Silkin Management Group

The Services of Silkin Management Group
Phone: 503 726 1810
Website: silkinmanagementgroup.com
Email: silkinmanagementgroup@gmail.com

Silkin Management Group was established in Portland, Oregon in 1983. Since that time the company has focused on delivering consulting and training services to doctors in private practice. Now an international leader in practice management, Silkin has a long standing track record of providing assistance to its clientele that consistently exceeds their expectations.

Nuts and Bolts Management Techniques

Silkin Management Group provides key ingredients that are often missing from a doctor's professional education: The nuts and bolts of how to effectively and efficiently manage a practice. Skillfully using an integrated approach which combines management training and consulting for doctors and their staffs, Silkin personnel follow-up with each client to ensure their full satisfaction.

Problem Solving

Servicing all health care professionals, including specialists, Silkin Management Group understands the business of health care practices. Known for being able to solve every kind of practice management problem imaginable in all types of demographic areas, the professional staff at Silkin is in the business of creating stellar results for its clients and does so with the utmost confidence.

Tailor Made Programs

No two practices are alike. Therefore, Silkin programs are personalized for each client. We take into account the needs of each client as well as the client's personal and business goals. If you're looking for a "cookie-cutter" management program, you won't find it at Silkin Management Group.

At Silkin Management Group, one part of our overall practice management program includes teaching our clients a very basic, but essential management system that we call, "management by statistics". The idea here is to take opinion and guesswork out of how each area of a practice is doing by assigning a relevant production statistic to act as a guideline for the area as well as the staff member responsible for the area. Without these metrics, you are operating the business side of a practice blindly.

As an analogy, no doctor would decide on a treatment plan without properly examining a patient and performing whatever tests are necessary to determine the proper course of action. This is all very scientific and requires specific metrics as part of the examination process.

Running the business side of the practice is no different. You must have a means to measure and thereby "see" factually what is going on throughout the practice. Just as you could not drive your car without its various gauges operational, you cannot run a business without having proper productivity measurements to refer to. As a consultant at Silkin, I routinely teach my clients how to implement a system in which they can easily "see" what is going on in all areas of their practice.

Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

Do you have any idea if your treatment plan acceptances are getting better or worse or if it is even in a viable range? Do you have any idea what a viable range for this would be?

Do you have any idea if your receptionist is doing a better or worse job of keeping patients to their schedule, other than "it seems busier".?

Do you have any idea if your recall procedure is working as well this year as last year?

There are numerous other questions and areas that we look at with our clients at Silkin Management Group to help them implement the correct statistical management procedures. It is not difficult, but without it, you cannot properly run a practice.

If you would like to find out more about Silkin Management Group you can visit some of our other blog sites or give us a call at: 800-695-0257.

Gary Crawshaw
Silkin Management Group Consultant

In an earlier blog posting we discussed the concept of measuring productivity in a health care office. I can't emphasize enough how important statistical monitoring is to the management of a practice. As clearly elucidated in this earlier blog, without proper metrics, you can't really see what is going on throughout the business side of a practice.

The first question you might ask yourself on this subject is: how does one determine what the correct monitoring statistic is for an area or job position. The answer to that is something more basic, and that is determining what the actual product is that should be produced by that position or area.

In sales this is usually easy to see. For example, the product of a car salesman is a sold car and his statistic would simply be the number of cars sold.

That one is easy. But what about a receptionist in a health care office? What's her product? And what statistic measures that?

Here are some ideas you can use for this position in terms of product and statistic for a receptionist:

Product: A patient who arrives at the agreed upon time
Statistic: Percent of patients kept to schedule

Product: Sufficiently full appointment book to keep the office at or above its needed production target.
Statistic: Percent of the appointment book filled

I hope this example gives you an idea on how this basic management tool works. If you want to properly manage your practice, you must be able to easily see the productivity in any area or job position and not operate on "feel" or "how it seems".

