Kelly shared with us her ‘borrowed’ motto for a new clinic service in her business planning blog post in May: “If you build it, they will come.” So, what if you found they came – and they came in masses. You’re busy taking care of patients, you’re over worked and you don’t have time to think about the future. You thought once you put the work into starting the service things would be smooth sailing and you could focus on patient care instead of administrative tasks. But, the success of any ambulatory care service requires continuous monitoring and strategic planning.
As described in Chapter 9 of Building a Successful Ambulatory Care Practice, maximizing your practice includes:
- Planning for your existing service
- Think both growth as well as a possible need to have an exit plan
- Determining the need for any new services
- What new needs have arisen and how can you meet them? Perhaps consider going back to the planning worksheets in the toolkit and then start the business planning process (yes, again).
- Anticipating changing in Health Care Delivery and Financing
- How can you modify or change your existing service to fit new models of care and reimbursement?
- Contributing to our world of ambulatory care
- Participate in research or scholarly activity to document the value of our services to patient care outcomes. Remember, as Mary Ann said “No outcome, no income.” Or, share what you have learned with other fellow amb care practitioners to help them in their endeavors.
- Train future ambulatory care practitioners. Maybe you’ll need to hire some good folks to join your expanding team. One day (maybe no time soon?) you’ll want to retire and leave the profession in good hands!
- And, plan strategically for long-term success. Develop set time-points (quarterly, yearly) where you stop and take some time to think about where your practice IS currently going, and where you WANT it to go. It’s always better if you’re in control rather than if you wake up one day thinking how did this happen.
Is your practice busy and bursting at the seams? What approach has worked for you? Or, are you in an anticoag practice focused on warfarin management that has seen declining patient visits – what’s next? What about all of these new models of care and payment systems: your clinic is becoming part of an ACO, now what?
How are you planning for the future? We’d love to hear more and learn from your successes and challenges.
We’ve learned that this is an ongoing process for all of us. In the spirit of continued learning and continuous planning, Mary Ann Kliethermes and Tim Brown will be presenting an upcoming webinar on October 29th entitled ‘Remodeling Your Successful Ambulatory Care Practice: The Next Chapter. ’ I always learn from talking to my fellow ambulatory care colleagues in this journey to a successful practice. Sign up for the webinar here.