As the healthcare industry continues to evolve and face new challenges, the importance of having a well-trained staff has never been greater.
From medical billing errors to patient dissatisfaction, the consequences of inadequate training can be detrimental to both patients and healthcare practices.
In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive landscape, it is crucial for healthcare providers and their billing staff to constantly develop their skills and knowledge to stay ahead.
In this blog post, we will discuss five valuable training tips that can help improve efficiency, reduce errors, and ultimately lead to better results for your practice.
The Importance of Staff Training in Healthcare
Before we dive into how to train your staff, let’s start with why staff training in healthcare workplaces is so crucial.
First, there’s the opportunity to provide better patient outcomes. It’s no news that healthcare professions have taken a bit of a beating over the last few years. So, those who remain in the industry have an extra level of commitment to patient care.
When you provide training to employees, they are better able to serve their patient base. This affects patient well-being as well as more objective morbidity and mortality statistics.
A practice where staff is well trained also operates more efficiently. If one staff member gets caught up in a longer-than-expected appointment, another one can step in to draw blood or start an IV, for instance.
When all staff members are working together like a well-oiled machine, the entire practice hums along. The alternative is constantly running behind in a disorganized fashion. At best, this makes both staff and patients grumpy. At worst, it can compromise patient care.
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Training allows for skill-building for employees. This boosts morale and allows the practice to hire from within rather than recruiting from outside the office.
When that training includes the medical billing and coding department—as it should—accuracy improves. You’ll begin to see fewer returned claims.
Lastly, healthcare training may be mandatory to meet accreditation requirements. These mandates at the institutional, state, and federal levels were put in place to protect patients. Without meeting the requirements, practices can even find themselves unable to operate legally.
The Benefits of Staff Training in Healthcare
We mentioned above that all the factors above can have further downstream effects on your practice. When you think of your practice from the business side of things, this makes sense.
To start, improving patient outcomes typically results in better patient reviews. It also generates more referrals from colleagues. These can boost practice revenue over the long term, whether you want to increase profits or expand.
Likewise, running a more efficient clinic can increase income too. You can fit more appointments into the day. And you can keep a desired percentage of the schedule open for emergencies, walk-ins, and other short-notice visits.
A smooth-running practice is more likely to keep employees happy as well, from physicians to front desk staff. This influences worker retention and recruiting. You can enjoy less staff attrition; when you do need to hire, your reputation as a great workplace precedes you.
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Hiring from within the organization is nearly always preferable to taking on an outside candidate. That’s because it costs significantly more to recruit, hire, and train a new staff member than to train an existing employee.
How do fewer returned claims for billing and coding errors impact revenue? It’s more than just ensuring that insurance covers as many invoices as possible, although that is a benefit.
You don’t want to waste staff time correcting and resubmitting insurance claims. And getting claims paid in a timely manner affects your revenue cycle management and stability. This is important for meeting expenses, as well as for making projections for scaling in the future.
Finally, accreditation and institutional standards are vital in providing the best patient care. They also ensure your reputation in the community. But they also can affect funding. You don’t want to find your practice out of the running for grants and programs that you need to either defray expenses or run at the top of your industry.
5 Tips for Staff Training in Healthcare Practices
Now you know how essential it is to offer staff training for your healthcare practice. Here are five tips to help you put what you have learned into action.
Map Out Training in Advance
Ideally, your staff training should be part of a larger overall initiative. For example, one of your goals may be improving patient satisfaction. So, at least part of your training should be dedicated to elements that contribute to that.
Think of your training like a schoolteacher mapping out a curriculum for a semester or longer. Set a timetable and decide when different training units will occur.
Break Education into Manageable Chunks
Once you have an outline established, think about how staff can handle each unit. For larger topics, you may have to break the curriculum into segments to make it more manageable.
For instance, you might be setting up staff training for your in-house coding office. Rather than going over all new coding changes at once, you could do one session on modifiers and then another on NCCI edits. That way, you can make sure one part of the material is clear before moving on.
Make Training Easily Available
Not all training can be accomplished during clinic hours. In fact, if you have a busy office, it might be hard to find time between 8 to 5.
Avoid making staff attend training sessions during lunch or breaks. This could easily violate OSHA and state rules about appropriate break times. And it won’t help staff morale either.
Instead, give staff some self-paced options for work-life balance. Be sure to pay staff for training time, especially if they’re required to come in early or stay late.
Clearly Delineate Expectations and Consequences
To get staff on board, make sure everyone knows what’s expected and what’s riding on training completion.
If accreditation is involved, they must understand the seriousness of success. And be upfront about the timetable so employees can plan in advance and not feel their free time is being hijacked.
Offer Incentives as Needed
Staff training in healthcare doesn’t need to have a negative association. Especially if you have a smaller office, you can make it fun or even gamify it.
Consider offering incentives for rapid completion of assignments, like an extra hour of PTO or a cafeteria credit for a few free lunches.
You could also divide the office into teams and have them compete during training. The winners could receive gift cards or a similar perk.
Measuring Training Effectiveness
How do you know if your training is effective? Start by setting SMART goals that are not vague or overly ambitious. That way, you can make changes as you go if necessary. And you’ll start off with metrics against which you can measure success.
Use tests, quizzes, and practical exams for short-term objective scores. Other more subjective-seeming outcomes can still be quantified, but it will take a little longer to see the results. These include criteria like:
- Patient reviews
- Number of professional referrals
- Number of appointments per day
- Income by month or quarter
- Number of returned insurance claims
- Profit margins by quarter or 6 months
For example, say you want to increase the number of patients your cardiovascular practice sees in a day for routine follow-up. Because you used SMART goals, you don’t simply say “We want to schedule more appointments.” Instead, you say “We want to add a weekly average of two patient slots per day.”
To accomplish your scheduling goal, you conduct training in the following areas:
- General patient intake
- Phlebotomy
- Obtaining ECGs
- Listening for breath sounds
- Applying home arrhythmia monitors
At the end of the training period, you can start assessing the schedule on a weekly basis. Within a month or two, your training efforts should be paying off.
The practice should be running more efficiently for basic appointments. Visits that used to take 45 minutes have been reduced to 40, allowing you to add those extra slots to the calendar.
Those two additional appointments don’t just benefit your bottom line and patient satisfaction on that day. Thinking forward, extra patient slots create shorter wait times across weeks and months.
A recent survey found that over 25% of patients waited two months or longer for care with nurse practitioners. They labeled these waits “longer than reasonable” and felt they negatively impacted timely care.
Do you have a practice that necessitates time-sensitive care like most? Speeding up the time between scheduling and actual appointments for patients can affect outcomes.
How You Can Start Staff Training Right Now
Are you ready to start training the staff in your healthcare practice right away? Here are some last tips you can use to get off on the right foot:
- Your clinic’s training needs won’t necessarily be the same as that of your competitors. Start by assessing your needs to see where training can overlap with your overarching practice goals.
- Pressed for time at the moment? Triage your training just like you would patient care. What needs to come first? If it’s making patient intake more efficient, for instance, focus on that at the start.
- Acknowledge that some departments may need more or less help. For example, your nurses may be humming along, but your billing department is slowing down revenue. That’s a place where you can concentrate training right now.
- Figure out how you will integrate new staff. Perhaps you can make everything you’ve covered before their arrival part of their onboarding.
- Don’t forget about technical training. Are you adding or updating software for more efficient scheduling or electronic health records? Any technology related to practice management also deserves its own training sessions.
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