Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years. I’ve looked at others and I just keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing.”
This episode is brought to you by PAR.
PAR offers the SPECTRA – Indices of Psychopathology, a hierarchical dimensional look at adult psychopathology. The SPECTRA is available for paper and pencil assessment or administration and scoring via PARiConnect. Learn more at parinc.com/spectra.
[00:01:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to The Testing Psychologist podcast. I am talking today about another business question; this is a question that came from one of my mastermind groups, which is often where I get content for the podcast- lots of good questions in those groups, and sometimes a little more discussion is needed and it’s worth sharing with the broader audience. The question in the group that I would like to talk about today is when do you know that you need to hire another clinician? This is aimed at anyone who’s considering hiring.So you could be in solo practice. You could be a group practice. It’s going to be applicable across the board. It’s a deceptively simple question that most of us, myself included “feel into”, as my wife would say, without paying attention to the metrics that are right in front of us to help guide that decision. So stay tuned to learn what I think is a pretty easy equation that will help if [00:02:00] and when you need to hire and how many folks you can bring on.
Speaking of mastermind groups, y’all know I am promoting my groups heavily right now because new cohorts start in January 2025 for beginner, intermediate, and advanced group practice owners. If you’re a testing practice owner and you want some accountability and support from other folks who get it and know what you’re going through, check out the groups. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting, get more info, and schedule a pre-group call.
All right. Let’s talk about the equation that will tell you when you need to hire.
Okay, everyone, we are talking about the equation that’s going to tell you when you need to hire and how many [00:03:00] people to hire. For my practice ownership journey, a good part of my practice ownership journey, I basically just hired people when I could find them and when I thought that it would be a good idea. Typically it went something like this, Oh shit, we’re really busy and booked far out. I should probably hire somebody. Or someone would email me asking for a job and I’d say, sure, come on in for an interview. Or I would think, wow, we have two open offices. I should probably hire people to go in them.
I don’t know if any of that sounds familiar, but this is the process of hiring for me for a long time. I will call that reactive. It’s very reactive. We’re seeing what’s going on in the practice and haphazardly deciding to bring people on. So if that sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. This is typically how it goes.
But lately, I have been turning to a more data-driven approach to hiring that I suspect is very common in “real [00:04:00] businesses.” I did some research on this very problem and found that large corporations and hospitals have full-time positions dedicated to, what they call capacity planning and infrastructure. They utilize sophisticated data on patient or customer volume. They do some forecasting. It’s essentially a science of figuring out when you need to hire, how many people, what positions and so forth.
For those of you who’ve listened to the podcast for a while, I’m a big fan of approaching our practices as if they are real businesses because they are, but we don’t get that. It’s easy to forget that and easy to not step into that role of actually running a real business, but we can borrow some of these strategies from real businesses and utilize them in our practices.
The good news though, is that you don’t have [00:05:00] to employ a complex model to figure out when you need to hire. I think there’s a pretty simple equation that can help you know when you’re ready to hire and how many folks you need to hire. The only prerequisite here is that you are tracking your booked appointments.
If you didn’t catch the episode on metrics earlier in the month, definitely go check it out for more info on which statistics and numbers to track in your practice. One of them I did talk about was how many intakes are you booking each week. That’s the one that I’m going to focus on here for the sake of this discussion. I want to keep it very simple and just boil it down to one single number essentially, and that is how many intakes are you booking each week.
I want to be very clear. We’re not talking about how many intake spots are open each week. That’s more like your capacity. We’re talking about how many intakes are you booking in a given calendar [00:06:00] week.
Just to bring this to life, let’s just say that our capacity here in our practice is two intakes a week. That’s what my clinicians handle. Our full-time folks do two intakes a week, but in any given week, our schedulers will receive, we’ll call it, I don’t know, six phone calls for intakes and we’ll book five of them. So we’re booking five intakes further out down the road and that’s the number that I’m talking about; how many calls are you getting and how many of those calls are we booking into intakes further down the road? So this requires that you are booking further down the road and you’re not doing a wait list model or something like that, though I think you could adapt it to that. I’m operating on the assumption that you’re getting calls each week. Those calls are more than you can handle and you are essentially [00:07:00] booking more appointments further and further out that you don’t have the capacity for.
Let’s take a break to hear from a featured partner.
