Game Board -- Tracking Your Way to Success!

In my consulting I have observed offices that track results as a group have a different attitude, energy, and “ownership” than that of an office that really has little or no idea how the practice is actually doing. It still surprises me when a doctor wants to improve or grow the practice and the Team is in the position of asking, “Compared to what?”

Hence the Game Board—a way to fully engage the Team and to create a critical mass, which is usually necessary to bring new energy, focus, and results to an area that is stagnant or perhaps not moving at the pace it could or needs to be.

In life we tend to get what we focus on: When we focus on the glass as half empty or on an upset that has occurred, this is what we will walk around noticing, even though there will be lots of evidence the glass is half full. If we are not focused on that, we simply will not notice it. When a Team focuses on a specific result to be obtained, the chances of this happening improve dramatically.

This concept of focus goes hand in hand with the AM/PM huddles. I have always felt the emphasis on the AM huddle ought to be organized around (1) how is the well being of my Team today, and (2) what do we want to accomplish today? You open the Game Board up at each AM huddle by going over each category of desired result and the specific target the Team is aligning behind today.

While I don’t think there is anything wrong with focusing on the schedule, I don’t necessarily think there is much power in that conversation as compared to discussing the well being of the Team and what the Dr./Team wants to have happen today in specific measurable terms.

Items to be commonly tracked often include new patient exams, recalls, new patient call-ins, full starts, collections, and production. Other areas that you may want to bring into focus include patient acknowledgements (influence referrals), at the chair starts (impact profitability), doctor contacts (influence referrals), and perhaps a bonus game for the Team as well. Some of these statistics can be found on the ViewPoint Kept Procedures, Practice Statistical Analysis, Transaction, and Referrer reports.

The Game Board, as we designed it, is simply a white marker board (about 2’ × 3’) that is marked off in the following manner: On the far left have a column that lists the items you want to track—they can change depending upon what you want or need to focus on. On the next column to the right, write in what your monthly goal is for each. For example, the new patient exam goal for the month could be 42. The following columns represent the actual days you are in the office seeing patients. You might want to draw a square for each day, with a line drawn on the diagonal in each square. In the upper half of the square you write the actual number of your goal for that day, and in the lower half you keep a running total for the month towards your total goal.

At the PM huddle, in addition to asking how the Team did today with relationships, you would also go over the Game Board to determine what actually took place for the day, as a way to close that game down. You would begin a new game on the next patient day.

If you do this with a bit of rigor, you will clearly see in a short time what is working, what isn’t working, and where the office ought to be focused.