Manage My Practice

Mary Pat’s Note: This first ran in 2009 and it continues to be a visitor-favorite! If you are using it and added your own rules to it – leave us a note in the comments and share your own “Golden Rules.”

Sometimes employees do not understand or follow the most basic of workplace guidelines. Here is a simple but comprehensive list that you can tweak to make your own. It covers about 25 basics in a short list of ten “Golden Rules”. Make it part of each job description or personnel handbook and/or post it in strategic places.

1. Report to work on time daily. Be ready at your desk to begin work at the designated time. Leave promptly for lunch and return to work when you should, unless you’ve made special arrangements with your supervisor. Take breaks on the honor system and do not abuse the privilege. Clock in and out faithfully.
2. Command respect from the physicians, managers and employees of (your practice name here) by demonstrating total professionalism in the workplace with your dress, your demeanor and conversation. Represent the practice in a way that would make your Mother and your boss proud of you. Treat your co-workers as you would like to be treated.
3. Be economical by not wasting time or supplies or doing sloppy work that must be re-done.
4. Give every patient your total attention, patience and courtesy. Do not assume you know what the patient is going to say, but listen carefully to the patient (in-person or on the phone) so you can assist them to the best of your ability. Remember how good it feels to be the center of someone’s attention and give that gift to every single patient.
5. Keep your supervisor aware of any problems in your workload, whether too much or too little. Do not expect your supervisor to know if you are falling behind or caught up.
6. Document all interactions with patients and other medical facilities to assist your co-workers in knowing what you have done, and document your resolution of the situation to the customer’s satisfaction.
7. Strive for a positive attitude every single day. Don’t whine.
8. Be a team player. This means both covering for your co-workers and knowing that they will cover you. This means supporting your co-workers to their faces and behind their backs. This means having (your practice name here) goals for your goals, and knowing that your success will be your team’s success, and ultimately, the success of the practice.
9. Clean up your own messes and act as an adult acts in the workplace: responsibly, maturely, and with thought for others. Accept blame for your own mistakes, knowing that everyone makes them, and that if no one is making any mistakes, nothing is improving.
10. Contribute to making (your practice name here) a good place to work. Only you can create a place where everyone enjoys working. Only you can make this place a good place to be.

Photo credit: Barbara Helgason | Dreamstime.com

At Manage My Practice, we have always been fascinated by the opportunities created when innovation and technical advancements are applied to the Healthcare system. The intersection of technology and medical practice has always been one of the most exciting spaces in research and development because the challenges of the Human Body are some of the most daunting and emotionally charged of our endeavors. Curing diseases, diagnosing symptoms and improving and saving lives are among our most noble callings, so naturally they inspire some of our brightest thinkers and industry leaders.

As managers, providers and employees, we always have to be looking ahead at how the technology on our horizon will affect how our organizations administer health care. In the spirit of looking forward to the future, we present “2.0 Tuesday”, a weekly feature on Manage My Practice about how technology is impacting our practices, and our patient and group outcomes.

We hope you enjoy looking ahead with us, and share your ideas, reactions and comments below!

• Steve Jobs thought iCloud had the potential to store Medical Data

Apple’s recently announced iCloud service let’s you store pictures, movies, music, and documents in Apple’s “cloud”, or Internet storage system, and retrieve them with your iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Mac computers. Dr. Iltifat Husain, writing for the IMedicalApps blog notes that in the new biography of the Apple founder, Jobs mentioned that he thought even personal medical data would one day be stored in Apple’s iCloud. Cloud storage is all the rage right now in a lot of different areas of technology, but Jobs saying that medical data would be stored on the consumer end next to vacation photos and favorite songs represents a very bold vision of the future of patient data.

• Researchers using Social Media to study attitudes about Public Health

A team led by Marcel Salath, PhD at Pennsylvania State University published a study last month in PLoS Computational Biology that used “tweets” gathered from the social network Twitter to analyze how the public felt about the H1N1 influenza vaccine in 2009. Although Social Media research has limitations, Christine S. Moyer, writing for the American Medical Association’s Amednews.com notes that the results were similar to traditional phone surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, and provides some other examples of how Social Media has been used to understand public health trends.

