For starters, we wish to thank everyone reading our on-line magazine for the massive amount of help you provided in our continual surveying of practice owners. Our survey team was very busy last quarter calling all over the U.S. and Canada. The survey results were very interesting and helped us design the format for this issue of The Practice Solution Magazine.

Given the nature of today’s financial climate, it is not surprising that our survey team found that there is a great deal of attention on the ability of the practice to attract new patients and clients. Our surveys showed that 60% of the professionals we talked to do little or nothing to effectively market for new patients/clients. Therefore we have included in this issue several articles on marketing, with emphasis on internal marketing (rather than fancy and/or expensive advertising) and more specifically, doing effective marketing surveys to find out what your public needs and wants. Knowing the basics of marketing will help attract more new patients – something vital in these economic times.

We have also included a number of articles presenting viewpoints that we think are important for professionals to have during the economic slump we are all experiencing.

As always, we scoured the Internet newswires for profession specific articles that we thought might be of interest and use to our readers.

In the spirit of offering solutions to the everyday business of running a practice, I offer you the next issue of The Practice Solution Magazine.

Charles Mann
Managing Editor
The Practice Solution Magazine

Managing Your Practice’s Finances

The Bane and Boon of Your Practice

Did you go to medical school to learn how to juggle your accounts payables and receivables? Did you spend 10 years going to school to figure out how to set up workable collection procedures with your patients and clients? I didn’t think so. Over the years, many doctors have considered managing the patient/client financial arrangements as a necessary evil to practicing medicine. Others, however, turned around their disdain for managing finances and recognized that their net profit can be positively effected by having proper financial policies in place along with workable billing and collection procedures.

Many, many, many of the doctors surveyed by The Practice Solution Magazine’s survey team have little to no experience in managing the finances of their practices. Not surprisingly, many of them have been burned by less than ethical employees or contractors.

While some of the articles in this issue of The Practice Solution are not the cure to extensive training in handling all aspects of your financial procedures, you will find some articles that will be of use at least in getting better collections-to-production ratios and keeping your receivables from getting too old to collect.

Additionally we have three outside contributing writers this issue writing on various subjects.

Our first such article is from Brad Beck, Vice President of Bank of America Practice Solutions. In this article you’ll find very useful information regarding some new, very advantageous tax ramifications of purchasing equipment. This is something that is very relevant to the “bottom line” of all of our readers. It is written in an easy to understand way.

The second article is from Dr. Amy Shroff, owner and chief of staff at the Veterinary Emergency & Specialty Center of New England in Waltham, Massachusetts. Dr. Shroff was originally contacted by one of Solutions Online Magazine’s surveyors and expressed a desire to provide other veterinarians with her hard-earned experience, especially in the area of working with staff. We thought her information to be valuable enough to include in this issue so that other doctors could benefit from what she has learned.

Our other guest writer is Lisa Thayer, co-owner, with her husband Michael, of Goldfish Network.com. I have had the fortunate experience of meeting the Thayers through our local Chamber of Commerce. In the recent past, we have discussed online marketing and how it can be somewhat convoluted. Lisa felt that since many doctors don’t get as much of an opportunity to explore the Internet as most businesspeople get to, they might be able to use some direction in developing marketing for their own websites. The first installment of a four-part series of articles written by Lisa on internet marketing is in this issue.

Additionally, as we do in each issue, we have articles that are relevant to activities in the three health care professions that compose the majority of our readers.

As usual, we hope you find the information in this issue informative and useful. And, if this is your first visit to our magazine, please take the time to look at some of our past issues for additional material that you may find helpful in the management of your practice.

I should caution you, however. I have at least one report of a doctor who lost too much sleep reading back issues of The Practice Solution Magazine late at night.

I can’t be held responsible for missed appointments due to lack of sleep.

Sincerely,

Charles Mann

Managing Editor

The Practice Solution Magazine

I hope you find this issue as informative as previous issues and I hope to continue to give you the most recent up to date articles on health care and management concerns.

In this issue, there is a profile on Dr. Vincent Dolce, DMD of Palm Beach, Florida written by former National Geographic TV producer, Chuck Friedman. Chuck was in the middle of creating a documentary on community leaders and the qualities of leadership when he discovered Dr. Dolce. You should find this to be a very informative article.

Lisa Thayer, co-owner of Goldfishnetwork.com, returns with the second part of a four-part series on search engine marketing. This is a very interesting article that delves more deeply into the often mysterious world of making yourself known on the Internet.

An article profiling a different Florida dentist, Dr. Lee Sheldon and his charitable activities, has also been added. It contains some excellent ideas on how you can use community outreach to boost the profile of your medical practice whether you are a dentist, optometrist, veterinarian or any medical professional.

In addition, we have our usual complement of profession-specific news stories and our regular practice management articles that you can use right now to benefit your practice.

