Strategy vs. Tactics

---

Today we're going to be talking about the difference between workbenches and reports. This is really crucial because a lot of practices I work with on day one, they come to me and they say, "I need this report in order to do my day-to-day functions for whatever it is." Whether it's figuring out claims that require attention, following up on patients that are delinquent on balances, or no showing to visits, or whatever it is, everybody seems to think that they need to work off of reports to do it, right? And this is a huge, huge problem because that's not really the function of a report.

A report is a strategic statistical analysis tool. It is not a day-to-day function tool. The problem is no one out there has a really good way to use these reports and automatically come up with the work that needs to get done because the work needs to be figured out. What we really need to understand is, what is the problem we're trying to solve here? Use the 4Q/A tool to solve any problem and get to the root of it.

Throughout the day, providers are tasked with a variety of tasks to attend to, so they are always asking themselves, “What work needs me now?” In other words, what work do I need to do right now, right? What work do I need to do today and how do I know when I'm done for the day? If I look at a report, it's going to always say what problems there are and what's going well, right? If you look at a whole aging report on your billing, you're going to see all the billing out there not just what needs your attention right now. So what's the opportunity here? Well, generally when we see practices working off of reports, they're about 50% dysfunctional.

Our opportunity is to recover 50% of our time, effort, and money. Whoever is responsible for doing the work here, they're getting paid for these efforts. So their time, their effort, and your money as an owner is about 50% lost in this case. The division between these three sometimes fluctuates, but these three make up that 50%. There's a huge opportunity here. However, what is the difficulty? If it was an obvious solution such as simply pulling a report into Excel and analyzing it or whatever, we would just have done it or figured it out, right?

The reason why we didn't is because it is difficult to solve. So the difficulty here, is that we need automation. We don't want to just recover 10% of this time, we don't want to recover 20% this time. We want to recover all 50%. And what that requires is artificial intelligence (AI). What does that mean? That means that whatever system you're using that's generating these reports needs to be responsible automatically for figuring out what requires the attention, generating work, a workload for whoever is responsible, and tracking when that work gets done.

We need to have an artificial intelligence that automatically assigns tasks and auto tracks completion. Now, this is day-to-day work that needs to happen, right? Day to day, we need a system that automatically assigns tasks. In other words, figures out what work needs to get done, figures out who needs that work and gives it to them, and auto-tracks the completion so that as an owner, I don't always have to ask the question, "Is it done?" That is really the question we're trying to answer and so the report is no longer a good function for that.

What other tool can we use when a report becomes a non-optional solution? What we need is what we call an artificially intelligent workbench which is a tool that will automatically list out only those items that require your attention. So let's say today, there are seven items that require your attention. Let's say you have a practice where you see 50 patients a day. Seven of those patients each day are priority and require your full attention. Whatever is going on within the course of the day, you should only be looking at the seven patients to be seen that day. Do not spend time looking at the other 43 patients who aren’t on your roster for the day. Prioritization is key whether you are a staff member, member of the front desk, as a biller or physician.

The next necessary function that is needed to automate workflow is whenever a task item is completed, it needs to come off of this list as a completed item. I need to know how many of these I'm completing so that, as the owner, I can track it. For example, I know that this month, we had 7x20 working days, so that is 140 items addressed by my team. Seven times 20, 140 items got addressed by my team this month. Now, the beauty of this is that as an owner, if 140 after a few months is my average number, I can start to incentivize my team by saying, "Okay, these 140 items just went to 150."

Well, you just did +10 for this month. Let's figure out a nice bonus scheme there. Now, you have to be careful when creating the bonus scheme because if you're starting to see an incremental growth in the number of issues that need to be addressed by your team, you may have a problem somewhere that needs to be addressed strategically as opposed to tactically. You want to control the number of tasks that are being dealt with and you want to have clean patient visits going through. Ideally, you want to keep this number on the workbench very low to begin with.

You also want to have it automatically calculated for you so that your team is focused 100% of their time on solving problems not figuring out what problems need their attention, okay? That is the difference here. It is the difference between 50% of their time, effort, and money, being spent on how to figure out what problems need their attention. Now, 100% of their time is focused on solving those problems! Now, every single dollar that you're investing in your staff as an owner is on solving problems and now it's a really valuable investment.

The result tends to be also an increase in performance so you're going to see your major stats start to look better. Things like no-shows, things like your A/R, your insurance, or your cash reimbursement rate is going to go up, right? You're also going to see fewer delays and patients without future appointments. All these statistics that you want to look at that all come together, right? All of them come together to form your revenue and then your profit. All of these numbers here each one has an effect on your revenue.

Of course, we know that as owners. The problem is that we tend to think we need an individual solution for each of these items. Turns out, there are some things we can do. There are some things we can put into place that eliminate or at least scale back the need to address each issue individually on a strategic level. The goal is, again, you want to empower your team on the tactical level to address individual items so that you can focus on new growth, and then, of course, maximizing margins, right?

As an owner, those are your two biggest responsibilities: maximizing revenue and maximizing profit. Figuring out where the new ones are going to come from, getting them in the door, closing them, that is revenue. Put strategic things in place that's going to help you keep that revenue and then maximize your profit. How does the workbench maximize your profit? Again, if we can recover 50% of the effort currently being wasted by using reports, that's a huge amount of time and effort and money that gets recouped into profit, right? As a staff member, suddenly I'm in control of my workload for the day and now I can come back to the owner and say, "I took care of every one of the items on my list for today," so if I go through here and I had seven on my list today, the constant work like marketing and closing new patients, they are now no longer worried about whether their efforts are leading to retained patients. They're worried about where the next patient is going to come from.

It is a really powerful analysis tool at the end of the week, or at the end of the month to see strategically where things are going versus your day-to-day, week-to-week work which is explicitly defined on your workbenches. That's really one of the big questions we want to make sure we're asking of whatever tool we're using. Again, we're talking about 50% of our staffs time. That's huge! That's not just figuring out how to reduce my no-show rate maybe by 5%. That is something that's going to affect every one of my practice statistics.