• Interesting EHR/EMR data from the Soliant Health Blog

Medical staffing specialist Soliant Health had very eye-opening list of statistics about EHR/EMR implementations on their blog last week. My personal favorite: Hospitals using EHR/EMR systems have a 3 to 4% lower mortality rate than those that dont. Very interesting numbers.

• HealthWorks Collective predicts changes in healthcare communications after ACA

Healthworks Collective‘s Susan Gosselin makes some predictions about how the communications between and among providers and patients are going to be changed by the Affordable Care Act (or Healthcare Reform)- and what both groups will demand from a changing system. Great stuff!

• Oregon to help disabled voters cast ballots using iPads

In today’s local and congressional elections, five counties in the state of Oregon are going to be equipping local officials with iPads preloaded with special touch-interface software to accompany people with physical or visual impairments, or who would otherwise have a hard time making it to the polls. The 9 to 5 Mac blog is reporting that the pilot program features hardware donated by Apple, and could soon spread statewide by the next election.

Be sure to check back next week for another 2.0 Tuesday!

As we finish off another month here at MMP, we wanted to go back over some of our most popular posts from the month and get ready for another busy, productive, and meaningful month. Presenting, The Best of Manage My Practice, October 2011!

• Are you ready for the holidays? How about the New Year? Even though it’s still a few months off, make sure you don’t see an interruption in your practice’s cashflow by getting ready for the January 1st 5010 deadline!
• CMS has released the Premiums and Deductibles for Medicare patients for 2012, so you can start informing staff and patients now. More importantly, will 2012 be the year that you get serious about collecting deductibles at the time of service?
• Mary Pat’s “Collection Basics”series about the fundamentals of Revenue Cycle Management in Physician offices is now at part three! Check out Patient Collections Basics: Developing a Financial Assistance Program.
• One of Healthcare’s most misunderstood and underutilized documents- the Medicare Advance Beneficiary Notice- is changing for 2012. Make sure you’re ready.
• And finally, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of he department of Health and Human services has released its 2012 Work Plan for areas it will concentrate on investigating. Better safe than sorry! Mary Pat goes over the highlights here.

We’ve started this monthly wrap-up to make sure you don’t miss any of the great stuff we post throughout the month on Manage My Practice, but we also want to hear from you! What were your favorite posts and discussions this month? Did we skip over your favorite from October? Let us know in the comments!

After Mary Pat’s “Coding for the Rest of Us” post this July, she sat down with Lyndsey Coates from Nuesoft as part of their monthly Healthcare IT Podcast to discuss more about how even a basic understanding of coding among patient contacting and administrative staff can improve patient experiences as well as the group’s bottom line. Check it out!

As we finish off another month here at MMP, we wanted to go back over some of our most popular posts from the month and get us ready for another busy, productive, and meaningful month. Presenting, The Best of Manage My Practice, September 2011!

• With the weather getting chillier, and coats and sweater getting pulled out of the closets again, it’s time once again to get ready for your patients’ flu shots! The CMS has released coding and pricing information for Flu shots given after September 1st, 2011, so bookmark the page or print it out for easy reference.
• Did your providers get their e-Prescribing done to avoid your Medicare rate reduction? If not, you’ll probably want to apply for a CMS Hardship Exemption for 2012. Find out how here!
• Mary Pat continued her series “Collection Basics” about Revenue Cycle Management in Physician offices with “Part II: Implementing Your Financial Policy“
• Do you dread patient complaints? Don’t! Patients with complaints are a GOLDEN opportunity to learn about your practice, gain new perspectives on your operation and connect and learn about your customers. Learn how to get everything you can from a complaint in “Why I Can’t Wait to Hear Patient Complaints“!
• And finally, everything you always wanted to know but we’re afraid to ask about a common, but sometimes vague office routine: “The Right Way to Do Write-offs.”

