Investing in training your staff is investing in your medical practice. Non-medical staff are your patients’ first point of contact and the core of your practice’s daily processes.
Training your staff can help your practice improve cash flow, reduce errors, enhance patient satisfaction, and develop a strong brand image.
Here are four reasons why training your staff is important for your business wellbeing:
1. Increase productivity & performance
Providing new tools and teaching your staff new abilities and processes can help them do their jobs more efficiently. New skills also help your employees be more productive, which can bring more profit to your practice.
Training allows you to note and address each employee’s weaknesses. Therefore, try to find areas of improvement for each department and individual. Provide training in those areas to support your teams and improve your processes.
Staff training in problem-solving can help them develop critical thinking skills, be confident by working independently, and make better decisions under pressure. In addition, training in conflict resolution can provide your employees with resources to communicate assertively and effectively in dealing with conflict.
2. Improve staff retention
Retaining your staff promotes the health and success of your practice. High employee turnover brings multiple problems including high costs, knowledge loss, and low productivity.
Training your staff can help you have engaged employees. As a result, your staff can be more interested in their professional growth, reduce errors, provide an outstanding patient experience, and improve your processes overall.
Also, patients tend to develop warm relationships with your staff, particularly your front desk staff. So, it is vital to establish and nurture these relationships by keeping your staff in your practice.
Read more about techniques you can implement at your front desk to improve your payment collections, schedule effectively, and guarantee patient satisfaction on our blog Improve your front desk processes with these best practices.
3. Enhance patient satisfaction
Medical practices must focus on delivering a great patient experience to improve patient outcomes, provide outstanding healthcare services, and increase patient satisfaction.
Therefore, your staff must improve patient loyalty and satisfaction in your practice. Patients tend to trust and be loyal to a practice whose processes are efficient and communicate with them efficiently. Patients value reduced wait times, ease of scheduling, payment options, and more.
If your staff is trained and helps the patients drive their medical experience smoothly, it will enhance patient satisfaction, foster loyal patients, and attract new patients.
Learn more about this on our blog How to improve patient loyalty to succeed.
4. Reduce / Eliminate government penalties & fines
Training your staff can help you reduce errors in your practice. For example, when your medical staff is properly trained in billing procedures, they are less likely to accidentally upcode.
Another important aspect is if your practice is participating in MIPS, your well-trained staff can handle reporting in compliance with CMS requirements accordingly to avoid any issues.
Providing valuable customized training to your staff can help them increase accuracy in their work, reduce the margin of human errors, reduce and eliminate potential penalties, and improve cash flow.
Learn more about best practices for your back-office staff that can help you optimize reimbursement and improve some of your processes on our blog Improve your back office processes with these best techniques.
When training staff it’s important to remember that:
- Everyone learns differently and at different paces.
- Cross-train ALL staff members.
- Hands-on development.
Read more about this on our blog What are some best techniques to improve your medical practice?
For more information on why you should train your staff to improve the way you run your practice, contact our team of billing experts at Health Prime or email us at [email protected]. Our team will set up a meeting to discuss how Health Prime can maximize your revenue by cutting costs, saving you time, and collecting more!
Subscribe to our Health Prime blog to stay updated on all the latest updates on running your medical practice better so you can focus on what matters most: your patients.
