Planning Your Way to Victory: A Guide for Strategic Planning
Who here likes to win?
Great!
If you’re a high-achieving, high-performing practice manager, I know you have your hand raised. Those who fail often skip the most important step: the time and effort it takes to prepare for the win!
Think about a professional athlete. Do they roll out of bed, slip on their tennis shoes, and step on the court the day of the game?
Well, yes, they do that, lol!
The question really is, what do they do during the days leading up to the game? They set clear performance goals, train, practice, evaluate their past performance, consult with their coaches, and measure their progress.
The amount of time and effort spent preparing is proportional to the level of results achieved.
The first step for a professional practice manager to get a win is to properly prepare for the win. Begin with an annual strategic planning meeting with the practice owner/ doctor. This will provide a vital step in aligning expectations and responsibilities shared within the practice.
Be sure to meet at least quarterly to check in and follow up on the progress you’ve made towards the projects and goals set.
If you don’t know how to start or create the plan for this meeting, I have your back! Use this guide as your secret weapon and give your practice owner one more reason to appreciate you!
Below is your bulletproof strategic plan template.
Annual Strategy Meeting
Vision/Mission/Values
- Revisit your office vision, mission, and values. Everything your office plans to accomplish should be reflected in the vision, mission, and values of the practice. This is like the destination point on a map, keeping the practice headed in the right direction.
- Does your team know the office vision, mission and values? Do they align with them? Provide a solution if your team has outgrown them. Here are a few ideas:
- Have the team brainstorm ideas and revise the vision, mission, and values together.
- Doctor/OM rewrite the vision, mission and values together during this planning meeting.
- Doctor rewrites the vision, mission, and values.
- How are you going to keep these values alive and present? How are you going to incorporate them into your decision making?
- For example: our bonus system has our core values written on the back of our bonus scorecard.
- Another example is our Team Member of the Month program. In order to nominate a team member of the month, the person nominating must give an example of how the person they’re nominating is living out one of our core values.
- Our vision and mission statement is the banner photo on our private FB team page.
- Our vision and mission statement are framed and posted throughout the office for our patients and team to see.
Highlight the Year Prior
- What worked well?
- Any new systems in place yielding results? (Provide numbers if applicable to support)
- What needs improvement? What are your solutions?
Review the Year Prior KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
- What are your current YTD collections compared to last year?
- What contributed to the increase or decrease?
- New providers, less providers?
- Fee schedule increase?
- More patient visits?
- Fewer patient visits but higher production per visit?
Set New Collection Target for the Upcoming Year
- What do you need in order to achieve that goal? Do you need to hire more providers? Increase UCR fee schedule? See more patients (if the schedule is light), see fewer INN patients?
- Number of NPs (FFS vs INS) by month.
- What is the trend? If you are going OON, the number of FFS NPs should be increasing and your INN NP count should be decreasing.
- Patient attrition (net patient growth).
- How many NPs are coming in versus the number of patients going into the inactive category?
- Example: If you have two NPs and three patients move to the inactive category, your net patient growth is -1.
- Tx acceptance month to month and year to year.
- Is there a positive or negative change?
- What could be causing that change?
- What solutions do you have to improve (if it needs to be improved)?
- Tx acceptance training?
- Hire additional Tx coordinators?
- What is the current practice profit?
- What are your profit targets for next year?
- What other stats has your practice been tracking?
- What has been the performance?
- What is contributing to the results?
Budget
Review of any projected budget for the upcoming year:
- New uniforms?
- Special events?
- Charities/donations?
- Supplies?
- New equipment?
Bonus System for the Upcoming Year
- Are you creating one?
- Are you updating an existing one?
- What are your thoughts, suggestions, and solutions?
Marketing
- Review marketing goals and your overall marketing strategy
- Do you have any new videos to complete? (Using your iPhone is one of the best ways to get marketing videos. Patients care more about authenticity than they do about a highly polished, produced video).
- How is your office presence on social media networks?
- How long has it been since you made updates to the website?
- Is your website mobile-friendly?
- Is your Meet the Team page updated and accurate?
Scheduling
Do you need to make any changes to the way your office schedules? Are all providers keeping the same work days and hours next year?
Are you anticipating any changes, i.e. adding more or fewer providers to the schedule?
Goals for the Upcoming Year
- Do you have any big projects in the future?
- Any upgrades to the office?
- Acquiring a new office?
- Hiring new team members?
- What are your suggestions about how to prioritize what needs to be done?
Plan to Win
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, that’s understandable. Preparing for a win is hard work.
Creating this strategic plan should take you a number of hours. Don’t rush through it, and ask for help or feedback from your team.
The best advice I can give you is to select your top three or four goals for the upcoming year and really focus on them.
It is so easy to be excited and ambitious, but if you don’t set priorities, you may be easily distracted and not achieve anything.
“Everyone has a will to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.”
– Vince Lombardi
