You’re prepared with the right KPIs. You understand the operational levers needed for improvement. Now how do you harness this foundational knowledge to improve your practice?
The first step is a simple recognition that if everything is important, then nothing is important. That’s why it’s imperative to focus and decide on what to improve first. And that can only truly be done through intentional and collaborative discussion within your practice. Once that’s accomplished, then—and only then—can advancing physician practice efficiency happen.
To accelerate the process, consider having two types of regular meetings in your practice: 1) a weekly or bi-weekly goal-focused performance improvement meeting and 2) a monthly management meeting.
Meeting 1: Performance Improvement
You can establish all the goals you want. But it’s easy to lose sight of ways to improve medical office operations without an understanding of how the team is performing toward those milestones. Hence, the importance of performance improvement meetings.
What does an effective performance meeting look like in practice? At its root, it must adopt a methodology to guide its outcomes. I use the Scrum framework, where the definition of “done” is clarified before work begins. That way, when you achieve your new and improved state, you can ensure nothing else needs to be completed (for a deeper understanding of Scrum principles, I recommend the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time).
While it would be difficult to describe this methodology adequately in this short blog, the purpose of Scrum is important to understand. Scrum is designed to help teams deliver high-quality products and services with greater efficiency and collaboration. As an agile project management framework, Scrum breaks work into manageable sprints—short, focused intervals where teams make consistent progress.
By emphasizing small, incremental improvements and encouraging adaptation to change, Scrum keeps teams aligned with both immediate tasks and the broader goals of the organization. This approach fosters agility and keeps everyone focused on delivering meaningful results in a way that isn’t overwhelming.
Scrum is designed to help teams deliver high-quality products and services with greater efficiency and collaboration. As an agile project management framework, Scrum breaks work into manageable sprints—short, focused intervals where teams make consistent progress.
Let’s return to the example of reducing claim rejection rate as a valuable practice goal. To do this we determine we need clean and verified information at the time of registration to enable a proper electronic eligibility check.The first step is to set a series of SMART goals that will ultimately lead you to your final improvement milestone. For the sake of this example, let’s set aim for:
- 95% of new patient registrations over a 1-month period will include either an email or mobile phone number so that online patient portal interactions can occur before the encounter
- 95% of new patients over a 1-month period log into the patient portal to enter/verify their demographic, insurance and clinical information
- 95% of new patients over a 1-month period have an automated insurance eligibility check.
Lined up in this manner, these specific and measurable objectives enable the future conditions where claim rejections will be reduced. Ultimately, if you only focus on the end-goal without minding these prior steps, you and your team are likely to experience significant hurdles.
Here’s how you can think about this a layer deeper. Let’s take the first milestone measured by 95% of new patient registrations over a 1-month period including either an email or mobile phone number so that online patient portal interactions can occur before the encounter. The first set of questions should be around the people, process, and tools you will need to achieve this goal:
- What is the registration process and does it enable easy capture of patient email and mobile number?
- Who are the people (roles and responsibilities) responsible for registration, and are they held accountable for this outcome?
- Does your software or tech stack enable easy, frictionless operations?
The goal of Scrum meetings (sprint planning, daily standup, and sprint review) is to demonstrate progress and eliminate roadblocks. A clear definition laying the groundwork leaves scant room for non-performance.
Meeting 2: Monthly Management Meeting
Presuming you’ve reached an optimized state of physician practice efficiency at some point, the remaining task is to make sure your practice doesn’t fall off the wagon. This is where the monthly management meeting comes in. Think of this as a KPI “guardrail” against non-performance.
Simply put, if you’re attaining measurably high-performing KPIs, you can presume all of the operational measures required to produce that outcome are performing to standard and don’t need correction. Specifically, the people, process, and tools to achieve the desired outcome are working.
This concept is so important because the hard work of attaining an optimized practice requires considerable effort. It’s easy for a new employee unassimilated to practice protocol or a misunderstood process to undo all that prior hard work. Indeed, well-documented processes and well-configured software together with a staff operating on habit and good training will keep going in the right direction. The power of habit and inertia is strong. But it can’t be relied upon alone. That is why a monthly meeting to check KPIs, ensure steady improvement through ways to improve medical office operations, and prevent bad habits from taking root in your operation is a critical aspect of continued success.
During the optimization process, the monthly meeting helps give you a bird’s-eye view, in distinction to the milestone-focused zoomed-in view on which Scrum-based performance optimization meetings center.
Of course any variation or combination of the above two meetings can be beneficial based on the individual needs of your practice. But the thought process involved with both is important to maintain. One of the essential reasons for its business importance has to do with the concept of compounding (which will be the subject of my next blog post).
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