How to Use Your Practice Data to Extend Staff Capabilities
Use KPIs to drive change for your practice and staff
Between 2020 and 2022, the healthcare industry lost up to 20% of its workforce, including up to 30% of nursing. Overall, US healthcare is down by an estimated half a million staff.*
Those who have remained in their careers are often pressured to do more with each shift, covering the gaps left by attrition. For physicians, physician owners and practice managers, this creates new challenges around productivity and staff management.
By looking at your practice data to structure updated expectations, you can reclaim control of busy days and competing priorities, while empowering your staff with clear goals.
Here, we’ll dive into insights shared in a recent ModMed® webinar to help you get started, or you can register to watch the webinar on demand.
Determine benchmarks for your practice
To get strategic about productivity, you need to set benchmarks for your practice. Your final benchmarks are unique to your practice, reflecting a combination of demand for your services and what you can realistically achieve in a given time period.
It may be easiest to start with external research into industry benchmarks that apply to your specialty or geography.
For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shares median pay for certain healthcare roles, with breakdowns for state and area data. This information can guide hiring decisions. When analyzed against your practice data, it can help you determine how productive staff members need to be to justify their salaries.
You may also want to review your analytics dashboard in our software to discover key performance indicators (KPIs) like appointment utilization and established patient volume.
Choose which KPIs matter to your practice and set benchmarks that make sense for the next quarter, half year or year. These KPIs and their benchmarks create a foundation for staff objectives and achievement.
Assign KPIs to individual roles
One way to give shape to your strategy is to decide on a limited number of KPIs that can drive change for your organization and its staff.
Select one or two KPIs each for categories like revenue, patient engagement and staff productivity. Then, assign KPIs to individual roles, so that each staff member knows what’s expected.
For instance, you may set a benchmark of taking 100 phone calls per day for a front office staff member, because that would let you schedule the number of visits you need to meet revenue goals for a specific office.
If most staff meet this, but one exceeds the benchmark or one fails to meet it, you can look to these outliers for opportunities.
You may find coaching opportunities that help people feel engaged at work. You may also see outliers as signifiers of where some staff may be at risk for leaving because they’re pulling more than their fair share of the weight for the same compensation.
Additionally, you may use these benchmarks to create a culture of teamwork that allows other staff to cover in a pinch. If you can tell team members the benchmark is 100 calls a day, but you understand they may only get a quarter or half of that done because they’re extending themselves around their usual role, this can help limit burnout and assuage feelings of underappreciation.
In this way, simple KPIs like this can contribute to more than managing the day’s productivity expectations. They can contribute to a culture that makes staff feel like they belong, limiting the risk of attrition over time.
Organize staff around business objectives
At the organizational level, you can use your practice data to connect staff around practice-wide objectives. A simple example of this is patient engagement, which is a responsibility that belongs to almost everyone in the organization in different forms.
You may set a KPI around no-shows, because patients that make it to all or most of their appointments tend to be engaged. You can create pillars that staff members exemplify and then hold everyone to them as part of performance reviews.
This can evolve into a situation where, for example, you can aim to reduce patient no-shows by 5% at each practice location. That increase in patient visits may tie directly to top-line revenue numbers.
In a culture of transparency, you can share this information with your staff, bringing them into the fold of executive decision-making and helping them feel connected to the team as a whole, because they see everyone achieved this together.
Use our practice analytics
With ModMed, you have plenty of opportunities to use your practice data to support staff performance and build a culture of loyalty. In our EHR, EMA®, you have access to a number of data analytics, including clinical, financial and operational measures that you can view in raw, tabular or data visualization formats.
For example, you may want to look at office flows that show where bottlenecks may occur in your office. Another helpful metric may be time to finalize, which shows the duration of time between the end of a patient visit and finalization of notes.
Understanding this data lets you explore opportunities for continuous improvement that can set your staff on track for success and satisfaction at work, even when things are stressful.
For more on how to analyze your data or develop benchmarks, watch our webinar “Short Staffed? Leverage Your Data to Help Improve Performance, Satisfaction and Retention.”
Help staff do more with each shift. Book a demo.
*Kathleen Poindexter, “The Great Resignation in Health Care and Academia: Rebuilding the Postpandemic Nursing Workforce,” Nursing Education Perspectives 43(4) p 207–8 (2022 July/August)
This blog is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or medical advice. Please consult with your legal counsel and other qualified advisors to ensure compliance with applicable laws, regulations and standards.
