It wouldn’t surprise you if I told you that, in my work as a practice management consultant, I often recommend big workflow changes. After all, it’s my job to embolden my clients to take those big steps to improve their practice operations that they might have been anxiously avoiding. (You know, things like major technology upgrades or job reconfigurations.)

It might surprise you to know, though, that I’m just as likely (maybe even more so) to urge my clients to look at the little irritations in their offices. That’s because even though those aggravations feel small, their impact on productivity adds up.

Practically every office has these kinds of pesky aggravations or tasks that never rise to the top of the list. They can pile up because people feel they’re just too busy to deal with them, or, in some cases, they feel guilty about “indulging” in fixes that make things a little easier when practice management culture is often focused on frugality. The problem with that thinking is that addressing these persistent annoyances can actually have a big, recurring payoff.

In the moment, your instinct might be to just tough it out and keep working around these types of annoyances (and ask staff to do the same). But it usually makes more sense to invest the time (and maybe some money) to fix them, even if you feel you’re short on both.

Here are a few examples that come up a lot:

• Cumbersome practice management reports: How much time do you spend every month running multiple reports, exporting to Excel (or, heaven forbid, keying the results into Excel), and then putting the data together in another workbook to get the stats and charts you actually wanted? It’s likely your practice management system vendor could eliminate a lot of this rigmarole with a custom report. It might cost a few hundred dollars, but that would be a one-time cost. And that cost would be repaid again and again in hours you’ll now have for other, more valuable tasks (like, say, thoroughly analyzing the reports and acting on them);
• Equipment that works OK… almost: Got a printer that is fast… except when it jams? A fridge alarm that repeatedly requires attention because of false alarms? A monitor that isn’t quite big enough to display everything employees need to see–so they have to scroll and scroll every time they look something up? Hardware prices get cheaper every year, even as features and quality continue to improve. If you haven’t upgraded your tech basics in a while, you’ll likely see a staff productivity improvement (not to mention stress reduction) that will far outweigh the cost;
• Alert overload: Speaking of alarms, are your system alerts and warnings optimized? Billing and scheduling systems, not to mention your main logins to EHR and PM, have numerous potentially helpful alerts that tend to default to stricter triggers than necessary. If staff are constantly closing out alerts they don’t need to see, that adds up to a lot of daily effort that delivers no value. Investing the time to learn how to customize alerts won’t just reclaim a lot of staff time, it will make staff much happier!

• Integrations and features you know you should be using: Setting up some of the fancy features of your EHR/PM platform might take a fair bit of doing. But if that expectation’s deterring you from implementing a feature you think would make things run better, you should know that many useful features actually take very little effort. Just one example: if patients complain about paper statements (and, especially, not being able to pay online), it’s often a very simple task (like flipping a switch) to enable the payment portal feature. Don’t let the assumption that implementing new features will be painful hold you back from trying unless you know for sure that it’s true–even if the problem you’d be solving seems “small.”
• Unfilled jobs and underutilized employees: This one plagues almost every busy manager I know. From my own experience, I understand how hard it is to set aside time for training up other people on staff (or for figuring out what you can delegate, or what new employees you should be bringing on). It’s especially hard when you feel like you’re just keeping your own head above water! But try to remind yourself that when you train someone on your team to take on a little bit more, or find the time to refine and post that long-needed staff opening, that will eventually free up much more time. Equally important, helping your employees grow in their jobs can help you retain them–avoiding the bigger hassle of turnover.
• Outdated workarounds: Are your staff putting key data in “notes” fields that actually could be placed in a structured data field? Or misusing fields that do exist (like no-show flags) because they’re not clear on how best to use them? Over the past decade-plus of developing their platforms, EHR/PM vendors have addressed many of the data-gathering shortcomings of their systems, but if you’ve been using yours a while, your team may still be doing time-consuming, unnecessary work-arounds. Worse, those work-arounds could limit your ability to effectively access and analyze important data. It’s worth a review to see how your employees are using unstructured fields, to determine if a better method of tracking already exists. (And if a field you need doesn’t seem to exist, it’s also worth asking your vendors whether a custom one can be added. Ditto for data you’re uploading as attachments instead of, potentially, importing.)
• Shared logins: I’m thankfully seeing this less and less, but even once is too often. Don’t give in to the temptation to share logins–whether to save money on software licenses or work around a third party’s rules. It’s on this list because of the productivity-draining hassles it creates (e.g., only one person can use the login at a time). But even worse than that, shared logins are a terrible security risk for just about any system in your workflow–and if anything breach or misuse occurs, you won’t have an accurate audit trail showing who was actually working on the records in question.