How can you balance practice management with other healthcare responsibilities?

Priorities and values must align. Begin with identifying your mission & values and then prioritize your tasks. Ask yourself how “this” task supports (or doesn’t) support your values.

Working collaboratively and professionally with colleagues, build trust and confidence with them and your patients and or clients.

To balance practice management with other healthcare responsibilities, prioritize time management, delegate tasks, use technology for efficiency, and maintain open communication with your team. This ensures you can focus on both administrative and patient care duties effectively.

In my experience as Emergency Medicine Physician, management and medical skills should both go parallel to each other. management to organize duties between the healthcare team, also to prioritize critical patients from cold ones and this needs a professional team to know exactly who is critical from who is not? for instance, if a patient come to the ER with typical chest pain and comorbidities, you should suspect MI (this is medical skills) , immediately you should prioritize this patient for management and order your team for further investigation like ECG and not more than 120 minutes from entering hospital till doing PCI ( this is good management)

This is a tough one in practice. Most end up with extended work schedules. I prefer having planned and separate times for healthcare management tasks and doing the same for patient care. Trying to do it all at once simply does not work in my experience.

1. Delegate Administrative Tasks:📊 Identify non-clinical tasks within your practice that can be delegated to administrative staff or outsourced. This frees up time for patient care. #Delegation #PracticeEfficiency 2. Use Technology for Efficiency: 🖥️ Leverage healthcare management software and EHR systems to streamline administrative processes. This enhances practice management and saves time. #HealthTech #Efficiency

I have learned that a little cross training goes a long way in being an extension of my manager roles. So many things can impact a practice day-to-day, and the managers are responsible for juggling all of that. If you naturally have employees who can step in for each other in those moments, I found I am not spread as thin, and I can keep my focused on the larger tasks at hand. The end result for our patients and others who conduct business with us is also less hectic during those times. I recognize it can be hard to relinquish some control as a manager, but I have found that my teams are mutually supportive of each other, with good morale and cohesiveness as the end result! Positive interactions go along way in the overall practice.

Non clinical tasks have to be done by staff trained to handle such work. Online EMR and other IT tools for billing , appointments , investigation booking , reports collection are being used in my clinical practice to declutter my work schedule

Something I experienced in my time as a nurse was that the things we had to do, that weren’t our core competence, took most of the time in our shift. And if you didn’t do these tasks and concentrated on your patients your colleagues were angry and didn’t understand that only together we could have changed this system.

A test of a leader's skills is in their delegation abilities. As a leader who emphasizes on team excellence, I realized how much micromanaging I did, because I did not think that my team's efforts were good enough. However, delegating tasks to team members not only eases some burden of taking on multiple roles, off any leader, it helps the growth of the team.

Third party apps are of immense help. At the same time , we have to make sure how data is handled by these agents. In India , it’s been noticed that the patients phone numbers were being used for promoting other brands / doctors / therapeutics for a price. We have to make sure that data is safe and secure .

Be careful when using software to automate certain processes. I’ve had EMR and scheduling software that claims to send out appointment reminders but ultimately never did; we even tested it with our own phones to make sure it wasn’t an issue on the patient’s end. The same software also never checked intake forms for context; a patient would put either the wrong info in the wrong box or put some random answer in a field and the software would accept. In the mental health field we got some rather interesting responses sometimes, but the process just took more time as we had to reach to patients for clarification - if they even put in their phone number at all, which the software didn’t verify before allowing patients to submit their forms.

I love the opportunity to allow the patients a chance to self-schedule. They can choose a time that works with their schedule and it eliminates a lot of the back and forth. Another great way of streamlining processes is during the check in process. Having the patient document their top 3 concerns at the outset, helps to guide the appointment.

After making sure that third party apps or softwares are working correctly and are as safe as possible…nothing digital is 100% safe. These systems should be testet by the people who use them on a daily basis. Too often these „supporting“ systems are chosen and bought for the wrong reasons and at the end make things even more complicated and really don’t support the system.

I always recommend HIPAA-compliant EMR systems even in Nigeria, for confidentiality sake. An EMR with a CMS integration is more useful. For smaller facilities, basic automation tools can be found in Microsoft outlook and Google workspace.

It is so very easy, as a leader, to be always available…to have that open door policy, that left you finishing tasks past normal office hours, or to be available any time. Although I believe leaders should be available in emergencies, it is easy to lose that work life balance, and eventually start to burn out. It is so important to set limits for your own well being.

I found that being available to my staff for administrative issues and emergencies was a positive. But patient interactions is where the line had to be drawn; too often patients would ask staff to just transfer them to me directly, or staff would ask me to insert myself into a patient issue. Too often, patient policy would be ignored in an effort to appease an irate patient and then it escalated to a bigger issue when I would have to step in to reinforce those policies. At some point you have to draw the line and tell your staff that policies exist for a reason, and that sending you a call or asking you to come to speak with a patient just to reiterate that is a waste of everybody’s time.

