Setting Goals with Your Healthcare Team

Goal setting exercises for healthcare teams is critical to improving productivity and improve the patient experience.

People make the difference in private practice.

Clear goals help align team behavior to achieve a common mission.

We all intuitively know that goals are important and can be an effective tool for driving results. But sometimes they can be difficult to get off the ground.

This is especially true of team goals in a healthcare office environment.

In this post we explore what it means to set goals with a team and share a couple of tips to get you moving in the right direction.

Involve the team

Goal setting for yourself is pretty straightforward.

Maybe you decide to read 12 books this year. So you develop a reading list and a game plan for getting through one book a month. You don’t need to convince anybody else. You’re motivated, and that’s all that matters.

But goal setting for a team is a little more difficult because you need to get everybody to buy-in to the vision. If not everybody believes in the destination, then they may not be as motivated to help out.

Goal-setting exercises for healthcare teams must involve everybody. Each employee must feel like a key contributor and stakeholder in the process. When employees feel involved in setting the goal, they also feel empowered and motivated to achieve it.

Don’t set arbitrary goals. When you involve the team, you get their direct feedback about what’s working and what’s not.

An easy goal-setting strategy is to formulate them around improving broken processes.

Brainstorm ways to get there

It’s not enough to align on a goal and leave it at that.

A rudder doesn’t do you any good if nobody’s rowing the boat. Every goal requires an action plan.

You need to outline specific steps that your team will take to move towards achieving the desired result. In other words, everyone on your team has to help row.

Brainstorm with your team ways in which they can work to improve processes and procedures. Improving these processes, while staying focused on the goal, will help your team arrive at the destination faster.

You might consider redesigning job descriptions to align people to focus on more specific tasks. Giving more direct ownership over a process is often a great way to increase engagement from an employee.

Ideas to get you started

The best way to start thinking about what goals to set is to look for problems with your current process. What are your biggest pain points? Where do you struggle the most?

If you’re not sure, maybe you should ask your staff.If you’re still stuck and want some place to start, then consider these practice benchmarks:

• Monthly outstanding receivables and percentages over 90 days old
• Adjustment percentage
• Gross collection ratio
• Total charges per week/month
• Collection ratio by financial class
• Number of New/Active Patients
• General Overhead Percentage

Conclusion

When done correctly, team goals are a great way to facilitate improvements in productivity.

But they require involvement and buy-in from the entire team.

Starting with your biggest pain points is usually the best way to come up with shared goal.

Once you have agreement on a goal, then start brainstorming how you’re going to get there. Decide on specific steps that each individual contributor will take to move the boat forward.

You might even consider redesigning job descriptions if you think it will motivate an employee to take more ownership over a critical step in that process.

At the end of the day, goal setting takes practice and discipline. But there’s no better way to move your practice forward than when you’re able to use goals effectively to guide your team.