The Daily Production Goal

One of the best mathematical goal-setting approaches to building a new schedule is to identify an annual production goal. Once that goal has been established, a simple formula can break down the annual production goal into a daily production goal, and then the schedule is created to achieve that goal. Once the time blocks are placed in the power cell schedule, then they should be evaluated to determine if they will allow the practice to hit the daily goal. There are many factors that go into scheduling, but in the end it is important to have a certain level of production for the financial success of the practice. The daily goal is one of the factors that needs to be evaluated when building a schedule.

Once the schedule has been built to achieve the daily goal, it is then necessary to monitor it closely. We encourage practices to have a 10-minute morning meeting where they go over a checklist of information about the day. The first agenda item is to review the daily goal from the previous day. Was the practice over the goal, on the goal or below the goal? Ultimately you want to be within 90% of the daily goal for 90% of the days. Practices that can achieve this typically come very close to their annual production goal.

This means the administrative team must be focused on what is happening with the daily goals throughout the day. For example, a no-show may reduce the opportunity to achieve the daily goal unless it is filled in, and there are numerous ways to approach that. On the other hand, an additional emergency that unexpectedly generates increased production could contribute to exceeding the daily goal that day. Overall, each of these areas needs to be managed within the schedule. For example, you want no-shows to be under 1% and emergencies managed to increase practice production without scheduling disruption. All of these management systems can be put in place to support the schedule as it has been designed allowing practices to achieve the daily goal. By achieving the daily goal, the practice will have financial success, allowing it to invest in the practice for the future.

If you are continually missing your daily goal, go back and review the scheduling. Look at the next few days or weeks and analyze each day to determine if the daily goal can be achieved. We have seen practices that have a daily goal and then simply ignore it and follow a schedule that immediately restricts the opportunity to achieve daily goals and, consequently, the annual goal. Conversely, we have seen many practices implement new schedules and immediately note a jump in production based on working to achieve the daily goal. This takes a cooperative effort between the clinical staff and administrative team to manage the schedule, communicate clearly, and monitor scheduling changes and alterations throughout the day. Overall, you want more positive scheduling opportunities than negatives. In the example above, this would involve handling emergencies productively with a significant decrease in no-show or last-minute cancellation patients.