The Importance of Hiring an Interim Medical Practice Manager
What happens when a medical practice loses a key member of their leadership team? While a position like this is vacant, critical decisions are pushed aside and organizational performance can start to decline. Hiring an interim medical practice manager will help address these challenges by providing immediate leadership to bridge your interim vacancy. This safeguards continuity within day-to-day operations and ensures the practice runs smoothly during the recruitment process, which often takes a minimum of 3-6 months.
But in today’s changing landscape of healthcare, bringing in an expert interim practice manager can be much more than a stop-gap measure. An experienced interim practice manager can evaluate your practice workflow and prepare you for imminent changes in the business of medicine. New government mandates coupled with the impending shift to ICD-10 requires that even well-established practices reevaluate the way they do business.
If your practice does lose a key member of your leadership team, it’s worth the investment to hire a highly trained, motivated interim manager to get you through the transition, provide continuity of leadership, maintain excellence and make recommendations about how to adapt your business model to succeed for many years to come.
An interim medical practice manager should be able to offer expertise in every aspect of practice administration and management with skills in the following areas:
- Day-to-day Operations of Practice Management
- Revenue Cycle Management
- Coding & Documentation
- Healthcare Information Technology
- Patient Engagement
- Process Improvement
- Leadership
- Team Building
- Operational Planning
- Strategic Planning
- Recruiting and Hiring
It’s important that practices introduce a seasoned interim manager that has the appropriate skill sets. A good candidate will have the ability to quickly adapt, embrace the culture, and look for ways to improve processes. You’ve already accounted for a practice manager’s salary in your monthly expenses – rather than leave that money on the table, reinvest it in your business and embrace the opportunity to get the perspective of an industry expert who can take your practice to new levels of profitability and patient/physician satisfaction. The infographic below outlines the real costs and opportunity costs of not hiring an interim practice manager; the money you spend on a qualified candidate will produce a measurable return on investment.