Address hiring and staffing issues by looking inside your practice

Most practices and businesses, in gen-eral, are having challenges hiring: It’s common to hear of a lack of applicants and candidates who “ghost” interviews or accept a position with a practice and then never show up.

Solutions to this problem have been focused on, “Which website is the best to list the position?” Or “What does your Help Wanted ad look like?” Or even, the oft debated, “Should I hire someone with or without experience?” In many markets, paying a wage above the current market rate doesn’t appear to offer much relief to this problem either. Is there another solution?

You have little control over external factors that influence this hiring dilemma. Therefore, you have to look internally for a solution.

A CAPACITY PROBLEM

The core issue with being short-staffed is that you have a capacity problem — you have more patients than resources to take care of them. And if you can’t change the labor shortage, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

First, what if you saw fewer patients? Blasphemy, you say? Well, if you’re understaffed and your current patients are getting a less-than-optimal patient experience (think about what’s going on with wait times at restaurants), will you lose patients in the future because of your current lack of service? If there was a way to “thin out the herd” and not suffer any financial decrease, that would be one way to deal with fewer staff. The two easiest, surefire ways to do that are to raise your fees and/or space out your appointments.

RAISING FEES/SPACING OUT

The prospect of “raising fees” is often readily dismissed as unachievable due to caps by insurance reimbursement. Of course, this is only the case if you participate in particular plans. There are a few considerations to that point: The obvious is to evaluate whether, given your labor challenge, you’re able to afford to stay in that plan. If the reimbursements are subpar and there is an inordinate amount of patients using the plan, you need to sharpen your pencil and see whether remaining with that plan makes sense for you.

Offering clinically indicated services outside of that plan is another alternative. However, remember that for any incremental increase in service, you may have to rely on having more staff to provide them.

Spacing out appointments is another viable solution. Effectively, you see fewer patients per day, making the staff shortage more tenable.

OTHER REMEDIES

Other remedies to consider are items such as cross training, in which you do more with less. Next, take a very hard and objective look at your systems. Eliminate repetitive non-essential steps, forms, documents, etc. Ask yourself, “What’s one thing we can eliminate without compromising clinical care or the patient experience during __?” Fill in the blank with booking appointments, checking patients in, preliminary testing, the exam sequence, the frame selection process, checking patients out, patient recall, etc.

Next, maximize your telehealth capabilities. Used at the right time with the right patients, these tools can help provide needed care with fewer staff.

Related to telehealth is technology. Is there something being done that can be done, or at least partially done or augmented, by technology? This can be clinical or administrative.

All these suggestions can be used by any practice at any time to provide an often much-needed tune up. OM

DR. GERBER is the founder of the Power Practice, a company specializing in making optometrists more profitable. Learn more at www.powerpractice.com .