Practice Tip 01 – Team Efficiency

TEAM EFFICIENCY IN THE VETERINARY PRACTICE
...and lost income.


Depending on how well your team works together you’ll have wide swings in efficiency. Efficiency is defined as: “the ratio of total input to effective or useful output in any system”. In your practice this would equate to, how many staff hours or wages does it take to deliver and collect your invoiced services? Think about it – you and your team are a system, much like an engine creates power. In many practices the output – I.e. the physical moving of staff around delivery of medical services correlates poorly with the input, i.e. the revenue collected. This is why you can have those oh-so busy weeks with poor revenue (you know the ones, right?).

An inefficient team will have poor understanding of its Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) - the agreements on how your practice runs - and will spend a good portion of its time handling mistakes and confusions (i.e. upset clients) and other non-invoicable activities and experience a good degree of frustration. The efficient team on the other hand follows its procedures closely, has minimal mistakes and good moral. These well thought out SOPs allow you to focus on the task at hand – the delivery of high quality veterinary medicine into the hands of your clients.

The biggest source of lost income in any practice is from poor efficiency.

Solution:
1) Get your Standard Operating Procedures defined
2) Get them agreed upon by all staff members
3) Compare you output (Staff hours / wages) to your Input (Money collected)
4) Work out and track your Practice Efficiency Index

If you would like some specific help in this area, then please give me a call.