Your team has been meeting goals and your numbers are up compared to last year.  Congratulations! I’ll bet you’ve been holding regular meetings to educate and motivate the staff as a whole. That is essential and must continue, however you can take your success to the next level by analyzing the individual components that make up your total production. There is valuable information in these details with the potential to substantially improve your bottom line.

Although your business may be growing steadily, there are likely areas where improvement is needed. When you identify specific underperforming components and implement plans to improve them, you accomplish far more than can be achieved by setting and reaching global goals alone. This process generally involves identifying specific employees and/or specific business metrics that are outliers compared to others within your practice or compared to other practices in your region or nationally. 

Although the core data you need is contained in your EHR, analytics software is the very best and most efficient way to identify the strengths and weaknesses in your business. Here are some examples of the many ways you can use specific data to pinpoint those individuals and business areas that need improvement:

• Which of your opticians is underperforming in which sales areas?  The possibilities here are endless. You can get as specific as finding out which optician sold the most zero-dollar (fully covered by the plan) frames to patients with a specific vision plan over a certain time period.  
• Which of your ODs is underperforming in collections per exam? Is this due to patient mix, poor optical sales or lower medical charges?
• What is your percentage of open slots (appointment slots that were not filled).  How many were no shows?  How many cancelled the same day?  Who confirmed the appointment?  What was the method of confirmation? 
• Which of your techs performs the least number of Optomaps or other elective screening tests?  

Many times it’s easy to improve these specific, individual weaknesses. Simply working on language/scripting or role-playing can improve performance significantly. The combined impact of identifying and ameliorating many relatively small flaws is powerful and provides great return on your time and the money you invest in analytics software. 

Get in the habit of looking at the performance of individuals in your practice regularly and take the steps necessary to help those who need it. Monitor their progress and provide positive feedback. They’ll become better and more satisfied employees who contribute more to the success of your practice.