Strategic management for primary care physicians and specialists: Not more, but more efficient and productive work

Data, facts and instruments on the German health system

What it’s all about

The results of the IFABS Betriebsvergleich-Tracker© for GP and specialist practice management show that deficits exist in almost every medical practice, the elimination of which could significantly improve the entrepreneurial scope of action and the financial result.

If one examines the profit before and one year after a practice management comparison© consistently implemented in the results, increases of up to 25% are found.

The connection between time and money is not seen

Many practice owners do not see the economic relevance of optimized practice management. For example, they reduce the action area „organization“ to the dimension „time“ without taking into account that time gained and invested sensibly is directly related to the practice result.

A simple example illustrates this thinking: a widespread phenomenon in practices is the „counter tourism“ of physicians. Several times a day – an average of 34 times in general practices – practice owners go to the front desk to bring documents there and/or pick them up from there. With only 90 seconds of waiting time, this results in a daily loss of time of 51 minutes, in the week of a good four hours, and in the year of almost 200 hours, wasted on errands. The physician produces costs by this activity, the number of hours evaluated with its hourly wage, however no incomes.

Staff can also make a contribution

The counter tourism is thereby only one single misadjustment under many, which lead in their summation to a lasting economic loss. If one replaces the question frequently asked by medical assistants to patients: „When can / would you like to come?“ with the alternative formulation: „I can offer you the following appointments…“, this results in an average of 260 hours that can be saved over the year.

Overall, therefore, the aim is not to work more, but more efficiently and productively. This means, among other things, identifying the mismanagement of time, which on average affects up to one third of the practice’s internal work, and making better and targeted use of the resulting free space for patient care and the range of services offered.

Looking at practice management as a system is missing.

If practice owners decide to make their management more productive and efficient, they often look for individual tips and tricks to realize this goal. But for most, little changes after appropriate corrections, because they do not consider that practice management is a system of many building blocks with multiple interdependencies.

Noticeable and, above all, sustainable improvements can only be achieved if a holistic best practice practice management system is systematically implemented.

It encompasses all instruments, rules and behaviors that ensure smoothly functioning practice operations overall, even under changing requirements. The amount of work required for such a best practice analysis and optimization is extremely low, e.g. with the help of a Practice Management Comparison©.