Are you SURE you're HIPAA compliant? The stakes are higher than ever for protecting Patient Health Information (PHI). The Department of Justice’s current stance is that it is committed to tackling corporate crime and will continue to investigate and prosecute companies (and responsible individuals) who engage in such misconduct. What does that mean for you?

We talked about the value and importance of the GEMBA walk and the Weekly WIP meeting. Now, bring the power of data visualization to the meeting, and you will cut the meeting time in half. Or more! Join me this week as we discover how the intuitive WIP: Aim for Success tool, combined with GEMBA insights, can streamline your weekly WIP meeting and transform it into both patient care and financial planning in one!

Do you want to turn the chaos of daily operations into smooth, well-oiled workflows? Last week I talked about the GEMBA walk and this week I will show how combining GEMBA walks with weekly WIP reviews can synergize to not only streamline your practice but also improve the patient experience. Whether it's verifying insurance, ensuring the availability of supplies, or planning for special activities, we'll show you how to be one step ahead, ensuring that each patient visit becomes a meaningful step toward their health goals while still getting paid!

In this blog, since getting paid for what we do is fairly important to most of us, I want to focus a little on a critical, but often overlooked communication opportunity.

Outcomes are more than just for patients. An “Outcome” is the effect or result of an event or process. They can be good or bad, desired or undesired, anticipated or unanticipated. What outcomes are you achieving in your practice management processes?

Keeping your data safe can seem like a never-ending challenge. New breaches of health data seem to be announced almost daily, and organizations of all sizes — including the government — have fallen victim to data scams. 

But there is good news on the data security front, too. The migration of many systems to the cloud means that much responsibility for security is now handled by true experts who focus on that task —rather than practice owners and managers who are overseeing a lot of other important priorities. 

There are also a number of quick, easily implemented tactics for reducing many of the most common risks of data loss.

I believe most leaders think they have a good understanding of what matters most to the staff, but do they? Acting on poorly understood priorities is not only ineffective, but it can backfire when leaders’ actions suggest that they don’t understand what their people are wrestling with. As someone once said, “Tone-deaf compassion is more dangerous and costly than none at all.”

In O&P, the glory goes to the clinician. But if they only knew what the admins do to make sure the company gets paid for that glorious work! The administrative professionals that are running your practice have about a gazillion different tasks to perform between the time they learn about a new prescription/patient and when you deposit payment for the services you render. 

I just spent a week at the Academy meeting in Nashville. While it was awesome to see a bunch of people I haven’t seen for a while, there seemed to be a common thread of frustration with finding solid employees. To me, this begs the question of which comes first, the people or the process? Yes, it is a trick question. But which one leads to business continuity? It is funny to me that in a profession that requires meticulous documentation, the processes that drive multi-million dollar practices are often poorly documented.

Who here loves chasing down compliant physician documentation? That is one of two issues that come up repeatedly when talking about frustrating parts of running an O&P practice. Read on the find the other and what you can do about it.

There is a lot we need to focus on as we run a business and attracting new patients (customers) is certainly key. Everyone knows that if we have no customers, we have no business. But a new customer and a retained customer are not the same thing.