At Eggleston & Eggleston PC medical practice management, one of our specialties is efficiency and reimbursement review. We have over 20 years’ experience and expertise in clinical and administrative staffing level evaluations, as well as patient flow evaluations, performed for medical practices and hospitals.
When it comes to streamlining the business aspects of your medical practice, it’s important to look at staffing levels. Having too many or too few staff can impact your bottom line:
- Higher than needed staffing levels can lead to overspending on salaries.
- Lower than needed staffing levels can lead to lost income, either through unhappy patients leaving your practice due to poor service or lack of billing and collections revenue.
To begin, you can compare your current staffing levels to industry benchmarks and practices that are similar to yours in size and specialty. For example, Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) recently released a few highlights from their 2016 Practice Operations Report. These highlights show some comparison numbers for:
- Appointment slots per day per provider.
- Average appointment time (in minutes).
- Percentage of appointments that are same-day appointments.
As you can imagine, these three areas are just a few of the many data points you can measure and benchmark for your practice. You may also want to look at information such as:
- Ratio of support staff to full-time physicians.
- Percent of revenue spent on staffing expenses.
- Balance of clinical and non-clinical staff.
Once you compare your practice to others and see where you stand, it’s tempting to immediately jump to conclusions about whether you need to increase or decrease your staffing levels. Before you do this, though, you need to consider other factors that influence how many staff you need, such as:
- Location and size.
- Employee and patient satisfaction levels.
- Physician productivity and practice styles.
- Payor mix.
Your practice’s unique characteristics may mean that your “just right” staffing levels may be higher or lower than the industry benchmarks.
With the high stakes involved in determining appropriate staffing levels for your practice, it’s best not to go it alone. Eggleston & Eggleston has many years’ experience with staffing level evaluations and works closely with you to determine what “just right” looks like for your practice.