A thriving practice is difficult to define.
Every practice owner and manager wants to run a successful practice, but it can be challenging to define and measure what success looks like. Especially across a busy practice that provides dozens of services. Some owners look to expand and buy into other practices within their local metropolitan area, while some are focussed on a single rural practice. Many are simply focused on the output of their practice, and the impact they can make by providing care for their patients. There are many different objectives and criteria that one can measure success by, however, they can all be measured in one form or another.
Defining Success
The first step in knowing if you’re operating a thriving practice is to understand your overarching business goals and objectives. From there it’s up to you to define what success looks like for you, your team and your community.
Breaking down goals into short term and long-term goals can help set perspective for you and your team and is a strategy that has worked for dozens of practices. For example, your long-term goal may be to become the most trusted care provider in your area, and a short-term goal that may facilitate that, is to focus on expanding your Chronic Disease Manage (CDM) services or getting first time patients back in for more regular health checks. Consider what you want to achieve within your practice over the next five years, and what you can accomplish in the next 6-12 months to get you there.
Measuring Success
Once you’ve set your sights on the next big step for your team, you’ll want to find ways of measuring and reporting on your progress.
The best way of measuring patient satisfaction and quality of service is through a combination of anecdotal feedback from patients and data found in your practice management system, many great insights can be surfaced from your best practice data. Metrics are a fantastic way of measuring the impact you’re having as a business, but when it comes to actionable insight, it’s also important to collect patient feedback. Make an effort to regularly survey patients and ask for feedback on how you can improve both the services you offer and the experience patients are left having. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular method of collecting and analysing feedback, as it will give you a singular score you can assess week on week, while also giving patients the opportunity to provide written feedback as well. Make sure to track this for your quality improvements, for instance, patient feedback regarding QI1.2 of the RACGP standards in the 5th edition.
As for metrics you can track, it’s recommended that practices look at billings per hour, diary wait time, patients per hour, and utilisation. These will provide you with a solid overview of your usage of the MBS schedule, how often you run on time, how well your team is equipped to service patients, and how full your diaries are.
Where Do You Find Opportunities for Improvement?
How are you performing? It’s a difficult question to answer. With reports you can often look backwards, and at historical trends. Compare your billings for instance, to the same period last year. Additionally, you can spend all the time in the world creating forecasts and looking forward. However, when we have data, it is vital to have context accompanying it, and to have targets in mind.
What we have lacked in the medical industry is the ability to look horizontally. For instance, you will know that you’re a bulk-billing practice in metro Brisbane, so how do you compare across other bulk-billing practices? Is a billing per hour of $302 across your cohort of GPs good for a bulk-billing practice?
It’s answering these questions and de-siloing General Practice that is to vitally important within the industry. It’s one of the major features, Touchstone, that Cubiko has been working on. For the first time practices around Australia are able to compare and contrast their business metrics to like-for-like practices.
Before Touchstone, available data on how a practice is performing against a national benchmark was very hard to come by. The government intermittently releases state and national numbers on MBS items. While this is useful information, you’re comparing your practice against state and national benchmarks across the board, rather than like-for-like practices.
By understanding how your practice is performing against similar practices you can celebrate the successes. If you see that your practice is performing well, share it with the team. If you’re wondering where improvements can possibly be made, looking horizontally at benchmarks can also be useful. But always be wary of benchmarks that aren’t representative of the practice you want to run.
So, is your practice thriving? It’s a question that might be easier to answer with the right tools.
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