of employees
  2. How to determine who to hire
  3. How to train them to do their job properly after you’ve hired them

When you are looking to fill a new position, the wording of your ad/listing is key. Where to advertise is also key. Utilizing employment agencies that pre-screen applicants to YOUR qualifications can greatly increase the quality of candidates you see, weeding out the lower quality people ahead of time.

Determining who to hire is often a “shot in the dark” for most doctors. A doctor might just read a resume, conduct an interview and then take a shot on that person as they have no other means to evaluate the applicant. No one ever writes on their resume that they are chronically late, don’t take direction and can’t get along well with others. What you see on a resume is only what the applicant wants you to see. Similarly, all you hear in an interview is what they want you to hear. They say the right things or at the very least what they think YOU want to hear in order to get the job.

After a person is hired they usually stay on their best behavior until they get comfortable and then they become themselves. Only then do you know who you’ve hired.

We believe you need a more objective way to screen and hire people so that you have a better idea of who they are, what kind of personality they have, their responsibility level, their aptitude and their work ethic. Corporations have been hiring people this way for years. Small businesses suffer through much higher turnover rates due to their lack of successful hiring techniques.

We teach doctors to test applicants. Personality tests, IQ tests, Aptitude tests are all implemented to get a feel for who a person is and how they will fit in to your practice and interact with the staff and more importantly your patients. Doing all of this as part of your “weeding out” process during hiring greatly increases the odds of you bringing on a good staff member.

Once you have hired the right person, you then need to make sure you train them properly. This is where detailed and up to date job descriptions and office policies come into play. It is vital that you equip your new employee with the proper tools to do their job rather than throw them to the wolves and hope they pick up the proper way to do things as they go.”

As mentioned above, Silkin Management Group provides its clients, as part of our overall management training and consulting program, an Office Policy and Job Description Manual with detailed job descriptions for nearly every position in an office, including the often overlooked job description for the owner of the practice.

If you would like any help with any aspect of your practice, call us at 800-695-0257 or email us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also visit our website at silkinmanagementgroup.com/offers/ask.html and ask questions via our “Ask a Consultant” feature on the website.

Ken DeRouchie
Silkin Management Group’s “Ask A Consultant”

Please see our other blog at: practicemanagementblog



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YET MORE IDEAS ON PRODUCTIVITY MEASUREMENTS IN A HEALTH CARE OFFICE

December 2, 2009 By 3 Comments
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Several of the consultants here at Silkin Management Group have been writing about various ways to measure productivity in a health care office. You can see what has been written by visiting some of Silkin’s other blog sites including: How do you Measure the Productivity of all Areas of an Office?, More on Measuring Productivity, and Here’s More Ideas on Measuring Productivity. I was invited to put my “two cents” worth on this subject since it is such an important aspect of the management of any business.

As has been discussed, the first thing you need to do with any area or job position is to determine exactly what the product that area or job should be producing. This may take some figuring out by carefully inspecting the job or area in terms of what you really need coming out of the area. Previous blog articles discussed this concept in terms of a receptionist and treatment plan presentations. I’d like to present what Silkin Management Group has found very workable for the management of the collection area of a health care office.

What is the product we’d expect out of this area? How about:

Patient fees collected in a timely manner.

It seems like that would be an excellent product for the collection area to accomplish. If it accomplished this product regularly, the income of the office should be in good shape with very low receivables.

Now, how would one best measure that so one could actually manage the area by a metric? There are several stats that would give you a good measurement of how the area is doing:

  • Total collections received.
  • Total accounts receivables over thirty days. (Graphed as a reverse graph with zero at the top.)
  • Percent of collections to services.

Needless to say, one would have to use some “smarts” when looking at the second statistical graph as it would also to be compared to the production in an office. Obviously if the office’s production was rising, the total receivables would likely be rising too, so a comparative analysis would have to be made. The third statistic above helps with this.

The third statistic is based upon a formula that we’ve worked out that compares several month’s collections to several month’s worth of services, with a time factor built in depending upon the type of practice, how much insurance is used and some other factors.

There are a variety of stats we help our Silkin Management Group clients with so that they can easily and properly manage their practice. The information above gives you more data about one area. I hope it is helpful.

If you are interested in any management help with your practice or business, feel free to contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website: silkinmanagementgroup.com

Best regards,
Dave McKevitt
Consultant
Silkin Management Group



Filed Under: Management, Small business, Statistics Tagged With: , , , ,