Practice set up question re: rooming patients

[SValleyMD]

I'm trying to convince our hospital to provide more MA/LPN help.. Curious what type of set ups others have.

I'm currently seek g 25-28 pts a day in about 7 hours. I typically don't start clinic until 9 due to procedures or inpt rounding.

I "get" one assistant to room the pt, get vitals and help with orders (I do about half the order entry but don't do the Med orders or list). however my efficiency is hampered by waiting on LPN to get the next pt ready.

Admins answer was I needed to do all order entry, Med changes to "ease the workload" for her.

Most use just one assistant?

[conniebird]

Wow that's def not enough. I have 1.5 and if I had 2 that would be better. I see more patients but likely we are in different specialties. I'm def not as efficient as I could be tho. I know in a lot of PP having 3 assistants is not unusual.

[MaxPower]

What a joke. I'd tell your administration to take a hike. Depending on what EMR you're using you're already grossly overqualified for the menial tasks you're bein asked to do (entering orders and I'm guessing billing stuff as well?).

I'm running into the same issue. I have one MA who rooms patients, gets consents for in office injections, schedules surgeries, enters orders for prescriptions, and applies casts and/or braces. Two may be overkill, but really if I had 1.5 I would be so much more efficient.

[DarrVao777]

SValleyMD wrote:

I’m trying to convince our hospital to provide more MA/LPN help.. Curious what type of set ups others have.

I’m currently seek g 25-28 pts a day in about 7 hours. I typically don’t start clinic until 9 due to procedures or inpt rounding.

I “get” one assistant to room the pt, get vitals and help with orders (I do about half the order entry but don’t do the Med orders or list). however my efficiency is hampered by waiting on LPN to get the next pt ready.

Admins answer was I needed to do all order entry, Med changes to “ease the workload” for her.

Most use just one assistant?

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure we are in different fields but I've got 4 MAs/LPNs

PP, see ~15-20 patients/day (mostly procedures), 9-5

The MAs/LPNs are trained to room the patient, get vitals, submit orders, perform charting, and even answer callbacks. The goal is to have all 4 rooms filled and ready so that I can bounce through each one of them in rapid succession. By the time I clear room 4, room 1 is filled again to repeat the cycle.

I liked the idea of returning to academics after training but I can definitely see why it is rare for someone to go from PP to academics after getting spoiled by the ancillary support

Although to be fair, it is still an expense and therefore, a fight with admins to get this set up. Went from 2 initially to the 4 I have now and we frequently clash about who is stealing my MAs/LPNs to patch shortages. The irony is that if your team is good, others like to steal from you. If your team isn't good, they'll be with you until the end of time...

[Hatton]

The number of employees per doc depends on specialty. For those of you who own your own practice there is a constant dance between overhead and efficiency. In a small office setting having people who can do multiple things is invaluable.

[drcolleen]

We each have 1 nurse (MA, LPN or RN, don't ask me how that makes sense in the budget) and then there is usually a "float" nurse shared between 2 providers.  We're Family Med.  Right now our nurses do the med rec, vitals, and ask the crazy questions we don't have time to care about (seat belt, sun safety, etc).  I've got my nurse reviewing the FHx and SoHx, occasionally the MHx and SHx if I am the rate limiting step for the schedule.  I'm working on a formal work flow since some of the docs don't have their nurses doing so much and get behind on charts.

[MichaelB]

I am in a high volume specialty, and I work with 3 MAs. They do almost all charting and all patient prep. It is not cost effective for you to do anything your MA can do.

I would frame your argument strictly from an economic standpoint. Figure out how many more patients you can see per day with another MA compared to the MA's salary. If you know your average collections per patient, it's easy to figure out your break even point. It probably only would take an extra 2 patients per day for this to be profitable.