Management Issues

Learn How to Run the Practice Instead of It Running You

You went to school to become a great clinician.

You learned how to evaluate children, create treatment plans and help families.

You probably didn’t take a class called:

How to manage a growing practice, oversee personnel, improve efficiency and keep every problem from landing in your lap.

Yet here you are—treating patients, making decisions from the car and reminding people about things you’ve already explained three times.

You built the practice.

You used to run the practice.

Now the practice is running you.

You Can’t Grow Chaos

Maybe you want to add new services, hire more clinicians or open another location.

But when one location already feels like a giant ball of wax, growth doesn’t sound exciting.

It sounds exhausting.

Expansion has to begin with stability.

You don’t want to replicate the confusion.

You want to replicate a practice that works.

Busy Isn’t the Same as Efficient

A disorganized practice doesn’t always look like chaos. Sometimes, it looks like everyone is working very hard.

But behind all that activity:

Tasks are done differently by different people
Work gets started but not completed
Information is hard to find
Details fall between departments
Decisions are made but never carried out
The same problems come up week after week
Employees wait for answers before moving forward
You step in because doing it yourself seems faster

The practice stays busy from morning until night.

But busy and efficient are not the same thing.

No One Is Quite Sure Who Should Do What

As practices grow, responsibilities often develop by accident.

Someone starts helping with scheduling. Another person takes over authorizations. A good employee becomes a manager but is never taught how to manage.

Before long, there’s overlap in some areas and big gaps in others.

Employees may not know:

Which tasks are part of their job
Which decisions they can make
Who gives them direction
Who checks that the work was completed
When to solve a problem themselves
When to bring it to a manager

When that isn’t clear, work gets passed around until it eventually lands back in your lap.

Your Memory Is Not a Management System

You explain a procedure in the hallway.

You assign a task between appointments.

Everyone nods.

A week later, the task isn’t finished and the procedure is being done three different ways.

Verbal instructions disappear.

An organized practice needs practical systems for:

Assigning and following up on work
Documenting procedures
Communicating changes
Checking completed work
Keeping information where people can find it
Making sure decisions turn into action

You don’t need to become a better nag. You need management SOPs that don’t require nagging.

Stop Solving the Same Problems

The schedule falls apart again.

A referral isn’t followed up on.

An authorization expires.

Billing information is incomplete.

A project gets pushed aside because everyone got too busy.

You fix the immediate problem, everyone breathes again—and then it happens again.

That’s because cleaning up the mess isn’t the same as fixing why it keeps happening.

Good management knows how to get to the bottom of it all.

You don’t need to become better at cleaning up messes.

You need fewer messes.

Being Nice Doesn’t Mean Giving Up Control

Pediatric practice owners have big hearts.

You want employees to feel appreciated and supported. You don’t want the practice to feel like corporate America moved into the therapy area.

We agree.

But being nice and being in control are not opposites.

Team members do better when they know what’s expected, how work should be completed, where to find information and who to ask for help.

You can treat people like gold and still expect the work to be done correctly, efficiently and on time.

We Find Out What’s Making the Practice So Hard to Run

The underlying problem may be:

No workable management SOPs
Missing policies on how the practice operates
Poorly defined jobs
Missing, outdated or inefficient procedures
Managers who were never trained to manage
Weak communication between departments
Little follow-up after work is assigned
No consistent planning process
Employees who are busy but not productive enough
Too many routine decisions coming back to you

That’s why we don’t hand every owner the same cookie-cutter solution.

We look at how your practice is operating, find where work is getting stuck, repeated, delayed or sent unnecessarily back to you, and recommend the right help to remedy it.

Depending on what we uncover, that may include our:

Essential Management Program
Management & Leadership Program
Customized Accountability Coaching
Combination of Focused Programs

The help is customized because the problem is customized.

We Help You Build a Practice That Works

The goal isn’t more paperwork, policies and meetings. It’s to make the practice easier to run. We help you:

Clarify job responsibilities
Organize communication and workflow
Simplify inefficient processes
Put practical procedures in place
Train managers to handle more
Improve productivity
Reduce repeated mistakes
Turn plans into completed action

You’ll still lead your company. You just won’t have to be its memory, traffic cop, reminder system and emergency department all rolled into one.