It’s a great honor to be one of the valued contributors to the NSIdE family in their pursuit of helping to educate their readers in the business and medical communities.
I would like to formally introduce our company. We are The 80/20 Group, LLc; a specialty consulting firm that serves the needs of physicians in practice by helping them optimize their business and medical practice performance. We are guided by our mission to provide physicians with sound and essential physician practice and financial management resources, relieving our esteemed physicians of the tedious details in managing their medical practice business, thereby making the practice of medicine professionally satisfying and profitable.
Why the name “The 80/20 Group (LLc)”? It sounds like some sort of distribution or mathematical formula. In the world of business and economics this number makes a lot of sense because of a recognized universal principle known as The Pareto’s Principle (The 80/20 Rule). So what is it all about? What is this principle we adopted as the name of our company and how does it relate to practice management? Let me unfold the secret behind the Pareto’s Principle and how we harnessed its power to bring great success in all the services we provide.
In 1906, Italian economist vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth and land ownership in his country, observing that 80% of the wealth was owned by 20% of the people. after Pareto made his observation, many others observed similar occurrences in their own areas of expertise. The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20%) are vital and many (80%) are trivial.
The value of Pareto’s Principle reminds us as managers to focus on the 20% that matters…that 20% of effort produces 80% of results. In medicine, some practices who experience exponential growth may feel they are spending far too much time and energy on “building the practice” without any positive return. It seems like they dedicate an exhaustive amount of time, effort and resources and still their businesses stagnate or even regress.
The above example is typical of a practice that has grown exponentially but doesn’t know where to go or what to do. our company hears this problem frequently, from almost every practice we encounter.
If we focus on The 80/20 Rule in evaluating this problem, what should be done in order to restore balance in a practice? our answer is to create a strong foundation right from the start. Remember the old adage, “always do it right the first time”? When you build a house the foundations should be strong and positioned where they’re supposed to be, so that when the pieces or elements are put together, the house will stand the stress that it will incur by time and the forces of nature.
The same holds true in setting up or having your own practice or being with a group. We can’t overlook the strong foundation, as this will determine your success or failure in medical practice. You don’t want to invest your time, money and effort to find yourself caught in a practice going nowhere because the foundation was not in place. Remember, no medical practice can thrive if it is wobbly. I hope you all agree with that?
As the 80/20 Rule states — in every action or activity we should focus on the 20% that matters most and that will give us the 80% of results. We have identified five key areas of a medical practice (your 20%) that will yield a strong foundation (80% of results). a strong and well managed medical practice balance their efforts and activities on these five key areas:
- 1. organization and Management
- 2. financial Management
- 3. Human Resources
- 4. Improving Healthcare delivery and clinical outcomes
- 5. Ensuring compliance
We will focus on these key areas, one in each of the following five articles in NSIdE Md. Each component will be addressed in more detail to provide the medical professional with an idea of how we undertake interventions in a real world setting. Some practices may do well with two or three components running smoothly but your practice will never truly thrive without focusing your efforts on each of these five vital components.
The 80/20 Rule reflects how as a company (The 80/20 Group, LLc), we efficiently deal with our client’s business. The 80/20 Rule is always embedded in our processes in evaluating what works or not and concentrating on not just working smart, but working smart on the right things. as we specialize in helping our physicians optimize their medical practice through sound practice management principles, the 80/20 rule serves as our compass as we travel through the intricate world of medical practice management.
