BLOG: Mastery: A key to enhanced practice performance

Read more blog posts by John B. Pinto

Have you ever watched a children’s karate class? Do it, if you have a nearby studio, and especially if the kids are a couple of years and a few belts into their program. You’ll see little ninjas-in-training, all of about 10 years old, all going “Ayyyyaaahhh” at the top of their lungs under the watchful eyes of their sensei.

Any two of these little nippers could easily take down your average urban mugger. How? Mastery. And focus. And enthusiasm.

Taoists wrote in China about mastery. Their wisdom is a useful index for managing your practice:

“The average butcher sharpens his knife every hour. The excellent butcher sharpens his knife every day. But the master butcher never sharpens his knife because he finds the space between the bone and sinew and muscle where there is no resistance. And the knife stays sharp forever.”

How often do you hit “bone” as you manage the day-to-day affairs of your practice? How often must you sharpen your knife? As you’re reading this, I’d like you to settle back and think about what level of mastery each person in your practice has achieved.

Start with yourself. Continue with your most senior staff. One person at a time. How are the rest of your support staff — serenely competent or barely hanging on? Is your organization made up of alert karate kids or a legion of slumped shoulders who long-ago stopped well shy of even trying for an ophthalmic black belt?

You should always see “better” as a potential that lies in front of you. Don’t be satisfied with simply maintaining standards — raise them. No practice ever achieves a perfect way of attracting new patients. Or seeing a larger clinical volume. Or collecting fees.

Even the most adroit practice misses out on polishing steps that could mean another ramp up in reputation and profits. Here are four common gaps — errors and omissions that continue day after day in practices that have not yet mastered the art of management.

Existing patients aren’t harnessed to develop the practice. You should be giving such great service that you’re comfortable asking every patient to refer a friend. This can be embarrassing for established surgeons, especially if the quality of their service has slackened. Start over, and begin handing out your cards and shaking hands at the end of each visit like it was your first year of practice. Every moment you forget about marketing is the moment that your practice is starting to grind to a halt. If you listen carefully, perhaps you can almost hear it happen in the hallway outside your office as you’re reading this blog.
Practices hire new staff who are convenient rather than excellent. And they hang onto weak links far too long. You likely have one or more staff who should be removed from your practice today. Why are they still hanging around?
Doctors and staff don’t pay sufficient attention to their appointment template, which can be thought of as a kind of “gas gauge” for your practice. Are you failing to keep tomorrow’s appointment book 100% full? If so, you should remember that just a few extra patients a day can bring $100,000 or more to the bottom line each year.
In faltering practices, patients are treated like a number. Instead, make it a point this week to treat every patient as though they were your only customer for the entire day. What would you do differently if you were just starting your practice? What’s stopping you from acting that way today?