We’ve started this monthly wrap-up to make sure you don’t miss any of the great stuff we post throughout the month on Manage My Practice, but we also want to hear from you! What were your favorite posts and discussions this month? Did we skip over your favorite from September? Let us know in the comments!

Apple announced last night that it would be sending an update to its OS X operating system that would protect users from and remove a program called “MacDefender” (alias “MacProtector” or “MacSecurity”) that had been finding its way onto some consumer’s machines. The program is a piece of malicious software (or “Malware“), that is ultimately designed to get you to send your credit card number to a company to sell you a program to “fix” the problem.

Here’s how MacDefender works:

• You are browsing Google Images and when you click on an image, you are redirected to a fake “security alert” webpage.
• The security alert webpage informs you that you have been infected with a virus, and recommends you download a free program – MacDefender – to solve the issue.
• MacDefender pops up on your computer as an offering. If you click OK, you’ve just invited the malware onto your system.
• Here’s where it gets malicious. The installed malware begins to make your system appear as if it has become infected with a virus.
• The program regularly opens up new browser windows to pornographic websites. Needless to say, this is very embarrassing, as well as making computer very hard to use.
• At this point you are probably thinking “well, I just installed a new anti-virus program”, and you try to run the MacDefender program. Now it gets really nasty.

(more…)

Last week I accepted an offer from Mary Pat to become the COO of the new corporation she has formed, Manage My Practice, LLC.

Together, we are excited to move MMP to its next phase.

Now the Medical Managers Secret Weapon is even more powerful by offering products and services that give your practice added flexibility and efficiency and that meet Mary Pats undisputed standard for practice-tested quality.

Helping people get the most out of technology is a passion that has kept me interested in the MMP blog. Mary Pats curiosity and confidence in bringing innovation to the industry has made her one of todays leading voices on the ways healthcare organizations and managers can get the most bang for their technology buck. I have been honored in the past to be invited to demystify some of the current technological trends as the author of the category of posts called Learn This for MMP.

As COO of Manage My Practice, I hope to expand that role to not only add more and better actionable content to the blog, but also to introduce readers to a carefully selected line of MMP-approved products and services that they can use to take their organization to the next level.

We call this new offering Manage My Practice Tools (find it here) and we hope you will find it as useful and valuable as you do the Manage My Practice blog.

The first MMP Tool we offer you is MMP FileConnect. Built on the Box platform, it allows your staff, providers and external stakeholders to share files over desktop, web and mobile platforms. MMP FileConnect allows you to create a living repository of your documents, calenders, spreadsheets, images, portable document files (PDFs) and more.

As a cloud-based filing cabinet and as a project management and communication tool, MMP FileConnect lets you and your team manage administrative and critical data tasks securely from wherever you are.

I am thrilled to be joining the Manage My Practice team during this exciting new time, and beyond heading up the new MMP Tools service, Ill be expanding my presence on the blog with a special focus on making sense of the latest technology news and products with a constant focus on one question: How can this help Medical Practice Managers? I hope you will leave your comments on this post or write to me here with topics youd like to see me write about on MMP.

I look forward to providing the answers youve come to rely on finding on Manage My Practice.

-Abraham Whaley, COO, Manage My Practice, LLC.

People of my generation (the author is in the late afternoon of his twenties) don’t get it. What we don’t get is how relatively new and modern personal computing technology is. We don’t realize that we were one of the first generations to have computers in our classrooms when we started kindergarten, one of the first to have internet access in our libraries, and one of the first to have networked computer interaction as a fundamental part of our lives from a young age. We don’t understand why other generations don’t find computing as intuitive as we do.

Learning to use computers effectively is a process of repetition, immersion, and is ideally started early in life, just like learning a new language. I think there is both a challenge and an opportunity – for all generations – in the generational computing gap. The younger folks who can find ways to tailor their products and services towards usability, approachability and friendliness can often make big strides in taking new technologies mainstream. Boomers and older have tremendous opportunities to separate themselves from their peers and their competitors by balancing a willingness to be open minded about embracing technology with a keen eye towards results.

