When Best Physician Practice Management Tips Come From Toyota

Small improvements, made consistently, are probably the most under-appreciated physician practice management tips. Not a full overhaul. Not a new hire or a virtual assistant. Just 1% better, in a lot of places, over time.

What Toyota Has to Do With Your Clinic

Toyota’s success is built on a philosophy called kaizen. The idea, as Steven Bartlett (a little bit controversial atm but his chapter on this still rings true) describes in Diary of a CEO, is not about big leaps forward.

It is about making small things better, in small ways, everywhere you can. Any employee at any level can flag an improvement. Even something as minor as the size of water bottles.

The result of thousands of small changes? One of the most reliably excellent manufacturing systems on the planet.

The British cycling team applied the same logic. After years of middling international results, they committed to improving every variable by 1%: gear, training, nutrition, pillow firmness, bike seat width. They swept the 2008 Olympics. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, calls this the power of marginal gains.

We already understand this in medicine. How hard do we push for a 1-2% survival improvement in oncology? Enormously hard. And when it arrives, it matters. A lot. (As it should.)

Your Practice Is a Business (Sorry)

Most of us were not trained to think of our practices as businesses.

But the business (aka our practice) is running whether we are paying attention to it or not.

If we improve one thing by 1%, it’s not going to change thing much. If we improve 10 or 15 or 20 things by 1%? Now we are saving real time, seeing real differences on our to do lists and getting back to life.

That compounding is the whole point of kaizen.

Even better, this does not have to fall entirely on us. Our practice extenders and admin teams likely have ideas already. Ask for their ideas and their thoughts. They’ll have more than what you can likely come up with and this takes some of the thinking off our plates.

Where to Start

This is not Everest. It is a 1% improvement. Pick one thing this week.

A few ideas to get the compounding started:

• Create a note template for your most common follow-up visit type
• Update your post-procedure handout to answer the questions patients are already calling about
• Pre-populate any form you fill out regularly
• Get a stamp with your contact info on it
• Build a simple FAQ document for your admin or nursing staff to answer their most common questions without interrupting you

None of these takes a full day. Most take less than an hour. And each one pays back time every week after that.

The Short Version

Do we need to rethink everything about how we run our practices? No. (And who has the bandwidth for that?) We need to make a few things 1% better and then do it again.

Kaizen works in manufacturing. It works in elite sport. It works in clinical research. There is no good reason it does not work for us too: a physician in Canada.

Start with one change. Invite your team in. Let it compound.

What is your 1% this week?

Dr. Kate Boehm, MD, MEd, FRCSC is a reconstructive plastic surgeon and the founder of DuplicateMeMD. She stubbornly believes that practice management is the key for female physicians to have better health, wealth and lives and to feel like it was all worth it.