When your medical practice seems to be as busy as it can get, your first instinct may be to simply hire another physician to get more patients through the office in less time. But how do you know when to hire help? And what kind of help do you need?
Key Considerations for Expanding Your Gynecology Practice
When considering expanding your gynecology practice, it's important to remember that employees are part of your overhead costs. While hiring an additional physician may seem like the logical choice, it is also the most expensive one. However, each employee becomes less expensive as the number of visits increases.
As with anything, the patient experience should be your primary focus when deciding whether to bring on additional staff. After all, every patient wants more face time with her doctor, and doctors often feel that they have too little time to spend with their patients due to increasing pressure to see more of them.
Below are a few key questions to help practitioners decide whether they are in a good position to hire additional help and, if so, determine what kind of help they need.
Do You Have the Appropriate Number of Staff Members?
Although there are many approaches to this question, the good news is that there are national benchmarks for the optimal ratio of staff to physicians. Physicians Practice offers a customizable spreadsheet that you can use to calculate your practice's staff-to-physician ratio. According to the spreadsheet, the optimal number of staff members for a single specialty practice is 5.42 employees per physician. Keep in mind, however, that more physicians in a business can sometimes translate to fewer staff, since some duties are shared, while smaller practices will have more employees per doctor.
Is Your Patient Flow Efficient?
By examining your patient flow, you can identify and eliminate bottlenecks of inefficiency. A good overview of patient flow can also help you determine where patients are spending the most time — or spending too much time. For example, are patients spending too much time in the waiting room waiting to see the doctor or undergo procedures such as ultrasound exams? A thorough patient flow map will require intricate time-keeping, but it can provide insight into maximizing patients' and physicians' time.
Are You Maximizing Your Staff?
Physicians and nurses are often bogged down with tasks that could be performed by someone else. Staff members should be working at the limit of their license. A nurse's time can be saved by having an aide perform less intensive tasks, such as taking blood pressure and weight. A busy gynecologist who spends many office hours performing ultrasounds and other examinations can save valuable time for patient visits time by hiring a sonographer.
I Answered Yes, Yes and Yes. Now What?
If you answered "yes" to the three questions above, it may be the right time to hire help. But what kind of help should you hire?
A survey by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) found that medical practices, regardless of specialty, increased their revenue more than other practices when they had a higher ratio of nonphysician providers (NPPs) to full-time physicians. NPPs, such as nurse practitioners, are able to perform a wealth of tasks, including patient care and administrative duties. Nurse practitioners can write prescriptions, make phone calls, perform chart documentation and see patients at a much lower cost than a physician.
Sometimes the biggest return on value in hiring for a medical practice can be achieved by hiring a mid-level medical professional to free up physician time. Services such as 3D ultrasound scans are reimbursed at the same rate whether they are performed by a physician or a qualified sonographer, so it actually costs a practice more to have them performed by a doctor. To better understand how sonographers integrate into a medical practice, take a look at the Society of Diagnostic Medical Sonography's guide, "Scope of Practice and Clinical Standards for the Diagnostic Medical Sonographer."
Testing the Waters
When deciding what position to hire, push tasks down the totem pole. Figure out what the physicians are doing that could be done by lower-level medical personnel. Then determine what those medical personnel are doing that could be handed to the administrative or clerical staff.
If you are leaning toward a new hire but are not ready to completely take the plunge, you may consider hiring through a temporary or locum tenens service to test the waters. If you see value added by the temporary employee, then you can consider whether to extend a permanent offer to keep the upswing in motion.
