Matthew Gillogly outlines a 2.5-week onboarding system for medical practice staff that starts with pre-hire red flags like candidates who can leave their current job immediately. Every new hire, including physicians, begins at the front desk learning scripts and phone handling, then passes competency tests before moving to other roles. The system enforces one standardized way of doing things to prevent unreliable habits from spreading.
Chapters
You go through the hiring process, the interview process, and you've identified the absolute perfect person to join your organization. You're so excited that you go home and tell your spouse that finally we have found the absolute perfect employee, and I'm so excited for them to start. I think this is really going to transform our business. Before you know it, 90 days later, you're either having to fire them, they storm off, or they become an absolute and utter cancer and nightmare to your practice. Well, let's talk about how to make sure that that doesn't happen. And the best way to stop that is how you onboard new people to your team. Notice I didn't talk about how you train new employees. We're going to talk about onboarding them. Now let's talk about the typical way that this goes about. You hire somebody, you go, when can you start You're interviewing them on Thursday afternoon and they say, I can start Monday morning at 9 AM. You go, great, let's be there. Well, Monday morning comes along, you've already been there since 7:30. It's 9 o'clock and your front desk person comes in and goes, Dr. Smith, we have Judy out front. She said that she's starting today. Oh God, that's right. I forgot to tell you Judy was gonna start. Darn it. Yeah, we're overbooked and it's crazy Monday. Tell you what, have her just shadow you for a little bit, then I'll get with her this afternoon. So it goes on and on, and before you know it, at the end of the day, you maybe you get to spend 5 or 10 minutes. Now the problem is— Hey, I'm Matthew Gillogly and I'm a Maverick. Well, what is a Maverick? A Maverick goes against the grain. We find our own way. And if you're sick and tired of being pushed around by the insurance companies, come join us. We'll show you the way out. And you'll love medicine again. Is they have now spent the entire day shadowing the front desk person who actually isn't doing anything the way you want it done. And the whole time they're saying, oh, don't worry about Dr. Smith, he does a bunch of crazy things, he'll come up with all these harebrained ideas, just wait him or her out. And so the next day comes and you go, okay, Tuesday I'm really going to spend a lot of time Well, then it gets really busy and you are on call and you have to go. Whatever happens, you don't really get an opportunity to control the way that you onboard a new team member. So what I'm going to share with you today is our foolproof process for onboarding people and indoctrinating them into our culture of our organization. So here's how it goes. So first and foremost, you're still going to be looking for red flags. So let's say that you hire somebody and you say, hey, when can you start? And it's Thursday and they say, oh, I can start Monday morning. The question that you have to ask them is, aren't you currently employed somewhere? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine, but I can just give notice and not show up. That's a red flag. Okay? If somebody is employed and they can start right away, that means that they're going to leave the other employer in a lurch. Guess what they're going to do when they get frustrated with you? They're just going to no-call, no-show one day. Okay? So you want to make sure that people aren't just going to be doing what you don't want to have done to you. So you got to make sure that if they're— that's a person. If they've got an existing job, make sure that they're willing to fulfill their commitment. That's actually one of the final tests, that they're going to fulfill their commitment to working at the other organization. The next thing is that you do not want them to come into the practice immediately. Once they have a start date, you want to do all the right steps. So we do all the right steps in that we send them all their employment paperwork. We actually have a checklist Everything that needs to happen before they come into the clinic. So they have to fill in all their paperwork and return it back to us, all their employment paperwork. The next thing is that we actually put them through training of our culture and our values of our organization prior to them starting. They actually do this at home before they actually start. And the reason why is I want them to realize that this is a different type of environment. We actually have done this where they do the bulk of their training, they'll do 3 to 4 days of training at home before they ever come into the office. So therefore, when they come in again, they know that this is a different place. Now let's talk about when they come in. What do you do with them? Well, the last thing you do is you have them shadow someone, because when you have them shadow somebody, the chances are that person is not following a checklist. When we brought people into our clinic, We had Paulina, who was our front desk person, and what she did is she had a checklist. I was watching her do this one day. We brought in a new employee before we did this, and she had a checklist, and she goes, okay, here's everything that you're going to learn today. Okay, so what we do is they have a checklist of what they have to master for that week. How we do it in our clinics is when somebody is hired, even if it's a doctor, they have to work front Desk first, and they have to master front desk before they go then to back of the house. And our training process is right at 2 and a half weeks, and what we do is everyone has to master the area and they have to pass a test. The reason why I have everybody start at the front desk is, guess what? The front desk is the nerve center of any medical practice. So we have scripts about how we answer the phone, how we talk to new patients. We have scripts of how we talk to existing patients. How do we check people in? How we do these checklists. I'll never forget this as long as I live. Hired a new doctor, urologist for 30 years, and I said, great, Mark, when you get hired, you actually will go through the exact same training process. You'll work the front desk. You're going to work the back of the house, and you want you have to learn the way that we do everything here before we start to change things. He goes, yeah, but I'm a doctor. I shouldn't have to work the desk. If you want to work with us, that's the deal. You have to master the front desk, and you can't move forward until Latoya, who is the front desk person at that time, gives you the okay and you pass the test. So at the end of the first day— you're supposed to spend 5 days— at the end of the first day, he comes into my office, closes the door, sits down. I go, what's up? He goes, I will never complain about the front desk ever again. He goes, please do not make me work another 4 days. He goes, I will do anything to make sure that I don't have to work another 4 days at the front desk. He goes, I promise I'll never complain about them. I will always give them respect. I'll always treat them with the utmost respect. And I laughed and I said, you got it. I knew that was going to be the case. The point in this is that no one should be beneath about learning how to run the entire organization, okay? You have to master the back of the house, and then you have to master You have to master all the components. Okay, so for us, it was front of the house, back of the house, and how we sold the patient or how we converted the patient into treatment. Everyone, including my doctors, had to master that. They had to learn how to do it. They had to get certified in it so that we were consistent across the board. That way, I never have to worry about somebody shadowing and learning Judy's way of doing it versus the organization's way. I'll leave you with this. You have to make sure that there is one way that everything is done in your practice, and it has to be the practice's way, not the front desk way, not Frank's way, not Judy's way. There is one way, and it's the organization's way. And people have to master that before they want to start making changes. They don't just get to come in and start making wholesale changes, but they have to master the organizational way before they start making changes and recommendations to improve. So that's how you do it. That's how you onboard new team members. Take a different approach than what you've been doing in the past. I guarantee you're gonna do a lot better. You feeling overwhelmed in your cash practice? Join us at our upcoming event, The Business of Orthobiologics. It's the only event in the world that marries the science of medicine with the science of business. We'll show you how to treat the patients and then also how to convert them into high-paying procedures so you no longer need insurance. Click the button below, click the link below, learn more about our upcoming events at the Business of Orthobiologics. It's one of a kind of events. Check it out. You'll be glad that you did.
