July 2019 - Capko & Morgan

Don’t let the bastards get you down

We recently found out that another client of ours has been embezzled. Yes, I said "another." Employees stealing from practices unfortunately happens way too often. Though not rare, even just hearing about it is jarring. I find it sticks with me for days, like a black cloud reminding me that people can be awful. Of course, the effect it has on us is trivial compared to the impact it has on the actual victims of this terrible abuse of trust. The point of this post is not to advise you on how to reduce your risk of embezzlement. (We can do that, so contact us if you want to learn more, or start with our short quiz on the subject. But this post is about the emotional impact of having been robbed and deceived by someone you trusted.) If you've discovered that someone you relied on stole from you, here are some things I would like you to know. It's not you, it's them.Becoming a victim of embezzlement has nothing to do with your intelligence. Read that again: being a victim of embezzlement has nothing to do with your intelligence. Too often, victims of embezzlement feel ashamed that it happened to them. But though embezzlers are often clever, the difference between you and them is more about worldview than intellect. In some cases, people who were once honest find ways to rationalize their first theft while working for you. In other cases, embezzlers are repeat offenders who treat their crime as a trade, moving from employer to employer to ply it. Either way, it's clear embezzlers have a completely different sense of what is right and wrong than you do. In all likelihood, you didn't suspect them because you'd never consider doing something like this yourself. It's wrong to blame the victim of any crime, even when the victim is yourself. The only person to blame is the perpetrator. But you can put your intelligence to work for you by learning how to avoid a recurrence. You'll need to look at the world in a different way, so that you

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:44-08:00July 15th, 2019|

New EMR/burnout study: Can your practice benefit from its findings?

A new PAMF (Palo Alto Medical Foundation) study on the connection between EMR and physician burnout is getting a lot of attention. The study has limitations (e.g., it focuses on one organization, one EMR and set of workflows, and it aims to infer much from a single question). But despite the need for caveats, the study is valuable because it confirms what intuition suggests about EMRs and physicians' stress. What's more, the authors tested workflow modifications and found they helped alleviate EMR-related burnout at PAMF. You can read about the study here. To summarize it, the study validated that when EMRs encourage message overload, they significantly increase physician stress. The study found that about half of all messages the physicians in the PAMF study received were EMR-generated--i.e., things like health maintenance alerts and medication reminders that the system generates automatically. The researchers found that many of these messages could be handled, or at least triaged, by other members of the care team. For example, medication messages could be routed first to a pharmacist, who would involve the physician only if needed. Nurses and MAs could also handle much of the automated message volume, such as follow-up appointment reminders. Not surprisingly, when PAMF experimented with diverting these lower-complexity messages to others, the burden (and stress) on physicians decreased substantially. Can PAMF's solution work in your practice? PAMF is a large, integrated healthcare organization. Healthcare Dive reported that PAMF launched an initiative called MIST--Multi-Disciplinary Inbox Support Team--to test the idea of sharing the message workload. One year in, MIST seems to have helped reduce physician message loads (and stress) substantially. But what if your practice is not a huge organization with IT and workflow experts or pharmacists on staff? In our consulting work, we often recommend practices involve staff in more meaningful work. To enable physicians to focus as much as possible on tasks that only they can do (working at the top of their licenses), everyone else needs to do as much as they can. Expanding the roles of staff -- within their skills and scope, of course -- can help

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:44-08:00July 7th, 2019|

Hiring your best new medical practice administrator

Since administrators play such a critical role in practices, recruiting a new one for your practice may provoke a fair bit of anxiety. If you’ve been left with little time, you may feel rushed. If your previous practice manager was a flop, you might even be feeling dread. Addressing the challenge head-on and systematically can help get you the result you desire. One familiar mistake we see is failing to define your needs thoroughly. This is not just a matter of “minimum of five years experience” – it’s a matter of understanding your practice’s mission, goals, and culture. It’s a matter of identifying what success looks like with the right administrator in place. Without mapping your practice’s needs and culture to a candidate’s qualifications and characteristics, you’re left merely hoping for a good outcome. Considering the lost time, productivity and general disruption that comes along with a poor hire, you need the odds in your favor. If you have infighting among your staff, which isn’t uncommon unfortunately, you may need a no-nonsense administrator with more of a hands-on approach as opposed to a spreadsheet genius who prefers to stay locked in her office all day. On the other hand, perhaps you have a mature and well-functioning staff and feel that you need a candidate with particularly strong financial management skills—for example, if growing your practice by adding a new office or even acquiring a competitor is on your agenda. Whatever you decide, you may want to create a spreadsheet table so that you can rate each candidates on the dimensions you think are most important - a simple 1-5 rating is a great start. You may want to use weighting as a tool to further refine your analysis. The old management saying of “be slow to hire and quick to fire” is useful to keep in mind along with some caveats. While it’s certainly important to find the best possible candidate, the cost of stop-gap management can be high. We see many practices where some staff is “temporarily” filling in as the practice administrator – often poorly attending to many

By Joseph Capko|2022-01-01T22:51:44-08:00July 2nd, 2019|

Monthly Archives: July 2019

Don’t let the bastards get you down

New EMR/burnout study: Can your practice benefit from its findings?

Hiring your best new medical practice administrator