A lot of vendors are online offering private practice management tips-and-tricks:

Optimize your scheduling! Streamline your billing! Focus on patient experience! 

It's good advice, but it's geared towards quick fixes. 

What if you're a practice owner responsible for the long-term success and growth of your private practice?

For private practices, operational excellence isn't just about implementing individual solutions. It's about understanding where your practice sits in its developmental journey and building systematic approaches that create sustainable growth.

When we looked at the practice management resources available, we found very little guidance on how healthcare practices systematically evolve and mature.

So we decided to create the first comprehensive framework dedicated to how private practices develop operationally.

Successful practices—the ones who consistently deliver excellent patient care while maintaining healthy finances—don't rely on good luck to hit their goals. They don't even rely (well, not too much) on heroic individual efforts. They build habits, systems, and processes that allow their entire practice to consistently perform at a high level.

As one practice owner told me, "Any practice can succeed temporarily with one superstar provider and perfect conditions. But nobody has perfect conditions forever. You have to build systems that work when your partner is on vacation, when your best staff member leaves, and when unexpected challenges arise."

Systematic development is the future of practice management, because it's the future of every healthcare organization. Systematic approaches drive the success of EHR implementations. They drive the success of operational improvements like workflow optimization, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement strategies.

We set out to answer a few simple questions. 

How do practices develop operationally—not accidentally and unpredictably—but systematically, scalably, and measurably? What's the value to the organization of that development? How far along are private practices in the progression to operational excellence?

We published our results in the Private Practice Maturity Model. Here are a few of the things we found:

• Operational excellence can't be "turned on" simply by buying new technology or hiring staff. Advancing practice maturity requires healthcare professionals to systematically evolve the way they operate every day. Transforming practice operations is one of the most significant challenges a practice leader can tackle.
• Our research found that private practices progress through five distinct stages on their way to operational excellence: Foundation, Growth, Expansion, Optimization, and Mastery.
• The vast majority of practices (roughly 85%) are operating in the first three stages of the maturity model, where operational inefficiencies limit growth potential and provider satisfaction.
• Practices have an opportunity to achieve significantly improved efficiency, profitability, and provider satisfaction when they reach the later stages of practice maturity.

The Private Practice Maturity Model provides the first diagnostic framework for practice leaders to benchmark their current performance and plan their practice’s journey to operational excellence.

We created this framework for clinicians in the field—practice owners, administrators, and healthcare leaders who aspire to create sustainable competitive advantage for their practices. 

We hope you will use it, test it, refine it, and ultimately build upon it.

You can assess your practice here: Private Practice Maturity Calculator.

‍