Generating reports to review your non-clinical staff and therapists’ productivity is now possible with the use of EMR system.
Nitin Chhoda explains the value of relaying these changes to your staff, making it possible to discover productivity issues together and solve them immediately.
Not every staff member is going to feel good about clocking in and out each time they come to work.
If your staff already does that, then a physical therapy software and EMR with time stamping will be ideal for improving productivity over time.
But if the idea of clocking in and out will be new to the staff, it may take some careful and patient explanations to help them understand why practice management is now going to track their hours.
Remember to Engage Staff with Responsibilities
Recent research has shown that one of the ways to improve productivity among staff, within any field, is to empower staff by giving them important responsibilities such as handling physical therapy software.
When employees feel they have no important role to play, they become apathetic and lose initiative. In a physical therapy setting, the introduction of physical therapy software should happen with the help of the staff.
Staff members should feel that the physical therapy software is going to improve the quality of their job by helping them to reach their goals. One of those goals should be to optimize productivity.
Be Up-Front About Reporting
If physical therapy software is going to start measuring productivity, the staff should know that these kinds of reports will be generated. Consider this: if you do find out that one physical therapist is much less productive than the rest, how will you improve their productivity?
If they know you’ve been tracking performance, you can have a conversation about the number of patients they see per day and talk to them about why they think it is lower than other physical therapists in the practice.
But if you’ve been secretly monitoring productivity using physical therapy software system, when you confront the staff member they may feel caught off guard and singled out, not to mention spied upon. They will tell their co-workers and a rift between physical therapy software management and staff will start to form.
If you don’t trust your staff to do a good job for the practice, then how will they trust you to have their best interests in mind?
Do Not Threaten Punishment – Be Inclusive
Although the staff should know that you will be using the physical therapy software to track productivity, they should not feel that they are being monitored and threatened with punishment.
Let everyone know that you don’t expect them to do their jobs differently right away.
In fact, physical therapy software and practice management should be able to communicate to staff members that the purpose of reporting and productivity management is to improve the productivity of the entire practice.
Everyone who works in a practice will have certain aspects of the job that they like and certain aspects that they dislike.
Perhaps they are frustrated with the way their days are scheduled, or they don’t feel like they get enough time with each patient. In a lot of cases, these kinds of frustrations or problems will cause inefficiencies and decrease productivity.
By implementing a physical therapy software and EMR that helps to identify where problems may be, the staff and practice management can discover together where there are productivity issues. And then everyone can work together to find solutions.
