“I would hope that administrators look at this as a way to engage themselves in communication with their staff and their doctors, and find an opportunity to improve what their staff can do, along with how they communicate, in order to improve the profitability of a practice,” said Gerry Kassouf, CPA, Managing Director of Kassouf & Co. and a Director of the Healthcare Services Group.
Laurie Baedke, of LIFEworks Healthcare Group, led the morning session. Baedke, who is one of just five independent consultants globally to hold independent certification by the Gallup Organization, focused on strategies to maximize employee strengths, which aims to improve employee productivity, along with the job satisfaction, which should lead to increased retention and better patient experiences.
“One of the important elements for organizations that want to achieve improvement and growth in what they do is to start with the foundation of establishing an extraordinary culture,” Baedke told the Birmingham Medical News. “The DNA map of an organization is vital because that influences employee engagement, which drives physician engagement, which drives patient loyalty, which ultimately drives business outcomes. But most organizations make the mistake of shooting for the top before they set their foundation. And the culture is the foundation upon which all of the other metrics need to rest.”
After lunch, Jamie Verkamp, the Managing Partner at (e)Merge, taught the afternoon session. Verkamp, whose writing has appeared in multiple industry publications, said that she and Baedke met on the state and national MGMA speaking circuit, and have combined their areas of expertise into a teaching workshop.
Verkamp believes that their separate areas of expertise go hand in hand in building a five-star practice. “Laurie talks about organizational culture and employee engagement and how that ties into the patient experience,” Verkamp said. “My specialty is patient experience, customer service and how we develop brand loyalty; how we grow our referral volumes. We can’t have loyal patients, which is my focus, unless you have engaged employees, which Laurie Baedke works on.”
“I focus on how we train our staff,” Verkamp said. “How do we develop a patient experience? How do we use the culture that we’ve built through Laurie’s program to create brand advocates from loyal patients?
“I believe skills can be taught, but behaviors are hard to learn. So we have to empower our people and give them some themes they can make their own. This afternoon, we gave administrators 10 tips for training their staff to create an environment where the staff feel they’re best serving their patients; developing some of their own best practices.
“We also talked about the big effect of social media. It’s now an extension of the four walls of the office. How to we leverage that to make it beneficial to our practice? How do we harness that power and take control of it?”
Baedke and Verkamp’s message resonated with workshop participants. “I enjoyed the personal stories that both Jamie and Laurie shared to reinforce their points, making the concepts real,” said Margaret Cook. MBA. CMPE, a Healthcare Advisor at Kassouf & Co.
The workshop, which was attended by 65 practice administrators, is one of four Kassouf & Co. give each year. “We’ve been having healthcare conferences for probably ten years,” said Jerry Callahan, CPA, a Director of the Healthcare Services Group.
Callahan noted that physician practices are now being rated on five-star systems, much like hotels have been judged for years, thus the need for practices to focus on providing quality service resulting in high patient loyalty.
“The nice thing about what Baedke and Verkamp are doing is that these concepts are nothing new,” Callahan said. “They really do transcend all industries. I think the specific discipline of healthcare is unique, but at the same time a lot of these management concepts with the goal of connecting with your employees transcends every industry.”