What high-level goals have you set for your practice for next quarter? We’re willing to bet that boosting efficiency and increasing profitability both rank near the top of your list. And those will also probably be your goals again next quarter… and the quarter after that.
But how do you achieve it? At Cerbo, we’re in the business of helping practices and clinics like yours reach their full potential. In our ongoing efforts to do that, we recently hosted an amazing webinar called, Amplify Your Medical Practice Efficiency. We brought together three physicians from different backgrounds to discuss how they’ve leveraged Cerbo to make their operations more efficient.
We were blessed to be joined by:
Their insights were so helpful that we’ve condensed them into this blog, with the hopes that their experiences can help you make 2025 your best year ever.
Here are the four biggest takeaways from that webinar, which we feel are also the four biggest difference-makers that can help any clinic or practice.
You probably know that hiring someone to help you with the more administrative side of things could free up your time to see patients and focus on high-value/high-level tasks. However, we also don’t have to tell you that this is easier said than done.
Various sources estimate the cost of hiring any new employee at between $4700-5000 over and above their salary when you factor in costs like advertising the job and conducting interviews/ background checks. And of course, that cost rises in more specialized areas like the medical sector.
You may also worry about the costs associated with hiring the wrong person, which can be incredibly expensive. It’s been estimated that a bad hire can silently cost you more than $17,000 when you factor in onboarding/ training, lost productivity, disruption to workflow, and starting the hiring process over again.
However, there is a low-risk/low-cost way to get the help you need: Hiring Virtual Assistants (VA).
Dr. Miller cites Cerbo and hiring her VAs as game changers for her efficiency. In fact l, she goes so far to refer to them as the “best decision I’ve made for my practice…Both of them have made my practice 1000 times easier.”
“The entire practice knows our VAs very well because they make the first contact with the patient… And then they're responsible for all of the onboarding tasks. They're kind of like my right hand and left hand.”
She added that their true benefit is freeing up her time to focus on what she’s good at, patient care. “That's what I'm trained to do. I'm not trained to do all the other administrative things.”
Practice owners can often feel like they’re alone on an island. They have to find all of the answers themselves, even if it’s for something beyond their area of expertise. That’s why Cerbo is incredibly proud of the community we have created. We created a place for physicians to help other physicians by offering advice and support.
Dr. Concepcion said that she particularly enjoys how “proudly geeky” the community is, with absolutely no egos.
“It allows a doctor to be much more relaxed and much more congenial when it comes to, ‘Hey, we're not stepping on each other's shoulders to get to the top.’ We are stepping on whatever we need to support everyone to be better, and more efficient, and more happy, and more centered in their own lives.”
Dr. Ryan was also able to leverage this community to get advice on setting up vaccine clinics. She added that, “Many of us are solo practitioners and we're in our own offices without the other doctors around us. We're not in doctors’ lounges, getting feedback and peer support and that sort of stuff. This is a place where we can get that.”
Many overwhelmed clinic owners, practitioners, and physicians struggle with maintaining true visibility into the day-to-day operations of their practices. There are simply so many moving parts. This can obviously hurt their ability to make informed business decisions about the future, but it can also impact the quality of care they’re giving today.
Dr. Ryan spoke candidly about what her practice was like before and after introducing Cerbo. “I didn't feel like I knew what was happening with the patient's care. I couldn't see it all and I can't retain it all in my head. And so I wanted that snapshot.”
She added that now that she has full visibility, she’s able to invest the time saved directly into longer visits with patients. “I have a higher expectation of my level of care. We do a better job because we have more time and that's great. And I like to do a lot of preventive care, go above and beyond.”
Chart Parts are user-managed templates that you can use to quickly populate your encounter note with text and information about the patient. You can also add things like:
We designed our Chart Parts with one thing in mind: Saving you time. These templates slash the amount of time you lose every day to laborious manual/repeat entry.
“I think that the magic really starts to happen with building the Chart Parts the way you want them. That allows us to save so much time as we see patients and send orders and things like that,” said Dr. Ryan.
“There's so little, so few clicks involved… The fact that you have pop-ups for everything is huge. I didn't even realize how much time and how many clicks I was saving. When I hover over something, I can see it without clicking on it. Every click is just an extra fine motor that our brain has to do.”
Dr. Concepcion added that this type of customization was an absolute deal-breaker for her.
“It's so nimble that you can create even a macro for an entire set of orders as well as handouts for your patients. When I opened as a telemedicine home-visit model, it was absolutely imperative for me to have the ability to use that from day one, which I did.”
“More basic EHRs, you're looking at PDFs, and you have to open the PDF, and you have to read the document. Does it allow you to trend it? Does it allow you to put the data into different places where you can see it, and collect it, and then pull it into your note?”
“The challenge with this is that we all think, ‘Oh, I have plenty of time to do that.’ And yeah, you can with the first 10 patients. But when you start to get busy and those patients need you, what you need to be doing is clinical care. Everything needs to be easy to find, easy to do, and easy to piece together.”
We provide a do-it-all EHR, practice management, and patient portal solution that helps you slash the time spent on administrative tasks, freeing up your time to work ON your business instead of being trapped by tasks IN your business.
“While it takes a while to customize Cerbo to fit your practice, it is well worth the investment and ultimately saves time and money. The best part is that this translates into successful patient outcomes while minimizing the burden of charting, educating, and day-to-day administrative tasks on the practice team.”
— Dr. Kristann Heinz, MD, RD, Red Hill Medical + Wellness, Pennsylvania.
