Showing posts with label Dentistry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dentistry. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Resources for Finding a Nonclinical Job

Websites, Podcasts, and Social Media


When looking for a nonclinical job, it can be difficult to find direction. There often seem to be many possibilities, but figuring out how to turn your interest in an area such as medical review or health writing into an actual paying job isn’t always straightforward. A number of useful resources can be helpful as your work towards securing a good nonclinical position that utilizes your medical training and compensates you as well as your work in patient care. The most accessible tools you can use in your search for a non-clinical job are free and online. There are a number of websites and blogs that provide tips and job links to help you find a non-clinical position. For example, lookforzebras.com and nonclinicaldoctors.com provide updated job listings and strategies that you should know about when making the transition.



Podcasts like Docs Outside the Box and The Physician Nonclinical Careers are focused on interviews with physicians who have left clinical practice for other professional endeavors. These stories and the voices of the physicians can be inspiring and may also provide you with ideas and steps you can take in your own transition. Another advantage of the podcasts is that when you hear physicians who work in nonclinical arenas discuss their work, you may recognize features of their jobs that are appealing or unattractive to you.



Social media groups can also be good free resources for doctors who want to bounce ideas off peers. Many of these groups are private or closed and state that they only allow verified physicians to join. Group members often share company links and job openings, conferring about salaries and company ethics privately in discussion groups. Doctors can typically post and promote their own ongoing projects and receive feedback from peers. Many of the groups tend to have a positive vibe and an encouraging atmosphere, but it is important to keep in mind that your colleagues from work may also be group members—so posting details about your job or your discontent with your work could have unpleasant repercussions.



Books


These free resources are generally easy to navigate on your own. You can concentrate on your interests and learn about the numerous opportunities available for doctors in the changing healthcare landscape as you independently work towards finding a position that suits you. In general, due to their length and publication criteria, professionally published books offer in depth and evergreen strategies for making a career change. Although they aren’t free, books are typically fairly inexpensive. There are a number of books about nonclinical careers in medicine, such as Leaving the Bedside, published by the American Medical Association. Many of the books about alternative physician career paths are self-published by physician authors who have made the transition themselves, so there is a wide variety when it comes to tone and overall goals of the publications. Some are designed to help you in your soul-searching process as you figure out what you might want to do with your career, some are focused on helping you create a plan of action, and others are written as personal memoirs.



Courses


You might consider the in-depth approach of a book to be more helpful than a website or podcast if you are unsure how to present yourself to companies or how to maximize the advantages of your own work experience to strengthen your application.There are a several courses geared toward physicians who are considering transitioning out of clinical practice. The oldest and most well-established, the SEAK course, provides lectures, networking, and brief coaching sessions. Newer courses, such as the Physicians Helping Physicians workshop, are emerging as well. Courses entail a financial investment that can include the cost of registration, travel, and accommodations. Generally, they do not usually provide CME credits and most physicians’ employers do not reimburse the cost. Thus, doctors who attend these courses typically use personal funds and do so during unpaid vacation time.

Coaches and Recruiters


You might decide that a course is right for you if you would prefer to meet people in person and make connections. You might also prefer the concentrated focus for a few days rather than spreading your job search sporadically over several minutes or hours at a time as you search on your own online. The most personalized type of assistance you can get when transitioning from a patient care job to a nonclinical position is by hiring a career coach or a professional mentor. There are many career coaches that provide services to help you think about what steps you need to take, and some can also help you find jobs to apply to, often guiding you as you put together your CV and cover letter. You will have to pay for the services of a mentor or coach, but you can usually talk with them ahead of time to see if their services and fees align with what you are looking for.



Your Perfect Recipe


Sometimes a corporate recruiter can be helpful as well, but keep in mind that recruiters are generally paid by their client (the company who is looking for an employee) and therefore will not necessarily focus on your needs and will instead focus on their paying client. However, if a recruiter has many clients in the industry that you are looking for, they may present several jobs to you as the positions open.It can be a challenge to find a nonclinical position. The options are not the same for every doctor and the possibilities often vary based on your specialty and level of certification. The more qualified you are, the more likely you are to find a good job on your own. Navigating the process with free resources online is a bit like cooking a dish using a combination of recipes that you found online. Of course, some people prefer cookbooks that also explain more about the ingredients and include some variations on a recipe. And some prefer to learn and work on recipes under the direction of an expert. The financial investment involved in getting help from a coach or a course can pay off in the long run, especially if you want to make a fast transition or if you are looking for someone to guide you along the way.



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In the end, you will ultimately decide on a combination of resources that works best for you.
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Monday, October 19, 2020

MGMA 2020: Becoming a future-ready leader through self-awareness

If the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has taught the healthcare industry anything, the greatest of these lessons is likely to be that leadership needs to be agile in decision making and keyed into the what their team thinks and need.

In the first general session of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Medical Practice Excellence Convention 2020 organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich spoke about how a physician leader with self-awareness can help their team to thrive no matter the circumstances.

Her definition of self-awareness is built on two forms of self-knowledge: one’s understanding of who they are internally and how well one understands how others see them. Both are needed for one to be self-aware.

Eurich says that she learned over 15 years of coaching CEOs and C-level executives that those leaders who are willing to take a hard look in the mirror and question their assumptions about themselves are always more successful even if they didn’t start out self-aware.

