Last week was amazing!  We partnered with CBS Billing and held a meeting in Oklahoma City, and although we didn’t witness any, those of us who were not locals learned a bit about tornadoes.  Those can certainly get your attention!  Our meeting was entitled “Driving Practice Success.” It drew a great group of people who came from Alaska to Florida and Maine to California.  It was really great!  We had a several few key takeaways and there was a lot of excitement for how OPIE makes life better.   

We had our Waystar team there, too.  They paid a lot of attention to what people were saying and they gave great tips for using the services already in Waystar that streamline processes and address some pain points that were mentioned. I do not want to minimize any of the topics we covered, but my takeaway was that everyone in the room, every company, from coast-to-coast, agreed that there were opportunities to improve internal processes.  I believe every person learned that OPIE can do something they didn’t know it can do.  And quite often, they had developed elaborate work-arounds because they were unaware of a feature.  

We talked about working together as a team to drive the practice forward.  To create more successful patient encounters and then we talked about how important the Administrative Role is to successful patient care.  We talked about the difficulty in clearly communicating who does what and when in the practice and ultimately how important consistent process is to creating organizational effectiveness.  We all decided together that there would be tremendous value in having a good set of SOPs.  We also agreed that creating, managing and promulgating SOPs can be really hard.  So we did it.  We created some SOPs together and we provided templates to everyone so they can go back to their offices and write more! 

But before you can document the roadmap to success for your practice, you must define success.  As Yogi Berra said “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up somewhere else!”  So before you set your course, have you defined what success looks like for your company?  Only then can you set expectations, and once expectations are set, you can begin to define how to meet those expectations.