Please note: this does not mean that you take the important human element out of your practice. I've heard people say that watching statistics takes the "humanity" out of a practice. These are not mutually exclusive activities! The "human element" is more important than anything else as it is people, working together as a team in a mutually created enjoyable work place that makes a practice a fun, pleasant and productive place to work. But, at the same time, you must also be able to logically see how the productivity of each area and job position of a practice is doing or you won't be able to manage the practice as a whole and take care of your staff.

Letting a staff member flounder around, not really knowing how they are doing, is not a fair way to treat any staff member. Neither is letting a poorly producing staff member attack in subtle or not so subtle ways a good producing staff member. Having a proper statistical monitoring system in place helps your staff know how they are doing and protects the good producers. That makes a happy and productive place to work.

At Silkin Management Group, we have researched and worked out nearly every product and statistic in a health care practice and, where we haven't, we know exactly how to figure them out. If you are interested in more information about how to do this, contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com

Dave McKevitt
Silkin Management Group Consultant

Two of our earlier blog postings discussed productivity measurements in a health care office and gave some examples of how to do this. We pointed out that you first have to figure out the product produced by an area or position, and then, once the product is worked out, you can figure out what metric best measures the production of that product. One of the earlier articles used a receptionist in a health care office as an example, since most of Silkin Management Group's clients are health care professionals.

Here's another example that anyone reading this might find useful in the management of their practice. What might be the product and statistic of a doctor in terms of his/her job of examining a patient and presenting the proper treatment plan? You might try the idea below as we've seen it work very well for Silkin clients:

Product: A patient/client who is fully briefed on their, or their animal's health condition including any non-optimum conditions that might exist, with remedies to the non-optimum condition/s presented in a clear and understandable way so that they are fully understood and agreed to.

Statistic: Percentage of treatment plans accepted.

This is an easy way for any doctor to see how well his/her treatment plans are presented and understood. A low percentage would indicate that the doctor needs to learn the proper way to deliver treatment plans so that the great, great majority get accepted and begun. There are very specific techniques that we, at Silkin Management Group, teach our clients that routinely result in a high acceptance rate of treatment plans.

If you would like to know more about this or any aspect of managing your practice, give us a call at 800-695-0257.

Scott Barnard
Silkin Management Group Consultant

Several of the consultants here at Silkin Management Group have been writing about various ways to measure productivity in a health care office. I was invited to put my "two cents" worth on this subject since it is such an important aspect of the management of any business.

As has been discussed, the first thing you need to do with any area or job position is to determine exactly what the product that area or job should be producing. This may take some figuring out by carefully inspecting the job or area in terms of what you really need coming out of the area. Previous blog articles discussed this concept in terms of a receptionist and treatment plan presentations. I'd like to present what Silkin Management Group has found very workable for the management of the collection area of a health care office.

What is the product we'd expect out of this area? How about:

Patient fees collected in a timely manner.

It seems like that would be an excellent product for the collection area to accomplish. If it accomplished this product regularly, the income of the office should be in good shape with very low receivables.

Now, how would one best measure that so one could actually manage the area by a metric? There are several stats that would give you a good measurement of how the area is doing:

Total collections received.
Total accounts receivables over thirty days (Graphed as a reverse graph with zero at the top)
Percent of collections to services.

Needless to say, one would have to use some "smarts" when looking at the second statistical graph as it would also to be compared to the production in an office. Obviously if the office's production was rising, the total receivables would likely be rising too, so a comparative analysis would have to be made. The third statistic above helps with this.

The third statistic is based upon a formula that we've worked out that compares several month's collections to several month's worth of services, with a time factor built in depending upon the type of practice, how much insurance is used and some other factors.

There are a variety of stats we help our Silkin Management Group clients with so that they can easily and properly manage their practice. The information above gives you more data about one area. I hope it is helpful.

If you are interested in any management help with your practice or business, feel free to contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website: www.silkinmanagementgroup.com

Bill Hickey
Silkin Management Group Consultant