This busy, well-established Surgical Practice had prided itself on personal communication with referring doctors, and the care and attention its admin staff gave to patients. They had more staff than comparable practices, but the benefits out-weighed the costs according to the two Principals.
Quarantine of two staff members due to COVID19 exposure had a crippling effect on even the most basic administration functions, leading the Principals to question how resilient their team really is.
While the practice has effective and highly trained staff, we knew that the team did not have the resilience to deal with multiple absentees, and that we could also give the Principals clear recommendations about how to start optimising their admin processes and providing flexible outsourced support.
After initial contact, we outlined our proposal and scheduled an on-site review of administration processes, briefing the Practice Manager (PM) with a list of administration and HR-related documents to have ready for our meeting.
Once onsite with the PM, we reviewed key admin activities and workflows, position descriptions, staff-capabilities and quality-related benchmarks. This enabled us to follow up with a report suggesting process improvements for the PM to make and a cost benefit analysis of outsourcing some telephone and administration work.
The Gap Analysis Report was sent to the PM recommending:
We also recommended 3 or 6-monthly reviews to monitor the practice and benchmark efficiency and business resilience.
The Virtual Reception service was connected within 5 days, providing a well drilled team of 4 off-site secretaries with deep knowledge of the practice, the patients and the attending surgeons. Bookkeeping and payroll services completely took over from the Practice Manager within 2 weeks providing, reducing her stress and improving financial literacy within the business. The review of practice processes allowed the PM to focus an dynamic management and strategic improvements for the business.
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