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Practice owner retirement planning

Are you actively planning for your retirement or will you “work until you drop”?  Healthcare practice owners are no exception to the habit of business owners (and people in general) in delaying the planning of their own retirement.  Many just have enough time in a day to take care of patients, address a few management issues and go home to live their personal lives.  There isn’t much time for long-term planning – especially something as distant as their own retirement.  We all read the frequent stories about the number of individuals in their 60’s that have no savings and are forced to continue working to be able to survive.  Again, healthcare practitioners are no exception to this.

Why [do] doctors do such a bad job planning for retirement? I haven’t found a good answer to this anywhere, but as usual I have a few theories:

1. We are average Americans, and we suffer from the same “oh-well-I’ll-cross that-bridge-when-I-come-to-it” mentality as average Americans.
2. Unlike people who work in other professions, I think we also suffer from the traditional image of Marcus Welby, M.D., who never retired. Heck, he never took a day OFF! There is still an idea out there that doctors don’t really retire until their health no longer permits them to do the job. Even doctors of my generation, who don’t want to work until their bodies give out, haven’t caught up with the notion that they have to plan for the day when they stop working and, consequently, stop earning.
3. We don’t have time to plan our financial future, or at least we don’t think we have time. In truth, we don’t have time to waste and we should be planning right now. Many physicians hire accountants and financial advisors to do the planning for them, but this is an expensive business and doesn’t solve the problem of becoming an informed investor and steward of your own future.

This recent post on ruraldoctoring.com not only lists some theories as to why it might be difficult for healthcare practitioners to work on retirement planning but goes on to give practical steps in actually creating a good plan for the future.  Check it out…it is not too early!

Change Management Key to EMR Implementation

I have assisted with Electronic Medical Records (EMR) roll-out into a number of small to medium sized healthcare clinics.  Careful planning and management of these projects is important for successful EMR implementation and seems to become even more critical as the number of employees in a practice rises.  I came face-to-face with this recently as I assisted with the implementation of an IT infrastructure and a software package into a 7 physician practice with 33 employees.  Planning, management, and communication at all levels of an organization is a lot simpler when you are dealing with a handful of employees – you can actually get them all in the same room for at least a short period of time.  But, increasing this number to a clinic the size of 33 employees is quite another thing to plan for and manage.  Communication has to be more formally planned out so that it reaches all levels of the practice.  Furthermore, the skill sets and culture of the entire organization needs to be carefully analyzed (i.e. you can’t assume that everyone knows basic computer skills or that they even want to know).

Peter Polack, in his recent post on Medical Practice Trends, offers that applying the principle of “change management” will make EMR implementation much more successful.  He includes ten principles that should be considered for anyone that will be managing the implementation of a new EMR system.  These principles include such things as “addressing the human side”, “involving every layer”, “creating ownership” and “communicating the message”.  Glancing through these principles one might think that they are simple common sense considerations.  They are.  However, omiting any or not creating a plan to effectively use these principles could be the difference between success and failure.

Many “failures” of EMR systems have as much to do with poor planning and implementation as with deficiencies in the software itself. This is especially true when it comes to the changes that occur on the human side. Planning how a new EMR system will integrate within a specific practice before actually installing the software will be time well spent and, ultimately, will benefit the bottom line.

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