Aside from being skilled, there are many other things that a physician needs to build and sustain a successful medical practice. Physicians must understand the factors that may either support or impede the growth of their medical practice.
The competition in the market is high, and leveraging all the available tools to help you grow is critical. Patient and employee satisfaction are the two prominent pillars of any successful general practice, along with ever-essential efficiency.
But, do not fret!
We will guide you through a few simple steps you can take to ensure that your office runs smoothly and efficiently. Any successful business faces unexpected hurdles. By incorporating a few organizational strategies and daily habits, you can alleviate some of the stress caused by unforeseen and challenging problems that may arise from time to time.
1) Strategize and determine your practice's competitive advantage
You can save some considerable time by learning about your patient demographic. Millennials would generally schedule a visit after office hours, while the older patients lean toward morning appointments. Keeping your practice around the hours you receive a high number of visits can boost the productivity levels of your employees and increase patient satisfaction.
You can also use online scheduling tools for even greater efficiency.
To determine the competitive advantage of your practice, develop a mission/vision statement for your medical practice. Do you envision providing affordable care or being the go-to best family practice in your area? It is pertinent to answer these and develop a vision.
The second step would be asking your patients! Why did they choose you over your competition? Conduct patient surveys to know the best and worst of your practice.
The healthcare market changes rapidly, so it's quintessential to be in continuous discussion with people who drive those changes, such as medical equipment providers and pharmaceutical representatives.
2) Create a plan to set your strategy in motion
The second step would be to see your vision come to life. You can either outsource consultants to help you with a plan or get the central member forces of your practice together to devise strategic proposals. Once you have a few in hand, scrutinize them based on the cost, time, and effort taken to implement and the financial impact it would create on your practice.
Rinse and Repeat.
Once you have a plan in place, delegate accountabilities to your project leaders. The more engaged your team is, the higher the chances are of successful implementation. Create a culture where honest feedback is appreciated. That will motivate your team members to carve a niche for your general practice. Disintegrate tasks and put timelines in place.
Finally, measure the results. We can not stress this enough. Identifying key measurable results and developing means to monitor those results is a part of the process. You can go a step further by organizing a meeting with your project members. Ask them to think of potential problems and obstacles that can come up in the plan.
Identifying these issues earlier and creating a plan to tackle them can make the implementation smooth.
3) Time for implementation
Before you start implementing your strategy, you have to remember to be flexible. Your strategies will continuously evolve, and what you end up with might be completely different from what you had initially planned. As Ken Favaro brilliantly put it in his article "Defining Strategy, Implementation and Execution", strategy and implementation run almost continuously in parallel rather than in sequence.
Business strategies rarely get to enjoy completion like a sports game.
Day-to-day hurdles might make it feel like a never-ending loop. That's why it is essential to create small milestones that your team members can enjoy. You can also share these milestones with other stakeholders like your patients or the physicians that refer to you. That will help establish in their minds that your medical practice is thriving and growing.
Humans have an inherent trait to feel validated for their work. Reward team members. That drives performance. The reward does not have to be monetary, as it could be in the form of public appreciation as well.
Don't forget to celebrate at the end of the project.
4) Evaluate, make changes, find success
Welcome to the final step of strategically making your medical practice succeed in 2021. Did the goal you achieve in line with the mission/vision you had created in the first step? Did you deviate? If you did, then by how much? Now that you have got your results, are they worth keeping?
Answering these questions will help you evaluate the performance of your plan. At the completion, identify the best results and things you could have done better. It will help you improve next time.
We hope this blog could be helpful to you in some way. Keep being proactive and not reactive!
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