Y’all know that I love TherapyNotes, but I am not the only one. They have a 4. 9 out of 5-star rating on trustpilot.com and Google, which makes them the number one rated Electronic Health Record system available for mental health folks today. They make billing, scheduling, note-taking, and telehealth all incredibly easy. They also offer custom forms that you can send through the portal. For all the prescribers out there, TherapyNotes is proudly offering ePrescribe as well. And maybe the most important thing for me is that they have live telephone support seven days a week. So you can actually talk to a real person in a timely manner.
If you’re trying to switch from another EHR, the transition is incredibly easy. They’ll import your demographic data free of charge so you can get going right away. [00:08:00] So if you’re curious or you want to switch or you need a new EHR, try TherapyNotes for two months, absolutely free. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing.” Again, totally free, with no strings attached, check it out and see why everyone is switching to TherapyNotes.
The SPECTRA – Indices of Psychopathology provides a hierarchical dimensional look at adult psychopathology. Decades of research into psychiatric disorders have shown that most diagnoses can be integrated into a few broad dimensions. The SPECTRA measures 12 clinically important constructs of depression, anxiety, social anxiety, PTSD, alcohol problems, severe aggression, antisocial behavior, drug problems, psychosis, paranoid ideation, manic activation, and grandiose ideation. That’s a lot. It organizes them into three higher-order psychopathology [00:09:00] spectra of Internalizing, Externalizing, and Reality- Impairing. The SPECTRA is available for paper and pencil assessment or administration and scoring via PARiConnect. You can learn more at parinc.com/spectra.
All right, let’s get back to the podcast.
That number is important because it just tells you how many real clients you are booking in intakes that will likely follow through.
Another caveat, I’m going to assume that all these folks are showing up for their appointments. You can add a show rate into the equation if you would like, but I’m going to keep it pretty simple.
So what is this equation?
It’s taking current demand; this is the average number of intakes booked per week that I was just talking about, and subtracting your current capacity; which is the available intake slots per week, and then [00:10:00] dividing by clinician caseload. I’ll say that one more time, but then I’ll walk through an example to try to bring it to life a little bit.
So again, you take your current demand; this is the average number of intakes booked per week, subtract the current capacity; which is your available intake slots per week, and then divide by the clinician caseload.
Let’s do an example. Again, this is straight from our practice. I know from tracking our KPIs that we are booking 23 intakes per week on average. Every week we are adding an additional 23 intakes somewhere down the road. Typically it’s 4 to 6 months down the road, we’re booking these intakes. So 23 intakes per week are getting booked. I also know that we have the capacity to do 20 intakes per week at this point based on our staff.
Let’s go back to our equation. Current demand [00:11:00] is 23 intakes per week on average. The current capacity is 20. So 23 -20 = 3. I also know that our clinician caseload is two intakes per week for a full-time clinic. So then we have the bottom number. 3/2=1. 5, which tells me I can either hire one clinician and not quite meet demand and we’ll continue to book further and further out or I can hire two clinicians and run the risk of the second clinician not being totally full. Though this honestly has never happened. The demand has always exceeded the capacity in my 15 years as a practice owner. It’s like the highway problem. The more lanes you add, the more traffic it generates and that seems to be true in our practice as well, at least up to this point.
Okay. So go through it [00:12:00] one more time. You have your current demand, which is the number of intakes you’re booking a week. For me, that’s 23. You subtract the current capacity; which is the available intake slots per week. For me, that’s 20. So that gives us a 3. And then you divide that by the clinician caseload. And for us, that’s two intakes per week. So 3/2=1. 5. That is the number of folks you need to hire.
Now, you can also use this equation for admin staff or schedulers. If you know that you’re getting 60 calls per week on average, and your current scheduler capacity is 40 calls per week, all you need to know is the average “caseload” for a scheduler. So let’s call it 20 calls per week. So 60 minus 40 divided by 20 equals 1. So you theoretically need 1 more scheduler.
All right. So as is the case, whenever I talk about math on an audio podcast, I know this is tough sometimes maybe to follow. [00:13:00] All you need to know is how many intakes you’re booking in a given week, what your current capacity is, and what the average caseload looks like. So it’s an easy three-part equation. You can check the show notes for a simple written version of the equation. As always, I think I said a couple of episodes ago, I’m now doing the strategy sessions where you can book a one-off a la carte hour just to talk through some of these questions. We can work through the numbers, we could do the equation, and hopefully get you to a better place and help you feel confident that you are hiring appropriately to meet the demand that your practice is seeing.
All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes. So make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you [00:14:00] listen to your podcasts.
If you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework. We have accountability. We have support. We have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
The information contained in this [00:15:00] podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here, and similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your needs.