Data collection on staff activity allows managers and leaders to determine how their team is spending their time and which activities take up the most of their working day. This post will help make your clinic and staff more efficient.

Data collection tools give you a clear picture of how your staff spend their time at work and how they can become more productive.

This is important in health businesses, as you are able to determine where your front desk and administration staff are spending their time.

I will use one of our clients as an example, they have two clinics and the managers found that there was always a workload on the weekend staff for scanning and administration. The staff that worked during the week were never able to complete the scanning, filing and other administration tasks during their working day, resulting in a backlog for weekend staff.

By using the activity tracking software, they found out that the weekday staff were spending all of their time on the clinical software booking appointments and taking calls. This confirmed that the workload during the week was too much for the staff and allowed the client to justify hiring a new front desk staff member to complete the scanning and filing during the week.

You can use the data to:

• Challenge your staff to spend an hour less a day on emails and use this hour to work on a project
• Determine the average time staff spend on social media whilst they are in the office and raise alarms if for example, a staff member has spent more than two hours on Facebook
• Set yourself some goals, for example, spend less time on administration and more time using clinical software.

A product that we use and is RescueTime (www.rescuetime.com). It is installed on all the devices in the workplace and it gives both staff and management a report of their efficiency, productivity and areas of concern.

We use this software to determine processes in our workflow that need to improve and find out how productive we are compared to other staff members.

For more information, please do not hesitate to contact us and as always, if you have any questions, do get in touch.