Why All Medical Practices Need A Dynamic Employee Handbook to Scale.

**CME Link for reflecting on this post available at the end of this post**

Two huge problems plaguing medical practices

are high employee training costs and poor company culture, and they make scaling up much more challenging.

Training new employees is one of the most expensive parts about scaling up, but if you train your team well, then your medical practice will start to build momentum.

It's often hard to train new hires to do things the right way because there are so many rules and complexities involved in operations.

It's difficult to educate medical assistants, for example, because their skills and knowledge vary from one to the next. Most medical practices solely use senior members of the staff to educate new hires. This makes the organization highly susceptible to employee turnover and puts practices at risk of litigation and medical mistakes.

Why Process Documentation Solves Your Problems Quickly and (Almost) Effortlessly:  

If your company documents its processes, then you train employees faster and avoid the pitfalls that come with a high employee training cost. As soon as new team members can repeat your documented processes in their sleep, things usually go back to normal operations and your practice is ready to start scaling up.

Without process documentation, hiring too many people at once will cause delays throughout the entire practice when you need to train everyone on every single procedure.

By documenting your process, you train employees faster to handle patient satisfaction issues and share their knowledge with other team members (to prevent redundancy). Plus, having this information available for employees on-demand will make them happier about doing their jobs.

When medical practices train all of their staff members to be able to answer questions about how everything works, they achieve competitive advantage over other organizations. This speed up operations and only takes a few months (instead of years) before you can scale up your company without too much effort/cost involved.

The documentation process doesn't just train your employees faster, it also enables them to train new hires more quickly and get back to doing what they do best.

Don't train new employees by showing them videos or sending them to training sessions with other people who train new hires.

If you train every individual member of the team on how everything works, then eventually you will burn out all of your staff members due to the amount of time and effort involved in training them all.

Instead, train an expert or two, and let them share their knowledge with other members so that everyone learns what they need to know and no one person is overworked. We do this on Trainual, a platform designed to do just this, which I'll go into at the end of this blog.

Get All Employees Involved To Help Your Company Grow Faster

When we trained our employees to screen record the most commonly used processes, it made learning our EMR easier. Every employee was allocated to one topic (such as uploading labs, accessing insurance info, etc). Sharing the work even brought everyone close together. Imagine how much easier it was to train new hires. We were even able to train overseas virtual assistants in just a few days which signifcantly reduced our costs.

By sharing processes among everyone in the company, you save money because there is less redundancy. The more efficient things are, the less time all employees spend making sure everything is running smoothly across departments. If you train your company culture to embrace this idea, then you'll train new hires faster and achieve scalability sooner than later.

How To Document Your Process.

I'll show you what we did in our organization.

• First, go to Trainual.com and click on the trial for free icon.
• Once you log in, choose a template to start creating content.
• After you create content, you then get a trainual link that you can share with your employees.
• You can allocate each type of employee to each training.
• To train new hires, they simply go to the trainual link and watch a video of how everything works.

By doing this, all employees train new hires together and don't have to take time from their day-to-day activities.

You can even track how many people have watched each trainual so you know who is on top of things and who needs more training.

There are lots of other times when it makes sense to train all staff members as well as individual teams:

- When there's a change in policy or procedures that affect everyone in some way

- When implementing a completely new system for your company (like a new EMR)

- When you just want your staff members to train each other

- When you have international virtual assistants in your practice (like we do)

Although this may seem overwhelming, decide which processes need the most improvement or training before you begin sharing videos with team members or train new hires on each process. Pick one department at a time and train every single employee who needs it (not only managers).

Let your team then identify which of your team members perform their task the most efficient and have them document their process within the Trainual platform.

Once you have created some momentum, it becomes addictive and fun.

For a free trial, go to Trainual and have some fun!

This content in this Journal / Blog Post Reflection is not approved for credit by CMEfy, however, you may reflect on how it applies to your day-to-day and engage to earn AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™ from point-of-care learning activities here: https://earnc.me/KPzmZw 

Cheng Ruan, MD

CEO Texas Center for Lifestyle Medicine

Founder of Integrative Practice Builder

For the entire playbook of practice optimization, team leadership, new CPT billing training, and more, head over to Integrative Practice Builder and join our community!