If repetition is the key to peak performance, then continually reassessing yourself and reflecting on your progress is the key to improvement, leverage and breakthroughs.
These two go hand in hand. You do not practice for the sake of practice. As the saying goes, “It’s not practice that makes perfect, it’s PERFECT practice that makes perfect.”
And perfect practice is achieved with oversight of the schedule, careful review of you new patient success (what I call a New Patient Audit where you determine “where are they now”), evaluation of team member performance, and how doctors engage with patients verbally and diagnostically.
True Champions always want to know how did I do and what can I do better; because there is no point in doing the same thing over and over if it isn’t getting you where you want to go. That’s what reassessment is all about – continuous improvement in the direction of where you want to end up.
I say “RE-assessment” because I assume you are assessing yourself already. You are if you are tracking diagnosis, acceptance, collections, value based scheduling, new patient referrals and every other type of conversion.
The teams that reassess themselves most often are the ones that grow steadily and achieve ‘next level’ breakthroughs consistently, which is the way it should be.
I can tell you story after story of practices that are already high performing that sit down and take a hard look at their schedule and say, “What can we do better, different – NOW? Even though we are at X/day, there has to be a way we can get to X+Y.” …and there always is.
I see practices that I would say have an incredible patient experience and yet they still evaluate it to see if there is something that can be done better in order to shape a better patient.
These are questions that you should be asking at least monthly and, if done right, you are proactively looking every single day at opportunities you can course correct.
You’ve heard me talk about teams that are just negligent in getting patients to move forward with treatment – acceptance and scheduling – before they walk out the door. As if it’s ever going to be as effective calling, emailing, talking about treatment any other time (unless you are doing a full fledge treatment conference).
If you really want to step up your game and you really want to see just how far you can push your potential, then you absolutely have to commit to continual reassessment over everything you are doing.
I challenge you to look at the five key pillars routinely…
Phone, Screening, Scheduling of New Patients
New Patient Experience Including Education
Diagnostic and Clinical Experience to Move the Patient to “Big Picture”
Treatment Acceptance, Cash Up Front and Value Based Scheduling
Referral Strategy with Systems for Growing A Patients
There are of course other areas… Your reassessment of your own performance, team communication, practice organization, flow of your day. The list goes on.
I will remind you that every practice (as well as every individual) reaches plateaus. The trick to doing it right is you intentionally reach them relatively quickly and again each at a higher level.
The real secret to breaking through those plateaus is honest assessment of where you are at, what you are doing and how it is all working. Your goal is to figure out this: if we were going to do it even better, what would that look like?
This should be a very fun and invigorating thing for everyone to discuss. The best part is each team member has their own perspectives and vantage points that they can share when it comes to reassessing each major component and pillar of your practice.
So get to it. And we’ll continue our Masters Level Daily Focuses next week.
