How to Improve the Efficiency of Practitioners’ Treatments With Real Data?

14-11-2020
Author: Guy Makmel
  • Best practice

Boosting the quality and efficiency of your practitioners’ treatments means boosting the efficiency of the whole clinic. It’s not a big deal either: you already have the data it would require, and calculating it takes mere minutes.

 

Have you ever considered how much treatment efficiency really affects your clinic? The numbers might surprise you. A percentile higher or lower might not seem like much, but it makes quite a difference when you analyse the effects it has on the workplace as a whole.

So, why is this information so valuable for clinics?

Revenue decrease. Booking new appointments costs money, and an after-treatment takes the schedule slot of an actual treatment! Increasing the efficiency of your practitioners’ treatments directly increases your revenue.

Patient experience. Besides taking away precious time from your practitioners, additional treatments take away precious time from your patients as well. The sooner the patients see treatment results, the better their experience with your clinic.

Patient retention rate. A significant portion of your patients will decide to change the clinic if the initial treatment didn’t give the desired results. Getting the job done in a single take significantly reduces the chance of your patients looking elsewhere.

Practitioner efficiency. Treatment efficiency is the most obvious indicator of the efficiency of the practitioner. A lower treatment efficiency rate shows where there’s room for improvement.

Practitioner quality. Finally, the practitioner efficiency really shows the quality of the practitioner. In other words, improving the efficiency of the practitioner’s treatment will make them a better practitioner.

How can you perform a simple check on practitioners’ treatment quality and efficiency?

The method is fairly simple, but very effective. To do this, you have to count the total number of treatments a practitioner has performed, and the total number of after-treatments performed after the initial treatment.

Next, you take the number of after-treatments and divide it by the number of first treatments. The ideal result would equal zero, but that most likely won’t be the case, so you should strive to get it to be close to zero, or as low as possible.

Multiply the result of the equation with 100 to get the percentage instead of the zero-point- something, as it is displayed in the drawing above.
And that’s it! Repeat for each practitioner of your clinic and compare the results: if certain practitioner’s results are above the average treatment efficiency ratio percentage, you should consider further investigating the matter.

You should note that new practitioners usually have a higher percentage of after-treatments, and that is fine as they lack the experience of their senior colleagues. What you as the clinic manager can do is make sure that they become aware of their treatment efficiency ratio. In addition to this, you can share your experience with them by providing them with some tips and tricks.

Alternative Method: Let Patients Give Ratings

An alternative method of ranking out practitioners is to allow the patients themselves to judge the practitioners’ quality.

This method perhaps lacks the accuracy of the former formula, but includes patients’ subjective opinions, such as their experience with the treatment and overall impressions they have of the doctors that have been treating them.

These factors are not included in the efficiency rating formula, but they do contribute to patients’ experience of their treatment at your clinic, and are thus equally important factors to consider.

Both the treatment efficiency rate and patient-doctor impressions make vital factors when it comes to judging the quality of your clinic. So, why not simply include both? As a clinic manager you can employ both methods and get more detailed and accurate results.

Clinicminds Automation

Manually calculating treatment efficiency for each practitioner sounds like a chore. Manually calculating AND keeping it regularly updated just sounds like too much effort to bother.

This is one of the reasons why you should consider streamlining and automating the process. Naturally, there are much greater benefits to streamlining and automation, but this just shows how optimization improves, well, everything related to your clinic.

Want to learn how Clinicminds can integrate both treatment efficiency charts and patient ratings into your clinic? Request a demo or chat with us!