Practice Management Alert

Question: We’ve been having trouble figuring out how many people to schedule. We’re now back at full-time office hours after having been partly remote/telehealth-based due to the pandemic, but we are also scheduling visits with more time between them for sanitizing. How can we evaluate how many people to have on staff at any given time?

Vermont Subscriber

Answer: Consider performing a time study to ensure that you’re scheduling staff appropriately. So many things can impact whether the clinicians end up running on time, including the amount of time that the physicians spend with patients, the components of the workup, how diagnostic testing is handled, patient mobility and mental conditions, how many rooms you have, and how much time it takes to turn around a room after a patient leaves it.

The first step in rectifying staff scheduling issues is having an office manager do a time study to uncover the constraints in patient throughput. Even if you’ve always done it a certain way, that may not be the best way or easiest way, so an analysis is essential. Sometimes you’ll find that it’s space or location that’s causing the backup.

Providers also need to evaluate whether the amount of time they spend with patients is appropriate. In the past, you may have seen 25 patients a day per provider, for instance, but now it could be more like 15 (or 40!). Understanding how your office visit schedule has changed over the past two years is essential to staffing properly.

A time study analysis can change the perception regarding data by isolating constraints and working with the team to eliminate them. Once you know how much time providers and support staff members are spending with patients, you’ll be able to adjust staffing accordingly.