S.O.A.P. Notes are the Key Towards a Clean, Organized Practice

If you are a healthcare provider, you are more than familiar with a SOAP note.  It is very easy to apply this acronym to patient care, but what about applying it to your practice?  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a budget, business and exit plan, it just helps to guide you on what you should be looking at, either daily or weekly.  

How to apply S.O.A.P. to your health care practice.

Subjective (S). In order to have a successful practice, you need to know if your employees are happy.  Spend time understanding what your staff might need to help you run a successful practice.  Ask questions about what they might need to be successful, what types of challenges they are facing in their position, and how you can help to improve on their process.

Objective (O).  In a successful practice, it is imperative that you have some specific measures you watch on a daily basis.  Areas that may need an objective measurement and will tell you quite a bit about your practice could be the percent of patient arrivals, daily collections, daily patient visits, accounts receivable and new patients, just to mention a few.

Assessment (A).  Continue to assess your practice on a daily and monthly basis.  Find a few reports or spreadsheets that work for you and your practice and put them into action.  With the capabilities of today’s electronic medical records (EMR), there are a substantial number of reports you can run to get information that helps you review your metrics.  Most EMR’s also help you by creating custom reports if you need them.  Just make sure you stick to it! Assessments are not just a one-time practice, they should be done on an ongoing basis.

Plan (P).  When you have gathered the objective measurements of your practice, do some planning.  After identifying any areas of improvement by looking at your metrics, create a plan with tasks, and assign each to key personnel.  The metrics will tell you quite a bit about the viability of your business.  By continuing to look at trends, and coming up with a plan, you will keep your practice on track to a successful future.

Keeping things simple can oftentimes be the best answer.  Applying what you already know to your healthcare practice can be easy and rewarding!  If you still need some help getting started, seek out the help of practice consultant – asking for help can relieve some of the burden.