HOW IMPORTANT IS YOUR OFFICE MANAGER?

In most practices I've worked with, the Office Manager, is the most underrated and undervalued position in a medical practice.

The Office Manager (or Practice Manager) is regarded, in many cases by the Owner, associates and other medical staff, as a glorified receptionist or office assistant. Often, as a result, people who have minimal to no management experience or training are hired and assigned this position, which furthers the idea that the Office Manager isn't really the manager.

This is also evident in the low pay grade of most Office Managers, where they are paid slightly higher then the front desk staff and much lower than Technical staff.

But in truth the Office Manager is a profession related to office supervisory positions, responsible for coordinating work flow and hiring, training, and supervising office staff and should be looked at as a partner in the smooth operation and stable growth of a practice.

The Office Manager is the executive who should be responsible for the smooth running of the front office operations and back office operations.

He or she should work closely with the Owner in managing day-to-day operations to obtain the longer term goals set by the Owner. Ideally, with a competent Office Manager, the Owner of the practice is allowed to practice medicine (which is why the owner usually went to so many years of school anyway!) and the Office Manager manages the practice.

The owner would set short and long-term goals for the practice and the Office Manager would be responsible for seeing that these goals were met.

Here is a summary of some of the functions an ideal Office Manager:

- Supervise the production of the personnel.

- Ensuring the smooth operation of each area and stepping in when necessary.

- Statistically tracking the growth of the practice.

- Handling staff performance issues.

- Handling human resource functions.

- Working with the Owner to set and enforce office policies.

- Run the daily and weekly production meetings.

- Hiring and firing of personnel (with approval from the Owner).

- The financial well being of the practice and planning of how monies will be used to grow the practice (in coordination with the Owner).

- Overseeing the promotion and marketing of the practice and its services.

- Ensuring the bookkeeping for the practice is in order.

- Ensuring that actions are being taken to create a steady flow of new and returning patients to the practice.

- Seeing that proper treatment plan presentation is being done by the medical staff.

- Proper scheduling of patients.

These are just a handful of the actions the Office Manager should be responsible for, which makes it clear that the Office Manager has to be regarded as more than a glorified office administrator.

To make this work the person hired as the Office Manager has to be qualified as a manager and has to be someone that can competently execute the above actions.

The position must be given its due importance.

On top of this, there needs to be a delineation of duties between the Office Manager and Owner (which I will cover in my next blog) and a regular meeting period between the Office Manager and the Owner to coordinate on practice production and goals.

Give your Office Manager position the proper value and assign that position the duties above. Then fill that position will a qualified person and you will have a steadily growing practice.