Over the next four weeks, I’m going to be sharing with you a specific lesson and component of smart successful teams who continue to win by hitting new production levels, avoiding plateaus and compounding results month after month.
First: Statistics
… but not just having them, KNOWING THEM.
I know you get beat up about this all the time and it is something that sits in the back of your head. Even if you are all over your numbers (by the day or week or month), the question really is two fold…
1. Who else knows them?
2. What do you do with them?
There are a few things I could emphasize more about success than this one right here. It is foundational.
For this reason: you can’t make decisions, track results, have effective feedback or even set goals properly without really knowing your statistics.
However, I see a lot of doctors mess this up by either them being the only one who pays attention or having some other person be the one who knows as they become disconnected from them.
None the less the key is: everyone must know and be involved in the numbers of your practice (both the overall organization numbers and the specific individual performance numbers).
For today, I’m going to make this simple and another time we’ll go into more depth on this topic.
What is crazy is only talking about production and collections, as neither of those number really tell you anything at all. They provide zero information relevant or important to actually making decisions.
That’s like knowing the score at the end of the game. You know whether you won or you lost but you do not know how to make adjustments, how to course correct, what to train on, what improve on or where to focus for the next game – as a team or as individuals.
A short list of the obvious…
New Patient Diagnosis
Daily Diagnosis out of Hygiene by individual team member
Daily Diagnosis by Doctor, per type of patient
Of course, you then need to know what the case acceptance was again by each individual person. If someone is good or bad, you need to know. You could have one team member getting yeses from everybody and others failing miserably. If you only look at the big number, you are either celebrating when you shouldn’t be or upset at people who don’t deserve it.
Being smart isn’t really that difficult or complicated.
You also have to look at daily schedule treatment totals and future schedule production values per day.
You have to look ahead in the windshield of your practice, not always just looking at the rear-view mirror of what’s already passed.
Perhaps the most critical number of all (aside from diagnosis and scheduled treatment) is the amount of collections per day on future treatment: how much cash upfront did we get? This is the only way to really know if your future schedule is something you can depend on.
Here’s a start to things you have to grasp and each clinical team member should be absolutely aware and focused on. They must know how much new treatment they secured at the end of each day – that is their worth to the practice likes points in the game.
So…what do you do with all of this information? You’ll have to wait until next week for that.
For now, assess how well everyone knows their numbers and if you are paying attention to the most critical numbers. Get a game plan together to make improvements on your system of engagement, reporting and tracking.
