Q: How do I get better control of staff overtime?
Keith Borglum, CHBC
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A: Staff overtime compensation can cost practices many thousands of dollars per year. At time-and-a-half pay, every hour of
overtime can be replaced by 1.5 hours of work at regular pay by another person or by an alternate schedule, allowing more
work to be done at the same or lower cost. Sometimes all the staff stays late–out of loyalty to you and the team–while that
last patient is seen. Occasional overtime is a fact of life for most practices, but it can be tightly controlled. Here are
some tips:
- Require employer or manager pre-approval of overtime on an individual, daily basis.
- Adjust staff schedules to minimize overtime, such as with the use of split-shifts, or 10-hour days.
- Only have one staff person stay to assist in exiting the day's last patient.
- Increase staffing to reduce overtime if needed. Meet with staff to properly diagnose the reasons for overtime, and the skills
required. You might find that hiring an entry-level person—part time, at a low wage, in the afternoons or into the early evening
or after patients are gone—can eliminate most overtime hours dedicated to filing, copying, pulling charts for the next day,
making confirmation calls, and other low-skill tasks.
10 WAYS TO CUT EXPENSES
Q: What are the best ways to cut office expenses in my family medicine practice?A: Here's a "Top 10" list of cost-cutting techniques:
1) See more patients per hour to reduce fixed costs per patient.
2) Spend more time in the office seeing patients. When travel and OR detention is included, you'll find that out-of-office surgical
assists and hospital rounding often lose you money.
3) Delegate all duties not requiring a physician license. You'd be surprised how many things you do that you wouldn't pay another
physician to do, like opening mail.
4) Don't employ and pay for licensed staff to do unlicensed tasks. Most solo and small group practices don't need licensed nurses
and often, if they have them, underuse them.
5) Use comprehensive forms and checklists for histories, physicals and progress notes to reduce the total time per patient while
increasing the quality of time you do spend with them.
6) Eliminate frequent overtime. Reassign duties or hire additional staff instead.
7) It is cost effective to pay 20 percent over the market rate for an exceptional staff person that works 50 percent faster than
other staff, and nets you the 30 percent difference.
8) Use an organized inventory control system such as "band-and-tag" to control supply costs and related inefficiencies due to
not having what you need when you need it. Put a band around the remaining amount of items that need to be reordered, with
an attached tag identifying the item and the amount to order and from where. Then, when the banded quantity is opened, throw
the tag into the reorder file.
9) Price shop online for supplies and instrumentation, with delivery, reducing supply and related staffing costs.
10) Ask your landlord, vendors, suppliers, accountant and billing service for discounts or ways to reduce costs. The worst they
can do is say no.
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