Practice Management Alert

Here’s why an expert recommends tailoring your evaluations to each job.

Before conducting performance evaluations for your front-office employees, you’re going to need to create forms that will thoroughly and fairly help you report on each employee’s contribution to the overall performance of the practice.

Problem: You won’t find any industry-wide template for evaluating front-end medical office employees. You can use that to your advantage, however, by creating scratch-made templates that pinpoint the areas you expect your front-end employees to excel.

“I recommend evaluating individual contribution, competence and outcomes, as well as team contribution and outcomes,” says Deborah Walker Keegan, PhD, FACMPE, president of Medical Practice Dimensions, Inc., in the Asheville, N.C., area. Keegan is also a principal at Woodcock & Walker Consulting.

“The complexity of today’s medical practice requires successful team outcomes, not simply a collection of individual achievements,” she says.

Check out Keegan’s advice for striking that balance between team play and individual achievement on your front-end employee evaluation forms.

Notify Employees Before Beginning, Revamping Evals

Your workers need to know what they’re going to be evaluated on before you actually evaluate them. So no matter what the final form of your front-end employee evaluations, don’t use them until you inform employees.

If you are introducing a new or updated version of your employee evaluations, be sure to notify employees that you will be using these metrics to measure their performances henceforth. Don’t start using any new or updated evaluation forms until at least six months after introducing them to your staff.

Line Up Employee’s Performance, Job Description

For each job description that you have for front-end employees — coder, biller, check-in/check-out staff, etc. — make a list of key tasks that the person in this job must fulfill. Try to come up with task descriptions that reflect “individual contribution, competence and outcomes,” says Keegan.

When it comes to ranking performance, Keegan recommends three levels:

• less than satisfactory,
• satisfactory or
• more than satisfactory. 

After completing the individual portion of the employee’s evaluation, you can move onto the team portion.

Stress Teamwork in Individual Evaluations

After you’ve assessed an employee’s individual performance, the evaluation form should move onto the employee’s team contributions; in other words, it should evaluate how the employee’s behaviors have contributed to (or been detrimental to) the overall success of the practice.

The specifics of the team section of your employee evaluation will be more subjective than the individual portion; after all, it’s difficult to measure how much of a “team player” someone has been. So you will definitely have to tailor your form to fit your practice’s particular culture. There are ways, however, to gauge how an employee’s individual contributions have contributed to the overall outcomes for the practice.

According to Keegan, some of the team-based behaviors you should address during a front-end employee evaluation include:

• how actively the employee participates in staff meetings,
• how well the employee works with others to achieve consensus,
• how much knowledge and training the employee contributes to support colleagues,
• whether the employee owns accountability on her department’s projects and 
• how well the employee works with others to meet project goals. 

Also: Keegan recommends you include spots on the evaluation form to gauge an employee’s contribution toward team outcomes, such as:

• telephone abandonment rate,
• front-desk coverage,
• patient satisfaction scores related to the front office and  
• quality of front-end registration.