In this spirit I would like to talk about a basic computing concept: file extensions. First, what is a computer file? (more…)

It seems only yesterday we got along just fine using words like “photography” and “cable television” without the world “digital” in front of them. They were “analog” technologies, but they didn’t need to be marketed as such, because there was no point – there was no marketing buzz on the term, and no alternative. Nowadays the word “digital” is everywhere and is accompanied by a very positive connotation. It seems if you are selling something “digital”, it is a superior, more technologically advanced product or service, and it probably lies on the cutting edge of its field. Digital is an old buzzword, maybe even a little past its prime, but it is still used heavily to promote what are already standard, mainstream technologies. If you Google the word “digital” the search engine returns around one billion web results. Compare that to “health care” which gets only a tenth of that.

“…But, what does digital mean?…”

Good question! Digital is a word I imagine few can give a succinct, straight definition for. For all the triumphs and innovations of the “digital revolution”, I doubt that there are a lot of people who can define the term’s root-word.

Let’s talk about theory here for a while, in abstract terms.

Imagine a two clocks on the wall of your office. Both are set to the correct time, and are the same model, except for one small difference. The clock on the left is always moving. The second hand of the clock sweeps around the dial in one long stroke, as do the minute and hour hands, although much slower.

The clock on the right is not always moving. It jumps second to second in a “tic-toc” style, and when the minutes, and hours are finished those hands jump as well. Both clocks represent the same piece of information- what time it is- but they have two different ways of representing how the time changes from moment to moment.

The clock on the left is one constant motion, and so it never stops to tell you “exactly” what time it is, but does tell you when the time is between seconds (not very useful, but remember we’re being theoretical). The clock on the right is much more specific (you can tell exactly what time it is, to the second), but never reports time in the intervals between the seconds.

This distinction, between a continuous flow of information, and a constant drip-drip-drip of individual pieces of data is the difference between analog signals and digital signals.

The clock on the left is analog- it provides a continuous “signal” (flow of information)- what time it is. The clock on the right is digital- it provides a continuous series of “points” of information, with periods in between each point with no information being produced (the moment between each second’s “tic”)

Back to the real world

You remember music records, right? They were flat, circular pieces of vinyl that could be put into a primitive version of what looked like a large CD player. If you had electricity, you could plug this “record” player, or “turntable” into a power outlet, and attach it to a set of two speakers using pieces of wire. The player would turn the record at a constant speed, and then the listener would carefully place a delicate needle attached to a mechanical arm on the record player onto the surface of the vinyl and under optimum conditions, sound would be produced through the speakers. There were all manner of musical groups that made these records, and they could played at parties or by yourself for solo enjoyment. The whole affair was quite charming.

Record players work by having the needle run gently over the “grooves” of the record, which are imprinted on the vinyl in such a fashion that the vibrating needle will quietly reproduce the recorded sound. Then the record player electrifies and amplifies the sound, and boom- party time!

There are no “gaps” in the record when it is playing. Even while the record is silent, the needle is running over an empty groove that isn’t vibrating the needle. Even when the signal is blank, it is part of the entire record, and it’s continuous playback. Record players therefore, are an “analog” technology.

I grew up with compact discs. Compact discs are actually very similar to vinyl records in how they operate. A CD player spins the disc at a constant speed, but instead of a needle running over the grooves, a laser (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation) is focused onto the grooves, and is reflected back onto one of two sensors, which then create a series of data points that are turned into music. But the key difference is in how that sound data is represented. Instead of a continuous flow of sound, a CD is comprised of billions and billions of these tiny data points. Every second of sound on a CD is 44,100 individual pieces of data that tell the CD player what sort of noise to make. Even though you don’t hear “skips” in between pieces of data, the sound is actually a series of noises that are 0.0000226 seconds long. CDs are digital technology then, because they rely on many individual pieces of data rather than one long stream of information.

