Performance vs Operations

Hey, everyone. I'm here today to talk about performance versus operational statistics or metrics. This is really important because this is about how you spend your day when you're not treating patients. This is all about how you're looking at how well you're doing, how effective you are, how effective your staff is.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see when I going into offices is when people are trying to decide what the daily tasks are going to be, they're looking at reports. They're either looking graphs like this. Whether it's a billing chart or they're looking at their collections

or their new patients or things like that. Or they're looking at a grid-type where they actually just have the numbers listed out and they're trying to make sense of it all.

The problem with this is that it's rear view mirror management, it's management by fire. Those are two common ways that you see people talk about this. It's a problem because it's all after the fact. And so two things happen here. Number one, you're trying to change something that's already happened by trying to predict what's going to happen in the future. It's not realistic.

The second problem you have is, because your setting unrealistic expectations, your staff now is going to start getting demoralized. They're going to start thinking that they're incapable of making progress. It's kind of like saying, "I'll never get in shape because I ate a donut yesterday". Obviously, that's ridiculous. But that's how a lot of practice owners today are managing their businesses, managing their staff, managing their patients.

So the way that we want to do this actually is through separating out performance versus operational metrics. What that means is, your performance metrics, these are your graphs, these are your, "How are my new patients doing? How is my visit average? What are my collections like?" These are all rear view mirror statistics. Performance metrics are rear view mirror statistics. And that's okay. What we want to be able to do here is recognize these things as what they are and not try to make day-to-day decisions on them.

These are things that we want to look at weekly, monthly, annually, quarterly, that kind of thing. These are things that guide overall strategies. So for example, if I'm going to choose a new billing company, I might want to see what their overall performance looks like year over year. How long does it take them to get my claims paid. If they're taking the average bell curve time to get my claims paid, well then it'll take up to 30 or 60 days for me to see the brunt or the bulk of my collections whereas someone working with one of our organizations will see that in the first 30 days, on average.

So this is this is an important thing you want to do. Performance metrics will help you make strategic or high-level decisions. Operational statistics will help you make day-to-day decisions. The benefit here is that if I'm able to actually interpret my performance metrics and interpret my performance needs operationally as one number, I'm going to simplify this whole thing. And the way to do that is actually by using what are called tasks and checklists. This is an impressive part of the VeraCore technology.

And the important thing to recognize here is that I'm looking at the day-to-day things that need to get done in the office. In other words, when a new patient comes in, let's say there are 10 things you need to do every time a new patient comes in. And they include things like getting their intake forms, getting their insurance information, making copies of their cards and their IDs, getting a picture of the patient, getting their questionnaire done and the rest of everything else. Right there initially you might do an x-ray, you might do some kind of testing.

That being said, all of that stuff you can look at two ways. Either you can look at it after the fact and see whether or not it had gotten done or in real time you can track everything by a task through a checklist and actually, and by the way when I say checklist I don't mean a paper checklist, that would be terrible. But day-to-day you can see that everything, if it's measured as a task, if everything is getting done in real time, I can see that my staff is regularly reducing that backlog of tasks to zero. Because that backlog of tasks includes all the areas in my practice like collections and new patients and all that.

And so when I'm able to reduce that to zero, I know that each day my practice and my staff and myself are as efficient as possible. This means that when I go into the next day, I don't have to look in my rear view mirror from the day before to get my data today. I'm looking at it day-to-day. Then when I go into my performance metrics review, I can look at my new patient average, my per visit average, my visit average. I can look at my collections, my build out. I can look at payer allowed amount reports. I can look at documentation reports, how often am I billing out my visits on time.

All of that is interesting at a high-level strategic point. In the day-to-day operational level, I need to be able to look at how my staff is doing, how I am doing, how my colleagues are doing in one number so that I can in real-time identify the issue and make a change. So I can actually get staff help so that they can see, not that I'm looking at what they've already done and punishing them for it, I'm actually in real time trying to get them the help they need to successful.

Because at the end of the day, it's not about how smart or how talented my staff are, it's about how well I'm treating my patients. And by treating my patients well, not just at the clinical level but at the staff level. All the interactions with my patients have to be exemplary, have to be exceptional. If I look at it that way, I'm always going to be more successful.