Your Practice's Doctor Exam Area
This is the final installment in a three-part series of articles examining the front office, tech station, and doctor exam portions of a patient’s visit. These articles are intended to provide some insight into how to perform your own practice assessment as a means to improve practice efficiency. Each assessment should take you less than an hour to complete. You will find these assessments worth the investment of your time. You will be able to identify common flow problems and bottlenecks, and then implement solutions to better the flow of your practice.
In Part One, “Your Practice’s Front Desk” we identified issues that commonly come up in the waiting room and at the front desk. In Part Two, “Your Practice’s Tech Station,” we identified the importance of the tech station and obstacles that impede the flow of patients to the doctor. This final article will examine the doctor exam area, mainly focusing on how the doctors’ time is consumed and how well their rooms and staff support them.
The exam lane is the “engine” of the practice. What happens there will dictate the needs in the other areas of the practice. The highest cost to the practice is the doctor, and understanding what happens in the exam lane is the best way to boost the number of patients coming through the practice — and ultimately the bottom line of the financial statement. The following sections describe the most common issues that affect the doctor exam area.
Lane Not Available for Doctors
What it means
Valuable time is being wasted if an exam lane is not available when needed. The most common causes for this
are:
- An insufficient number of lanes relative to the doctor’s rate of seeing patients
- Not enough staff to work up patients
- Inefficient use of lanes
Ways to correct
To assess whether there is a sufficient number of exam lanes, conduct a time study, like the following:
- Record:
- Amount of time that the doctor is doing things that benefit the practice — things that only they can do (practice time).
- Amount of time the doctor is doing things a staff member can do (staff time).
- Amount of time that is wasted because of gaps in schedule or no lane to work in (lost time).
- Take the total practice time and divide it by the number of patients seen to get a true benchmark of average minutes per patient.
- Use the time study to determine the number of lanes needed. Ensure each doctor’s average time per patient is greater than the time staff needs to prepare a patient for the doctor.
For example, if staff needs 15 minutes to ready a patient and the doctor spends five minutes, on average, with
each patient, then you would need four lanes to allow the staff enough time to ready the next patient without
holding up the doctor. (Of course, you also need to schedule by the type of patient visit; some will necessarily
be longer than others. Depending on scheduling of post-op checks, you may need an additional lane for quicker doctor visits. And, as discussed later, some doctors work more quickly than others.)
While observing doctors, play close attention to the kind of functions they are performing. The doctors should
only be performing tasks that require their expertise. All other functions should be delegated to techs.
Consider adding staff if the cost is less than the expected revenue that the doctor would generate by seeing
more patients.
To free up lanes, find space to create dilation areas rather than having patients wait in the exam room.
However, avoid using the main waiting room as a dilation area, as patients arriving for their visits may feel
they are being made to wait longer than others.
If you need additional lanes or dilation areas you may need to repurpose non-patient space for patient use.
Doctor Is Always Late for the Start of the Session
