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BLOG: Practice efficiency — The adventures of Dr. Lycra, part 4
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Three blog posts ago, we introduced you to Dr. Lycra, in the year 2066, and the innovations allowing future doctors to see vastly more patients. We continue and conclude with this installment.
The most productive surgeons I know move through their clinic with an elegant economy of motion, a sort of ophthalmic ballet that’s probably as hard to master as the real thing. If you can’t work more elegantly, you’ll have to settle for longer hours and greater intensity, and thrash along as best you can. You’ll have to avoid as many wasted steps as possible, stay on the clinic floor and stay off the phone as much as possible. Save your Internet and email time for the end of the day. You should be arriving somewhat before the first patients and huddle with technical staff about the day, and then start the clinic alongside them, helping them work up the first few postops and quick checks.
If you find yourself mentally foggy at the end of a day of patients, you’re doing something wrong. Get more sleep. Take a noon nap of not less or more than 20 minutes (anything less or more will not pay off your sleep debt and may actually leave you groggier than you started). Eat better and smaller, more frequent meals. Exercise. If appropriate, take off those extra few inches — imagine how much more energy you would have at the end of the day if you didn’t have those extra 30 pounds to lug around.
Ultimately, like so much of your professional life, it comes down to discipline. Have the discipline to examine thoroughly where you really stand and where the trends are taking you. Don’t be an ostrich and assume you’ll somehow muddle through as you always have in the past.
The last 20 years of Medicare fee reductions have been nibbles compared to the considerable “chomps” that could be ahead of us. Have the discipline to admit to your soft points and commit to their improvement.
With any luck, like the future Dr. Lycra, by taking lots of small incremental steps, year by year, you’ll stay ahead of the falling fee curve and ahead of the doctors to the left and right of you in town, who you had better assume are reading this blog and tuning up their game, too.