According to her research, self-aware people are:
  • Better performers at work
  • Receive more promotions
  • More effective communicators
  • More engaging and motivating leaders

She says that when it comes to healthcare, self-aware leaders tend to:
  1. Have higher wellbeing
  2. Lower burnout
  3. And organizations they are a part of deliver higher quality care and have higher patient satisfaction

“What I would encourage you to think about, when you think about this topic from now on, is (self-awareness) is not nice to have, it is a business imperative,” Eurich says.

When seeking to cultivate self-awareness, Eurich says it is good to start with a self-assessment and for people to think about what kind of leader they are. She recommended one should grade one’s self on what kind of leader they are, what kind of friend they are, what kind of a driver they are.

She says that research shows that most people believe that they are above average at all things, which bears little relationship to where they actually stand.

Eurich says one of the biggest barriers to self-awareness is that many people believe they already are self-aware.

“The more we think we are already self-aware, the less self-aware we tend to become,” she says.

To combat this, Eurich suggests something she calls the humility challenge which entails finding one chance to spotlight one’s own imperfections or challenges.

“The micro opportunities to show humility, as many of them as you can do on an ongoing basis really results not only in you being self-aware, but in your team being more effective and engaged,” she says.

When leading a medical practice, especially during the pandemic, Eurich says that external self-awareness, or understanding the way others see you, is slightly more important than internal self-awareness.

To foster this, she recommends getting feedback from a wide variety of team members because most people cannot see the areas in which their awareness falls short. She says it’s safe for most leaders to automatically assume they need to improve their external self-awareness.

In order to avoid unintentional, or well-intentioned, false feedback, Eurich recommends building a small group of people who have one’s best interest at heart and have the courage to tell one the truth especially when it is hard to hear.

Going further than building one’s personal self-awareness, Eurich also recommends building a self-aware team by fostering the same form of honest communication one seeks from their feedback group within the team.

While working on self-awareness can be difficult, Eurich says that it is important to still focus on it despite what all is going on in the world.

“Self-awareness isn’t about these bolts of extreme insight,” she says. “It’s about daily, small, incremental baby steps to get there.”



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Sunday, October 18, 2020

Protecting your investment in staff resources

An email from the MGMA delivered an exciting tidbit into my mailbox this morning.


The email promoted the association’s newest dataset, which analyzes financial and operational excellence. It asked readers to guess which organizational effort was correlated with an extra $85,000 in annual revenue per physician. The choices were trimming waste, reducing headcount, or launching an employee appreciation program.

It didn’t surprise me that the answer was the employee appreciation program. But it also won’t surprise me if you guessed one of the other two options. In my experience, many physician-owners and practice executives assume staff is a cost they should always look to minimize. This notion is something my partners and I are always trying to combat.

While there is, of course, an expense associated with staff, your employees are also essential to generating revenue. That’s why I argue it’s better to think of your team as an investment—and consider the revenue and profit they contribute to your business, not just the cost.

Here are just a few examples of how focusing primarily on minimizing the out-of-pocket cost of front office staff to bolster profit can have an unintended opposite effect:

Missed opportunities


Many practices we’ve worked with are more troubled by front desk staff having occasional downtime than by what might not get done timely when staff are overloaded. For example, a common hidden cost is lost business when phones aren’t answered. If your practice is not the only option a new patient is considering, they may call another office and book with them if they get voicemail when they call yours.

It doesn’t take many lost new-patient opportunities to exceed the cost of an additional staff member. Even just based on the initial missed visit, a single new patient per day offsets much of the cost of a staff member—but the actual revenue potential of a new patient is likely much higher in terms of lifetime value and referrals.


Costly mistakes


Many practices are reluctant to have enough phone/scheduling support to enable insurance eligibility verification at the time of booking, instead waiting to verify a day or two before the appointment (or worse, not at all). But this may mean that appointments need to be cancelled too late to offer the slot to a different patient—a deadweight loss for your practice and any other patient who wanted to be seen.

Similarly, if mistakes in demographic information make their way through the billing process, they create extra re-work and delays in getting paid. (And this extra work and delay is actually the best-case scenario—in which the patient is actively insured under a plan you’re contracted with. If it turns out the patient isn’t covered, you lose both the billing time and, likely, the revenue.)


Turnover


Practices that focus on minimizing staff may leave themselves vulnerable to spikes in demand, the exit of an employee, or a bug that sweeps through the office. Being slightly short-handed versus your norm shouldn’t put your practice into a high-pressure situation, but if you’ve cut your headcount to the bone, this can easily occur. You may have been patting yourself on the back for keeping costs as low as possible, but if your employees feel overly stressed by their workload, especially if they’re dealing with impatient or angry patients to boot, you’ll likely have higher turnover than you should—and the costs of it can quickly exceed the profitability gains you thought you were getting.

So how does all this connect with the MGMA finding? The presence of an employee appreciation program suggests that a different mindset about staff, one that seems “softer,” yet can pay off with the bottom-line impact practice owners and managers are looking for. Staff who feel recognized may work harder, be more creative, take more initiative, and be less likely to leave—all ways in which they boost your revenue and profitability. So, while it may seem counter-intuitive, investing more in staff, not less, may actually be a more reliable path to a more profitable practice.

 



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