Insuring Your Therapy Clinic Against Inevitable Staff Transitions
No matter the type of business you own, ups and downs in employee attendance and commitment are common. Whether it’s illness, vacation, moving, or another normal life event, all of your staff will at some point encounter circumstances that affect your business continuity. Therapy clinics can be particularly vulnerable to change, as you no doubt already know.
Having worked with hundreds of therapy practices throughout the years, we’ve learned just how critical it is to build a standardized work environment to prevent the fallout from inevitable transitions like these. Believe it or not, this can be done without the confrontation, or even telling your staff about this conscious focus. It all boils down to policy and documentation.
Set Clear Expectations With New Hires
By having well-documented and routinely updated instructions for all regular processes, you won’t be in a difficult position when the inevitable occurs. Long before you need to train a new front desk admin or other member of your staff, you should ensure that everything is written down. This is especially critical for daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, and procedures that keep your practice compliant with HIPAA, insurance, and other regulations. We recommend using an online document creation and storage system to track all current drafts and edits and backing up these documents in at least one other location accessible only to management.
Prior to creating evidence of office procedures, you’ll of course want to examine the way things are currently done and make adjustments to maximize efficiency. Simply put, nothing should be documented if it doesn’t work. In addition, it should be regular practice (quarterly or semiannually) to review written instructions for each position. Having outdated protocol can result in confusion at the very least, and costly mistakes in the worst case.
After checking that this protocol is correct, introduce it to new hires on day one. Not only will this encourage them to respect the way your office is organized, but it will allow for faster and more thorough onboarding. In fact, having documented procedures for all major responsibilities makes training less of a burden for everyone.
Prepare for Planned Absences
Require a reasonable amount of notice from each staff member who will be gone for vacation, maternity leave, etc. Always keep a central calendar showing the overlap of each employee’s hours to help you decide whether or not to approve vacation requests. Once you know how many employees you’ll have on hand on any given day, it will be clear whether you need to make temporary changes to schedules or procedures to cover for those who will be out of the office.
Some jobs are more critical than others. For example, if you take care of billing in house, failing to double check calendars could result in financial consequences. Billing-related tasks need to be covered at all times or your revenue could take a hit. Submitting claims can be thought of as the core of a therapy clinic’s cyclical business processes. So ideally, staff transitions should not have a heavy impact on claims, appeals, or payments.
One way to avoid this kind of risk altogether is to hire a capable and competent outsourced billing team. Not worrying about the effect of temporarily or permanently losing staff is a huge plus because it ensures your company’s resilience and protects your bottom line. A quality billing service should be able to pay for itself due to the time and expense it saves you. To find out more about how the numbers would look for your clinic in particular, request a consultation with our partner billing agency.
Be Ready for Therapists to Quit or Take Unplanned Leave
Administrative staff aren’t the only ones who can have a huge impact on your business operations when they’re suddenly absent. Losing a therapist, which is unfortunately a common event in busy therapy clinics, could cause you to start bleeding money right away if you don’t have preventive policies in place.
Consider the following scenario: If a therapist typically takes seven to ten days to finish treatment notes, there could be a serious backup of incomplete documentation in the event they decide to quit. It would be difficult to incentivize them to finish and sign the documents, since they wouldn’t be getting paid for that time. Similarly, if a provider has an unexpected medical emergency, you would experience an indefinite delay in documentation for treatments that have already occurred. In our accompanying infographic, you’ll see the monetary damage that just a few extra days of backed up documentation can create. We recommend calculating your average revenue per therapy session and completing this type of analysis for your clinic.
How to avoid this? Have a strict 48-hour signature rule, per CMS guidelines. See this post from our partner EMR, TheraPlan, for additional ways to maintain an audit-proof therapy practice.
Get Help in Assessing Your Clinic’s Risk Factors
At the end of the day, it’s not possible to predict everything that will affect your business for better or worse. However, it’s easier than you think to protect against the human factors that could affect your staff presence.
Need more customized guidance? Our team is experienced with the ins and outs of clinic ownership, including credentialing. Reach out to us any time and we’ll be happy to evaluate your needs and make recommendations.
