Advice to Practice Managers: Balance Your Workload by Outsourcing

As every medical practice manager knows, an administrator’s duties are not limited to the financial side of the business.

Administrators also are involved in the real estate of the practice, the buildup of the practice, human resources, risk management and professional liability, to name just a few areas of responsibility.

At the Alabama Allergy and Asthma Center in Birmingham, a four-physician practice, “we also have a clinical research department that I manage,” administrator Helen Combs said. “We’ve got 12 research studies going on right now, and three research coordinators.”

Combs said, “It’s a huge thing, so one of the things that has become a little bit more common is to try to take things off your plate that maybe aren’t your forte and outsource them. I think our physicians are finally starting to realize that we can only work 60 or 70 hours for so long, and that we can’t do everything. I think more and more the trend with MGMA (Medical Group Management Association) is to tell managers to ‘just breathe. Here’s the latest: You can take a step back, get back to the basics and breathe.’ One of the things everybody’s been talking about lately in my arena is outsourcing.”

She went on, “It’s pretty common for physicians to think managers can do anything you ask them to do. My physicians will ask me, ‘Can you do an analysis of X, Y and Z?’ They fail to realize that pulling that data together in itself is a 40-hour project, which means I get nothing else done. They’ll have their project, but things fall by the wayside.”
Combs advises managers to hire a consultant for such analyses.

She also highly recommends outsourcing payroll. Other suggestions from Combs include the following:

Hire a marketing consultant, someone “who will physically go out and market your practice for you.”
Link with an outside public relations company to handle media requests for information on topics of public interest such as new drugs, drug warnings and flu season.
Keep a temp service on hand, “so that if you do have someone out, it’s not a crisis.”
Outsource billing. In the past, that was a bad idea for specialty practices because a general billing service could not be expected to know all the rules and regulations, Combs said, “but they really are getting better.”