"If you think about it, who would be dumb enough
or foolish enough to ever think of taking on such
a responsibility as managing a private medical
office business, with absolutely no knowledge or
education about how to do that?"
Answer: Over multi-thousands of physicians just out of medical school over the last century, with no business education, plus 10,000 new medical school graduates each year in the USA.
After reading a recent article about medical practice business management and the difficulties that business administrators have in doing their jobs, I immediately could visualize the close connection to why most physicians not only have difficulty with the administration of their own medical practice business, but also why all professional medical doctors are victims of their own attributes.
It's well recognized and accepted that entrepreneurs make lousy managers and administrators. Medical doctors are, by definition, entrepreneurs. It would be difficult to argue against that premise because physicians function in the same environment, or world, as all entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs can find answers to problems by stepping out of their comfort zone of self-limitations and letting their minds research their memory banks for the hidden answers. But it does not lay out to anyone the details about how to make something happen. Yep! You need a business education to know how to create, manage, and grow a medical practice business.
Like the church bulletin board I read, "Google doesn't have all the answers."
Almost every patient comes to the physician with a symptom, or complaint, or medical problem that may not present an easily recognizable pattern of a disease or diagnosis. So, here in the first few minutes of speaking with his patient, physicians find themselves outside their comfort zone and involved in a surge of mental creativity while organizing and interconnecting the symptoms and the physical findings to come up with the perfect diagnosis.
The physician can then open their mind to all kinds of possibilities for diagnosing the problem, all of which are subliminally squeezed out of the memory banks by the subconscious mind. From there, the search becomes more focused, and the possibilities are narrowed down.
The only way the brain can come up with the right treatment of the diagnosis issue, is if the brain has already memorized the book of treatments (education in medical school). In the same sense, when a physician has the business education (includes the marketing) already, he or she will have an astounding headstart on all who don't have that.
The whole pile of information and findings are funneled down to the most obvious cause which usually has a most common treatment. If that's not the case, the physician ends up in entrepreneur heaven with bundles of ideas and a great opportunity to solve the problem anyway, and show the world what they're made of... perhaps even the elite medical school they graduated from.
Getting back to those attributes I mentioned above. Several are those that are a real pain in the ass for those physicians in private medical practice who avoid taking full control of their office business. They avoid the responsibility for management of their medical business, and avoid attempting to learn and implement time proven business principles every physician must have for maximizing their own potential in practice.
The highest potential for their business income and efficiency results from the process. For doctors in this hypnotic state of avoidance, the inevitable consequences always show up, often when it's too late to do much about their circumstances.
The crime is that it should never happen to any physician because it is entirely preventable.
A physician's greatest distaste for management is often that too much of the administrative work is either too routine, or not challenging enough to peak their interest. You know that the worst thing that can happen to you in medical practice is to have two jobs at the same time.
In one you are your own employee treating patients for that invisible corporation you set up to run the practice business. The other is being the owner and CEO of the business which requires management of the business done by the only person responsible for the success
of the business... you!
Pushing the management job on to an untrained employee who thinks she or he can handle the job is downright stupidity. As the old saying goes, "Ignorance can be overcome by education, but stupidity lasts forever."
Hiring a person trained in medical office management, dramatically improves the office business functioning, but does not remove your overall responsibility for supervising the manager and maintaining your control of every aspect of your medical practice business. Managers earn higher salaries so you must earn more to pay them, which is often an affordable problem for
physicians nowadays.
Another trait physicians have that makes it difficult to manage their office is difficulty in delegating duties. Most doctors want things done a certain way. They often are not satisfied with how someone else does a job and would much rather do it themselves and have it done "right."
A mistake made by the majority of physicians who do delegate duties to their staff is that of not taking the time to explain to the employee exactly what he or she wants done in detail. If it's done without a detailed explanation, you will get back what the person thinks you may have meant.
Delegation of duties, including outsourcing, is a critical issue for business growth. Physicians must learn to be satisfied with, "good enough" work done by others. No one can do it all themselves.
The distasteful idea of replacing yourself, your importance, your supreme talents, makes a huge dent in the ego and self esteem, which is another barrier to good management by physicians.
We all develop habit patterns in our lives to make our life experiences easier and quicker. It's been reported that 80% of our daily activities are composed of habit patterns. For physicians, it's just another problem in their adjustment to a managerial status, where most everything in management is constantly changing, new problems, new innovations, new procedures, new employees, new systems, new toys, etc.
If there is one essential factor to keep in mind while thinking through all of this stuff, it's one that's known to all success business people, business experts, management experts, and maybe even your wife or husband.
You need to make your productive time even more important than it is now. You must free up the time to do the $100/hr. job instead of doing the $10/hr. job. It's very easy to find an employee to work for $10/hour but you rarely can find an employee capable of doing what the
$100/hour requires.
That is what you must do yourself or trust in your ability to mentor a staff member assigned
to do it. In most medical practice businesses that job is for marketing your medical practice and establishing a constant flow of new patients into your practice. It also can be assigned to a marketing experienced staff member to do at home, or outsourced to a marketing agency/company (very expensive to do).
----Professional Probe----
"Management and marketing staff must know
how to spell, as well as to communicate well.
Otherwise, workers will cover up their mistakes
so that their boss never finds out."
Articles©2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #151, 3-16-22
