This week a client asked me, "Robert, just how do you make an office more efficient?" Well the answer is my favorite answer, "It depends." That sound like a flippant answer, but it is so true.
Every medical practice operates in differently and, thus, recommendations to improve one office's efficiency differ from the next. The most common cause of inefficiency and area to improve is the physician's patient schedule.
First, is the physician's scheduled based on seeing a given number of patients per hour? If so, you probably are not taking into consideration the reason for the patient visit. We all know that a new patient requires a bit more physician time and should therefore be schedule for a longer appointment. A general rule of thumb is have three distinct time slots for the schedule. For now let's call them brief, intermediate and long time slots. By establishing this type of schedule, you can better take advantage of the physician's time while respecting the patient wait time.
There is a catch. Implementing a variable time schedule requires training for your schedulers. It becomes their responsibility to properly triage patients as they schedule the appointment. Some of you may be thinking, "this is impossible," but believe me, with proper development and training; your staff can become quite adept at properly scheduling patients in the proper time slot.
Secondly, I am a big believer in arranging the schedule with two "brief" appoints at the top of each hour in any given clinic session. This is particularly important for the first appointments at the start of the day and first appointments after lunch. Having these brief appoints at these times aides the staff in getting into the swing of that session.
Thirdly, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER schedule two "long" appointments back-to-back. This is usually a recipe of behind in the overall clinic session. Instead, to the extent possible, limit "long" appointments to only one per given clinic hour.
Depending on the physician capacity, your staff's capacity and the physical layout of your office, there are scheduling templates available to assist you in getting started with this strategy. Implementing a variable time slot appointment schedule can go a long way into improving your productivity. This in turn is beneficial to your patients and your bottom line.
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