Is digital better than analog?

Well, let’s stay with the record player vs. CD player discussion. Listening to the same recording on the two different players produces two distinct sonic experiences. If you’re not a huge music fan, but like to hear tunes from time to time you might not even notice it. But if you’re a music fanatic who takes his sound quality very, very seriously, then you probably notice a lot of differences. The analog record is going to have “signal noise” where electrical and environmental interference distorts and slightly interrupts the signal- the slight hiss you hear in the backgroud of a record, and the loss of audio quality as the signal fades in strength over time. Never mind the pops and scratches that come with the wear and tear of handling and playing the record. Purists insist however, that the analog signal provides a certain “warmth” and some talk about the presence of a “soul” to the music that can’t be found in digital.

Of course, this isn’t to say that CDs sound bad. In fact, without the signal loss and interference, many everyday listeners think CDs sound far superior to records. The digital signal means a “cleaner”, “brighter” sound that comes from listening to only the music, and not the noise in the background. However, something is lost with CDs, literally. Like the brief moments of time between the jumps of the second hand on the clock on the right in our earlier analogy, the tiny moments between each of the 44,100 tiny pieces of sound aren’t recorded or played back on CD. These microscopic little pieces of music that aren’t on the CD lead some audiophiles to call digital sound “cold” and slightly “empty”.

The bottom line is this however. Most music that is being made today is being sold on either CDs or MP3 downloads (learn how to start using MP3s in my earlier Learn This Now post here), and not vinyl records. Even disc jockeys that play in clubs rarely use real vinyl anymore. So even if you think CDs sound a little worse than vinyl, chances are you already use digital music almost exclusively, and will continue to do so.

What should I know going forward?

The truth is, there aren’t many traditional analog technologies still in use. Radio and television broadcasts are still analog, but with the rise of Satellite Radio services like Sirius and XM, and the coming American Digital Television transition, even those are on the way out.

The important thing to remember is that just because something says “digital” it isn’t necessarily a huge leap over an old technology, or even particularly new. But now that you know what digital and analog means, you are empowered to decipher any such attempts at newfangled tomfoolery. Stay tuned to ManageMyPractice.com for the resources you need to stay ahead of the curve. Cheers!

Note from Mary Pat: The change to digital technology has tremendous implications for healthcare. Think about telemedicine, electronic health records, and sharing of all information digitally. Expect some significant changes down the road in medical records between Obama’s stimulus plan and dollars for HIT and the transition to digital technology.

Twitter is a combination of two concepts, social networking and micro-blogging. When combined, they create a fascinating way for people to communicate and keep in touch. Let’s explore social networking and micro-blogging individually first.

Social Networking

This is the Myspace, and Facebook you’ve heard so much about. You already know what networking is – you create, build, and maintain personal and professional relationships to meet people, find opportunities, and learn new things. Successful practice managers are constantly networking to be in the know and stay ahead of the curve. Now add the social aspect of it to the equation. Social networking means starting with people you already know, and using that as a jumping off point. Take your existing network of contacts and digitize them to build an on-line community.

Think about your contact list in your address book, email, phone, or Blackberry. You have everyone in there: colleagues, friends, family. What if you also had access to the contact lists of everyone in their contact lists? There would be duplicate entries but there would also be a lot of people in this “friends of friends” list that you didn’t know before. You would probably see a lot of new names and faces, some of whom you might want to talk to about your organization, their organization, your product, their service, their hobbies, even ask out on a date!

When you walk into a room and see a friend talking to someone you don’t know, you go and say hello to your friend, and introduce yourself to the stranger- you are building your network by social networking!

The differences between various social networking sites (see the MMP post on LinkedIn) will be explored in a later article, but all social networking sites have one thing in common – they are designed to help you meet new people through common friends, interests, pasts, and goals.