Sincerely,

Charles Mann

The Practice Solution Magazine

Managing Editor

Office Basics:

Maintaining Stability in your practice

At The Practice Solution Magazine, we are constantly doing surveys of health care professionals to help determine what type of information to provide in our upcoming issues. The interviews we do often paint a vivid picture of problems indigenous to doctors in any profession. This quarter’s edition of The Practice Solution contains articles that address ensuring your practice becomes more stable through written communication that provides common policies for all members of your staff.

The key basics addressed in this issue are creating job descriptions, writing standard policies for your practice and implementing specific policy if you leave your practice for any period of time. You should find these useful

This issue additionally contains the final installment of a two-part series on conflict resolution by Daniel Bobrow, president of American Dental Company and founder of Climb For A Cause. As mentioned in our last issue, Climb For A Cause is a non-profit foundation, whose mission is to provide health care treatment and education to people in need worldwide. It seeks to encourage adventure travel, while emphasizing social action, responsibility and accountability. This year’s climb of Oregon’s Mt. Hood will be July 13, 14 and 15. While this year’s climb is now closed, if you’re interested in participating in the future, contact Mr. Bobrow using the contact information in the article he wrote for Solutions or go to http://www.climbforacause.org. Funds raised from this effort will be used to support dental education and treatment projects in both Guatemala and Cambodia.

Based upon interviews personally conducted on doctors all over the country, staff writer Ken DeRouchie has written an interesting piece on how to ensure you increase your collection percentages and create a higher standard for your practice.

In this issue we also have an assortment of news articles you may find of interest.

We hope you find the information in this issue informative and useful. And, if this is your first visit to our magazine, please take the time to look at some of our past issues for additional material that you may find helpful in the management of your practice.

Sincerely,

Charles Mann

Managing Editor

The Practice Solution Magazine

How do you get competent, willing and professional staff?

I’m sure many of our readers are very familiar with the Practice Solution Magazine phone surveys. Our team of surveyors contact doctors all over the country, 8 hours a day, five days a week. Given the busyness of your schedules, we definitely appreciate it when you take the time to speak with our team. The information you provide enables us to more closely concentrate on articles of interest to you and your staff.

With that in mind, we have found from our recent surveys that one of the most distressing areas for most doctors is the managing, hiring and controlling of staff. Every person is different and human interaction within small practices oftentimes can be nerve-wracking, volatile and frustrating. You have probably found that not everyone thinks like you do, cares as much about your practice as you do or is as willing to work extra hours as you do.

We definitely recognize the frustration that can occur with losing an employee whom you had just invested thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours training. One of the most important things you can do to bolster your practice is to ensure that all of your staff are fully trained and operating on the same page. The optimum team is one that knows what the other staff are supposed to be doing, what their specific duties are, and how to do those functions without any difficulty or emotional issues. In other words, strictly professional.

When staff are competent, work is more efficient, morale is higher and the doctor can just be the doctor instead of the referee or babysitter.

In this issue of The Practice Solution Magazine, we provide articles addressing employee issues like staff meetings, setting production targets, and what YOUR responsibility is as the leader for your staff. If you implement the suggestions within these articles, you may find some of your frustrations disappearing and you may get even more support from your front desk because they will have a better understanding of what you need as the practice owner, which will enable them to become more competent and more professional.

You’ll also find general news articles that address issues currently of interest to many of our readers.

Sincerely,

Larry Silver

Managing Editor

The Practice Solution Magazine

Practice management.

Those two words sum up the success or failure of any doctor who owns his or her own practice. Running a practice can sometimes seem to require eight arms and three clones of oneself.

From governmental regulations to hiring and training staff, to handling finances and collections, to figuring out how to properly market, improper practice management can often lead to unwanted stress for the untrained doctor.

In this quarter’s issue of The Practice Solution Magazine, we will have profiles from three doctors in different professions that were less than satisfied with their practices. Dr. Jeff Carden, a dentist from Alabama, Dr. Kathleen Bartos, a veterinarian from Florida, and Dr. Tommasina Pasqua, an optometrist from Michigan, all knew that their practices were not operating as productively as they could be. Dr. Bartos was even on the verge of bankruptcy.

Each of these doctors took their practices from where they were to tremendous successes.

How did they do it? Practice management consultants. These doctors recognized that there was something they did not know in how to run a practice and that perhaps someone else could have a different perspective.

I sat down with each doctor to find out why they continued to use practice management consultants considering that their practices have been doing and continue to do so incredibly well. They had very similar responses and yet they all had very specific problems to solve in the beginning.

I think you’ll find their stories interesting.

In this issue, you’ll also find some gold nuggets of practice management advice for doctors and office managers. We are also continuing to provide industry specific news and Dr. Barry Levy joins us again for a follow up on last quarter’s story regarding minimum standards of infection control for dentists.

Enjoy!

Sincerely,

Larry Silver
Managing Editor
The Practice Solution Magazine

Happy New Year!

