Why Do a Dream Practice Analysis (DPA)?
Can Dr. Ben help his partners see why he wants to do a DPA when they only see why not?
Ben shut his office door quietly behind him and gave a deep sigh. He had a meeting coming up with his partners. He was hoping they’d join him in going through a Dream Practice Analysis. His wife had suggested that he prepare a PowerPoint presentation with the objections he had been hearing in the casual discussions they’d had so far.
“That way,” Carmen had said, “you’ll be prepared. You won’t get defensive or go off track or decide to go along with the majority even though you know they’re wrong. You’ll be giving your ideas a fair chance.”
Ben wasn’t sure he showed up as well as he’d have liked in Carmen’s imaginary picture of the meeting, and he wasn’t sure how his partners would react if he showed up with a slide presentation, but he figured it was worth trying.
So he had put together his slides and now it was time for a final run-through before the meeting.
“We don’t need to waste time on dreaming. We’re an established practice,” said the first one. Ben ran through his thoughts on that: how easy it was to get mired in the day to day details and to lose sight of the big picture and how important it was to reset goals sometimes. He found himself speaking eloquently — under his breath, of course — about the value of having an objective outsider helping them to see where they were and how they could step up to the next place they wanted to be.
Deciding to try a Dream Practice Analysis wasn’t a criticism of their current practice, he realized, and he wasn’t sure that he had ever made that point in their discussions.
The next slide said, “Reducing costs is the key to ROI.” His talks with Carmen had really helped him understand this one. He knew his partners couldn’t see how spending money on software could provide a good return on investment, because they didn’t see it as an investment. They thought of it as overhead, and figured that increasing overhead couldn’t be a good thing. Carmen, with her business school background, could see how the right practice management software could increase revenue and reduce costs, so the investment in the software would pay off.
Ben also realized that the practice might need a expert to help them figure out the potential ROI. That brought him up to his next slide: “We don’t want to share sensitive information.” Of course, being careful with information was second nature for any medical practice, but it was clear to Ben that they really didn’t know what to do with their numbers. They had tried to figure out the potential ROI for themselves, but they hadn’t been successful. In fact, if he was honest with himself, he thought they had mostly been confused.
Ben decided not to share that observation with his partners. Instead, he figured he’d emphasize the value of having expert insight and help the group determine some parameters that would help them feel comfortable sharing the information that needed to be shared.
Finally, Ben turned to a slide that just said, “Opportunity.” He knew that the kind of insights the practice could get from the Dream Practice Analysis with experts who had worked with plenty of other practices would be worth paying for — and they weren’t having to pay. This was an opportunity to get some valuable consultation that would give them important knowledge, no matter what decision they made.
Ben saved his presentation to a thumb drive and headed for the conference room. He felt lighter than he had in a while.
Can Dr. Ben help his partners see why he wants to do a DPA when they only see why not?
Disclaimer: For HIPAA compliance, all characters appearing in this post are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.