Micro-blogging

It’s blogging, but smaller. But what’s blogging? ”Blog” is short for “web log”, and it is keeping an online journal of writings, pictures, and other multimedia, as well as news items and content found on the web. Some blogs are just places where people write about their feelings and activities so other people can read them. Some blogs are focused on a topic- like ManageMyPractice.com focuses on health care administration. But all blogs are simply websites that are updated by their authors fairly frequently around some common theme.

How does blogging become “micro”? By shrinking it down to its bare essence and relaying the heart of the message, communicating the necessary. How could this be of use to you? What if you set up a system where your kids received updates when you were going to be home later than usual from work, telling them they were allowed to have a soda with their homework before TV, and what would be for dinner when you arrived? Or maybe your kids need to update you when their plans change. What if all your colleagues were updating each other about the goings-on at a professional conference so they could decide on the fly which events to attend, and share their experiences, and decide where everyone would be meeting afterward.

Anything that could be helped by contacting an entire group of people quickly with short message could benefit from micro-blogging.

Twitter puts it all together

Twitter takes these two concepts, and merges the whole shebang with your mobile device. Twitter lets you easily microblog to your social network over your mobile device. You don’t have to use a cell phone or a Blackberry to use Twitter- you can send and receive updates over the web, and through a variety of third party providers.

If you want to get started, go to the Twitter homepage at www.twitter.com, and click the green button that says “JOIN THE CONVERSATION”. You will create a username and password, and start adding contacts and you’ll soon be able to make your first micro-blog post (they call them “tweets”).

On Twitter, anyone you want to receive updates from is someone you are “following”, and anyone who is receiving your messages is one of your “followers”. You can also send messages directly to just one user, or set up groups of people to receive certain updates – your co-workers don’t have to see your notes to your kids, and vice-versa. You can also do fun things, like upload a little picture of yourself to be your icon that people will see when they are on Twittera.

Now it’s time to supercharge your cell phone

But you don’t have to ever go to the site if you don’t want to! The real power of Twitter is that it can let you do all these short internet communications (micro-blogging) right from your cell phone. Basic text messages that you may already use on your cell phone (called “SMS messages“) can be used to send and receive messages from Twitter. Just link your Twitter account to a mobile phone in your Twitter settings, and then you can send your updates as text messages to 40404. Incoming Twitter messages from the users you follow will show up as incoming texts from Twitter, but with labels to show you which user the update is from. You can also customize your mobile updates, so you only get messages from certain users. If you follow some people who are heavy updaters, you might get tired of constant alerts of new text messages. Also be sure you understand your cell phone’s text messaging plan – Twitter is free to use, but if you don’t have unlimited messaging on your phone, it could be easy to run up a big bill.

Once you have your Twitter up and running on your mobile phone things get really interesting, as now you’ve basically turned your cell phone service into an internet chat room. And in terms of business, that gives you near constant connection. Twitter users are often the first people to know the newest information, and love to post updates about it online. It’s an interesting way to see what’s new in the world – finding out what people are talking about literally “right then”. Plus it creates an interesting crowd of which to ask questions: What’s going on tonight? Can anyone recommend good seafood on the north side of town? Is anyone getting anything out of this conference?

The brilliance of Twitter is that it so easily connects people on all different types of computers and cell phone platforms. Twitter can seamlessly create networks of people communicating for mutual benefit, and provide an interesting new way to keep on top and keep in touch.

To Recap:

1. Social Networking = networking with your friends’ friends
2. Micro-blogging = little missives without all the niceties and all the heart
3. Twitter = #1 + #2 (little missives to your friends’ friends’ friends)
4. How can you leverage this technology to make your practice more efficient and productive?

Note from Mary Pat: How can Twitter be used in a medical practice setting? Here are a few ways – I’m sure you can think of others. If your doctor is running late, use direct messages to Twitter patients to let them know right away that they can arrive later or reschedule their appointment. Likewise, when an earlier opening is available, Twitter a patient to see if they could fill your appointment time. Twitter your doc to let him/her know about schedule changes that would affect what s/he is doing right now.

And to get you started on Twitter, my Twitter name is “Mary_Pat_Whaley.”