It is December and every expert is taking out their crystal ball and predicting 2015 trends. They usually have a Top 10 list. I have only one, but it is a biggie.
If you only take one single concept from this article, make it ‘Process Knowledge Transfer’. This is a systematic way of harvesting, standardizing, documenting, and transferring knowledge that is kept in your tech-savvy human capital (your employees’ heads) and upon which your practice’s continued operation depends.
Our first IT Director was a technical genius who transformed our rudimentary technology infrastructure to one with a successful EMR implementation. Technical systems finally ‘spoke’ to each other and we had a smoothly running, in-house software development department.
But he moved on. We lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because we did not harvest what he kept in his head. We had done zero process knowledge transfer, were caught flat-footed and needed ‘Practice CPR’. It became our inside joke: CPR = Continuity, Productivity and Risk.
What we learned was that our digital practice wasn’t just a technology inventory. We had become a process-centric practice without a centralized and systematic approach to how our workflows, our technology and our staff needed to interact. We were randomly managing certain processes and randomly ignoring others.
Our advantage was that we could absorb these hits because of our size and our access to resources as a top-tier ophthalmic group. Nonetheless, our decision to become a digital practice could only be accomplished by broadening our thinking beyond workflows into systems. We would have to run our practice as a set of synchronized systems built on three key elements: our people, our processes, and our technology.
Knowing that the switch to digital is not instantaneous, we had to lay out a plan for high performance as a hybrid of both manual and automated process execution. Our challenge became one of designing both types for maximum productivity. Different skillsets are required.
Manual processes rely heavily on human (process participant) decisions for execution. The people are not automated out of manual processes so they need training, job aids, checklists, and evaluation criteria focused on learning.
Automated processes rely heavily on process design decisions for execution. These depend on business rules in the form of programming code running inside a software application but require no human decision in order to execute. They are triggered for all kinds of reasons by all kinds of criteria such as calendar dates, dollar amounts, procedure codes, etc.
As long as our practice functions under this hybrid model, as we will all certainly be next year in 2015, we must elevate process knowledge transfer to its highest level of importance, second only to revenue cycle management.
Make 2015 the year you model effective behaviors, document critical processes, transfer process knowledge, and develop world-class continuous improvement programs.
Process Knowledge Transfer is such a big topic, I have begun work on a book dedicated to Practice CPR. If you would like information on obtaining a free advance copy, visit this link http://bit.ly/practiceCPR