A real case and fact that you should know if you run a clinic.

A cruel fact that we can’t run away from it

Being in the world of tough business competition, high demand from customer, volatile human resource and complication of professional practise policy, what should we prepare in order to tackle the challenge we are having here, especially in the service industry? Quality, reliability and speed of our service will deter returning customer. You will not return to the restaurant that serves bad food, give you inconsistency of order and respond to you slowly, either am I.

Restaurant operator is serving public. They are able to profit only with enough volume and returned customer. If you are looking closely to it, there is a bottleneck on the number of serving they can make under one branch. There is no sign when and how many of customer will come to you at one time. If you analyse it properly, you see it is pretty much the same happen to your clinic. We are serving public and we need certain volume to promise our return on investment of the infrastructure and renovation we invest in. More importantly to survive in the positive cash flow in order to bear our material and operation cost.

Unlike restaurant, clinic needs to keep every patient’s visit records and ready to be searched when they return, such as patient profile, medical records, X-Ray, photo, blood test, urine test, medical certificate, receipts and many more. This will congest the whole clinic easily within a few years and you need to keep for 7 years! To organize it, some clinics index the file by using alphabet A-Z, some groups by date of birth, some groups by panel. Having spent so much effort yet, it does not solve the problem. If a clinic is looking for better return, it should expect 20 patients in a day. If there is minimal 1 paper open for a patient per day and it is open for 6 days a week, soon it grows to 6,240 files a year and 31,200 files in just 5 years! This number does not include the lab test paper, receipt and other attachments.

Managing huge paper storage is never an easy task, especially speed to search is crucial and consistence update is frequent. According to Garner Group Consultation, many of professional time is spent on waiting and looking for files (50%), reading and analyse information (15%) and others. “If one hour can earn a clinic for RM50 and a clinic is consuming 1.7 hours averagely to manage daily registration and files, they are actually losing RM85 a day, RM2,550 a month, RM26,520 a year and RM132,600 in just 5 years! Just a simple calculation.” told by an expert.

Human resource is another issue. It is hard to hire reliable staff today. It is even harder to maintain their loyalty. It is cruel to know that today workforce is very different from previous time. High turn over rate of staffs cannot be avoided, as like the time bomb that you don’t know when it will explode and yet it explodes again and again. All in all, self control with minimal risk in business operation is a must plan to run a business in long term. We want piece of mind without need to worry the unpredictable issue.

How about government’s requirement and Panel Company’s demand? Oh no… it is getting to be more complicated!

A real case in the transition

A true story happened in a clinic located at local famous specialist medical centre where senior staff is holding the owner’s neck. A woman with one kid was working 10 years for a couple of senior doctors. Highly paid like the senior executive in big corporation and enjoyed car and housing allowance. Due to unchanged habit of stealing patient’s valuable after repeated forgiveness given to her, she was finally fired. Due to no proper filling system and the habit of heavily depends on the staff, without present of the senior staff, things can easily go hair-wired in patient’s medical records such as missing files, slowness in file search and  many more. The couple worried of her leaving will bring disaster. “Total age of the doctor couple is over 100 years, but yet they are trying to use Doctor Assist ™” said the Doctor Assist ™ Authorized Reseller. “One of them doesn’t even know how to use mouse and shut down the computer, but yet they manage to get the system up immediately after 2 sessions of training, how amazing!” he said. “It is never too late for us to pick up new skill after realizing about the benefits. Now we are communicating with our lab via email and direct attach the result into the system. Everything is on digital now, we have to adopt the best practice.” explained by the doctors who does not want their name to be revealed.

Leverage from digital world where space does not need to cut tree

Wind of Change

1. “In US, President Obama is allocating USD 15 billion to digitize medical records even in the crisis of economy, eyeing to save more billions in years to come”
2. “In Malaysia, a local university and its medical alliance, UKM & HUKM has been starting a project with budget of RM20 million to build Hospital Information System”
3.  “In clinic, a computer-assisted management system is now becoming a norm”

         “Change is a must to move forward! Digital platform is the direction!”

Analogue VS Digital