In healthcare, juggling practice management with patient care often feels like tightrope walking. A strategy that's worked wonders for me is the boundary box approach. Delineate your roles and set clear boundaries for management tasks and healthcare responsibilities. Begin by charting out the expectations for each role and stick to them diligently. These boundaries become your safety net, allowing you to allocate your time and energy more efficiently. Once these expectations are transparent and communicated, it streamlines workflows, reduces role confusion, and elevates the standard of care and management.

This is a tricky one. If one of the core values as a nurse is to help people - setting boundaries is really not easy. Wrong beliefs and the need to be needed press the wrong buttons. Here it needs a lot of coaching and training to shift this into a healthy mindset for the employees.

It’s pretty important to have self-awareness to enable us to understand ourselves better and that will paint a much clearer picture on our strengths and weaknesses, an invaluable piece of information on our limitations. Having the information isn’t sufficient, because it’s also crucial to act on the available information; otherwise, it’s as good as none. Therefore, see to it that something’s done to complement the our shortcomings to the situation, that’ll give the fundamental concept in knowing when to seek for any required support for better overall quality in management.

Feedback and support can go a long way. If you're a leader within the healthcare industry right now, you probably have an infinite number of things on your plate. This means that there are issues that can easily fly under the radar. When we allow ourselves to be open to new perspectives or ideas from those with different areas of expertise, we can get insights we wouldn't otherwise have access to.

As a lab director, it was so valuable to have a network of other lab professionals that I could ask questions or opinions. We forged a strong network of professionals that had experiences in so many areas that there was rarely a question asked that someone didn’t have experience with in their practice.

I would love to see this type of support getting to the nurses on the wards! Imagine there would be the possibility of a coach supporting you through the day. You could immediately “on site” learn where you need to change your patterns and together work on that. Stress levels would not rise that high. Optimising work on a whole new level.

Beware of organizations that ask for money upfront without letting you get a partial experience of their services. I was part of ACHE for a few years and found it largely useless and they kept asking for money after I let my membership lapse, while my current affiliations (which are provided in a limited capacity for free as part of my certifications) are far more useful and haven’t cost me any additional dues or fees.

As a healthcare worker, self-investment is crucial to your professional and personal development. This can entail going to conferences, continuing education, and keeping up with the most recent developments in medicine. Maintaining your physical and mental health is also important because a well-trained healthcare professional can provide patients with superior care. Long-term gains from financial expenditures in professional development can lead to new opportunities and enable you to deliver healthcare of a higher caliber. In the end, making an investment in your professional development as a healthcare provider not only expands your skills but also raises the standard of care you can offer your patients.

Strive to be a lifelong learner no matter how busy life gets. Read something every day! Education can take on many forms outside of a classroom. Take advantage of webinars, seminars, and conferences with topics that spark your interest. Network and surround yourself with people who have common interests that you can learn from.

I can not stress how important ongoing education and improvement is even after you’ve finished formal schooling. The longer you go between your last graduation and professional/personal development through conferences and webinars, the harder it becomes to get up to speed with current industry trends or new technologies.

Always lead from front and work with your own hands 🙌 and the others will follow you immediately as a role model,always keep a broad and welcoming smile on your face no matter how hard is the work/job/ challenge

I like to attend conferences to learn about innovations in our field. You can learn a new process or system which may benefit your practice. You may also learn about potential hurdles and blind spots that you have not considered.

The practice management system enables providers to focus on quality rather than administrative duties by coordinating and conducting medical practices. Scheduling and tracking are mechanized, so the patients and difficulties associated with billing and other issues can b managed and for these responsibilities health care system hire people who are at the position of executive director or chief operation officer. They work separate from the patient care area so that patient care won't b suffer. Balance can be managed by dedicating the work to the responsible team of the system. Team work plays an important role in achieving balance

When I was heading a very busy department my first job was to keep strong interpersonal relationships with my staff and clients alike and always faced challenges from “ front “and never allowed any blame game amongst healthcare workers with in the department despite very tough competition between them for professional growth. More over , never 👎🏿 ever show any bias towards anyone specially young workers no matter even if he/ she is more inclined towards your contenders for the top slot you are occupying at the highest level. The highest rank demands that you allocate 60% time for administrative and allied duties and only 40% of time for clinical duties that too for training the younger members who will face the future challenges .

Health care managment differs from many other fields . Doctor as a team leader needs more time to devote to his patients . Technology does help in maintaining the records and scheduling the appointments. But the staff needs to be trained for understanding the sensibilities of patient and their parents and care givers. Many of the patients need priority in appointment system. Para medical staff can take care of these things after proper training. For billing and medico legal issues you need a helping hand so that a doctors has more time with the patients.