The Morning Huddle

Effective communication is the key to success. Communication between doctor and staff and between staff and staff. Morning huddles are the perfect opportunity and the perfect venue for communicating. In my opinion, practices with consistent well-run morning huddles are easily 15% more effective and successful than those offices that don’t use them.

The huddle is twelve to thirteen minutes in duration. I suggest that the doctor does not lead the huddle, but attends and actively participates. Actually in the ideal world, the doctor arrives to the office first and hands out coffee to the staff as they arrive! The huddle is led by staff members on a rotating basis. Topics to be covered include:

• When are the three best times to see an emergency that day based on the doctor’s schedule. If this is decided at the huddle, then there is no need to bother the clinical team after the day has started.

• Which hygiene patients are scheduled for a doctor exam, and at what time during that continuing care visit will the exam get done. Again, this is based on the complexity of the doctor’s schedule. I recommend that continuing care patients be seen by the doctor every other time. Of course if a diagnosis needs to be made, the doctor will see that patient.

• Who are the new patients — who referred them – and are there any special considerations for these new patients based on the telephone intake slip.

• Fine tune the doctors schedule for ultimate patient flow. This attention to detail can add hundreds of dollars of production every day.

• Discuss whether any patient on the schedule today with a lengthy appointment and a history of lateness or forgetfulness needs a second reminder call.

• Be aware of financial arrangements/collections/co-pay responsibilities.

The last thing I suggest is that the person who is in charge of leading the huddle is also responsible — just before the meeting ends — to tell a joke. This gets everyone smiling as they head out to do battle for the day. There are lots of jokes online — and sometimes it is more hilarious observing someone struggling to tell the joke than the actual joke itself. As always I appreciate your feedback with what works for you.