Capko recalls working with a frustrated dermatologist. The poor fellow wanted to sail smoothly from exam room to exam room, but every time he left one patient, he had to stand around, looking for a nurse to tell him which exam room to go into next. It was the same story every day; all the yelling in the world wasn’t fixing it.
So, Capko got the nursing staff and the physician in a room and together they walked through the processes in their practice. They even role played, with some staff playing patients. They got everyone’s perspective on what was going wrong and came up with two easy fixes.
“He’d been living with this problem for …years,” says Capko, “and the solution was a slam dunk.”
First, the team realized nurses could never be omnipresent, so they agreed to start using a room-manager function they discovered in their EMR. By putting a portable computer in the nurses’ station, the dermatologist can now see where he needs to be by pressing a button.
The practice also invested in larger monitors in the exam rooms. One reason nurses were hard to find was because they were forced to retreat to a back room to complete charting. The monitors in the exam rooms could only display eight-point type, too tiny to read easily.
Watch, too, for wasteful process you hardly even notice anymore.
“It’s just like you don’t realize your wallpaper is getting old because you live with it. You live with something so long, you don’t realize it’s not working,” Capko offers. How many steps are in your scheduling process? What, exactly, happens to a denied claim? Consider actually writing down each step and thinking about what you can eliminate.
Donald Wetmore, a time-management guru who founded the Productivity Institute in Stafford, Conn., figures it’s worth the time it takes to work through it.
