By Caren BaginskiHow do you ensure that your staff follows your medical practice's procedures? Employees often overlook the big binder simply because, well, it's big. Practice administrators who attended the MGMA seminar "Achieving Efficient Practice Operations" in Scottsdale, Ariz., earlier this month shared eight ways to break that binder into manageable pieces.
- Serve a monthly lunch to your staff and choose one topic to review, such as paid time off or your organization's dress code.
- Have "mystery shoppers" call to see if staff follows telephone procedures. This is a great way to get unbiased feedback, but use caution in how you share the feedback with your staff so as not to demoralize the team.
- Consider peer review. This can be effective if colleagues are honest, but might pose a problem if you have employees who don't get along.
- Don't be the one with all the answers. When an employee asks you about a procedure she should know, pretend you aren't sure and look the procedure up with her. Teaching the employee to fish is much more effective than handing over the fish.
- Keep the procedure manual current. Staff will be more likely to follow up-to-date procedures than ones from the Stone Age. Review procedures every two to three months with the input of the people doing the work. You might find you have to change procedures to reflect reality.
- Print procedures on index cards and place them at the workstations where the procedures happen. This is more effective than a large binder listing all your procedures. And because the cards get used all the time, they'll be updated, too.
- Have supervisors teach the new hire the procedures, not the outgoing employee (whose mind is no longer committed to your practice).
- Put procedures on your intranet for everyone to access. Plus, this makes them searchable.
Do you have an idea not mentioned here? Add it to the comments.
Caren Baginski is MGMA's Web content writer/editor.
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