Some changes have occurred within The Practice Solution Magazine over this past quarter. I have moved on to the official publisher position for The Practice Solution Magazine and we have recruited a new managing editor to handle the day-to-day activities.

Our new managing editor, Matthew Bratschi, is a transplant from Washington, DC where he worked in public relations for 14 years. Most recently, Bratschi was president of the Northern Virginia PR firm, Creative Professional Resources. He is also an experienced writer, media analyst and interviewer.

We look forward to seeing him implement his visions for the expansion of The Practice Solution Magazine.

Our plans for the coming year include a change in design for the website and a broader marketing of the Forums section to engage readers in broader debate about questions of practice management. We will also be adding to our base of articles and providing additional resources for you to use.

I want to thank you very much for your continued readership of The Practice Solution Magazine. If you have any questions regarding the format or content of our magazine, please send me e-mail. I look forward to your responses.

As always, if you are having management problems with your healthcare practice or small business, don’t get frustrated – contact us and we can help in some way.

Sincerely,

Larry Silver
Publisher,

The Practice Solution Magazine

They say that change is good. If that’s true, then The Practice Solution Magazine will take a nice step forward this year with the changes we have underway

First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Matthew Bratschi and I’ve recently accepted the position of Managing Editor for The Practice Solution Magazine.

We’ll be regularly contacting our readers to find out what they liked best about the magazine and areas that could be fine-tuned.

We’ll be adding regular features to the magazine including profiles on doctors and businessmen that are outstanding in their fields. A FAQ (frequently asked questions) page will be added as well as an e-mail “hotline” to me for direct communication.

The purpose of The Practice Solution Magazine is to provide an information source on practice and small business management issues that fills an existing need amongst healthcare and business professionals.

Previously, The Practice Solution Magazine has concentrated solely on members of the healthcare profession. This year we will branch out somewhat into general small business, although healthcare will remain our primary focus. There are, simply, common management problems in all small businesses – i.e. staff management, financial management, getting new patients/customers, etc. With the proper management education there are solutions to all of these problems, no matter the type of business one operates.

As many of you know, surveys are the crux of The Practice Solution Magazine. This issue spotlights recent surveys conducted on optometrists all over the country. There is some fascinating information that was uncovered that applies to all industries. This is something that we are finding out in our ongoing surveys of practitioners in the fifty States and Canada. Apparently, there are universal truths.

The article that explains the results of the survey is the first in a series of articles outlining issues that YOU have said are the biggest problems in your practices and businesses. Our next issue will address the results of our surveys with veterinarians and the following issue will highlight the results of our surveys with dentists.

I look forward to making The Practice Solution Magazine your first stop for industry news and interaction. It’s great to be here!

Matthew Bratschi
Managing Editor
The Practice Solution Magazine

Welcome to The Practice Solution Magazine!

The goal of The Practice Solution Magazine is to provide practice owners with practice management information that will assist them in achieving success.

It is a commonly known fact that the vast majority of owners have had little to no business administration training. It is this fact that causes many doctors to discover that owning and operating a practice is not as easy as they thought it would be and inhibits growth and prosperity. Technical training alone does not prepare doctors for many of the situations they encounter when running a practice.

Lack of knowledge about how to hire, delegate, train staff, market, budget, control the scheduling book, formulate office policy and implement efficient organizational techniques is a major cause of stress and dissatisfaction for doctors.

Our goal is to help practice owners by offering nuts and bolts solutions to management problems. We hope the information we provide in The Practice  Solution Magazine helps each and every reader to reach the goals they set for themselves when they went into private practice.

We welcome your feedback and ideas for future issues. Let us know what problems you’d like to solve in your practice so we can tailor our magazine content to address your needs. We’re happy you found The Practice Solution Magazine and I encourage you to visit often so you can take advantage of the solutions we offer.

Warm regards,

Larry Silver
Editor

Welcome to The Practice Solution Magazine!

The goal of The Practice Solution Magazine is to provide practice owners with practice management information that will assist them in achieving success.

It is a commonly known fact that the vast majority of owners have had little to no business administration training. It is this fact that causes many doctors to discover that owning and operating a practice is not as easy as they thought it would be and inhibits growth and prosperity. Technical training alone does not prepare doctors for many of the situations they encounter when running a practice.

Lack of knowledge about how to hire, delegate, train staff, market, budget, control the scheduling book, formulate office policy and implement efficient organizational techniques is a major cause of stress and dissatisfaction for doctors.

Our goal is to help practice owners by offering nuts and bolts solutions to management problems. We hope the information we provide in The Practice Solution Magazine helps each and every reader to reach the goals they set for themselves when they went into private practice.

We welcome your feedback and ideas for future issues. Let us know what problems you’d like to solve in your practice so we can tailor our magazine content to address your needs. We’re happy you found The Practice Solution Magazine online and I encourage you to visit often so you can take advantage of the solutions we offer.

Warm regards,

Larry Silver
Editor