Your team is working hard. You’re working hard. But is all that effort getting your practice where you want it to go? “We’re doing our best” only tells you so much. That’s where key performance indicators come in. Yes, numbers—but numbers that help you see where your team needs support, how to help more children, and how to get yourself paid, too. That’s what I will cover in this article.
My name is Diane Crecelius. I am a fellow practice owner just like yourself. I’m also a coach with the company Let’s Talk Private Practice, a sister company of Peds-A-Palooza™ Community & Conferences, a networking organization of owners coming together to support each other. At Let’s Talk Private Practice, we work with owners like yourself to be able to handle problems in their practice, and we want to help you.
As an owner, I started my company small, grew it to a larger company, and sold it for double-digit millions about five years ago. I want that same success for you. I know what it takes to really organize and structure your company in a way that pushes production to help more children and also be profitable and get you owners paid.
KPIs: What You Need to Know
The real value of KPIs isn’t simply tracking numbers—it’s knowing which numbers matter and what to do with them.
The right KPIs give you an objective way to see how each area of your practice is performing, where additional attention may be needed, and where there are opportunities to increase production, revenue, and profitability.
They also help take management out of the realm of opinion. Instead of asking whether a department is “doing well” or whether everyone is “working hard,” you have a measurable target that shows whether that area of the practice is producing the result you need.
And for your clinical team, these numbers can represent something much more meaningful than statistics on a spreadsheet. They can show the amount of help your practice is providing to children and families in your community.
Put a Number with Your Scheduling Target
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to know how many patients are on the schedule before the week begins. This is called the advanced schedule. We need a KPI number, a target that the owner wants to achieve to have children on the schedule ready to be helped before the week begins.
If you tell your front desk, “Just fill the schedule. Any openings that you see, fill them,” they’ll try really hard. They’ll call everybody on your waitlist. They’ll talk to therapists and parents and try to get more children on the schedule. But the true way to push the potential of that schedule is to put a number with it, to say, “I need 100 children on the schedule next week.” Pick any number depending on the size of your company.
Now they have a carrot to truly go after, not just to try really hard to do as many as they can, but 100. When they’re at 85, they are not at 100. They know they have to push harder. They know they have to turn over every rock to find more children to help.
Identify When It’s a Marketing Problem
There are only so many children that are coming into your clinic. How do you ensure your front desk is able to keep finding children to schedule? That’s your job as the owner: to make sure the front desk doesn’t have that problem.
That then becomes a marketing problem. Get with your marketing team about whether you are driving in enough patients, the right kind of patients that can fill the openings you have in your schedule—whether it’s occupational therapy, physical therapy, or speech therapy, whether it’s a young child or a homeschooled child that can be helped between the hours of nine and three.
That has to be handled with marketing, not at the front desk—as long as the front desk is turning over every rock to really help every child they can get on the schedule.
Establish KPIs for Every Division
You should know key KPIs for every division of your company including:
- Accounting (which would have KPIs such as “billing” and “collections”)
- Front desk
- Marketing
- Human resources
- The clinic as a whole
There should be a KPI for every division of your practice that the team stives for and pushes their potential to go in the direction that the owner wants. The owner has to understand the whole big picture of the company to know:
- What is the right number (KPI) for that division?
- What would push the potential of that team?
- How do I get that team trained up going after that number?
Then the owner has to go back and manage it on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis to make sure that staff are hitting those KPI numbers. This pushes the potential, drives in more revenue, and gives the team and the company stabilization and organization–because now they’re all striving for the same goals. It literally creates your culture; and I promise you, if implemented correctly, it will maximize your revenue and your profitability.
Let’s Get You Paid as Owners
Let’s get you paid as owners. Let’s get you paid at the right level. Let’s get you learning how to actually have KPIs and measure them so you can use them to push production.
If you need help with that, just reach out to us at Let’s Talk Private Practice. We are here to answer any of your questions and hold your hand and implement this at the highest level.
