It's the beginning of a New Year and the birthplace of a new set of New Year's Resolutions. Even if you don't formally establish these for yourself, on paper, every person I know who accepts the challenge of leading and managing at least one aspect of a veterinary practice resolves to make one lasting change in the next calendar or fiscal year. What happens to many of us, however, is our practice lives become increasingly cluttered with new responsibilities, staffing challenges, financial constraints, legal challenges, facility issues or other challenges that require our devotion and time. Meanwhile the resolution to achieve meaningful change gives way to hope (I hope we can do this thing) which gives way to the abyss of forgotten goals and initiatives. And, why does this happen? Because our professional lives become cluttered!
In this first of a two-part blog series, I want to challenge all of us to take a hard look at the physical aspect of our practice environments and think for a moment about the clutter that is present. In my mind's eye, my office is tidy, everything has a place and everything is in its place by the end of the day and or workweek. In that same wistful place, our practice maintains only those resources that help us fulfill our mission of providing veterinary excellence, day or night. We keep everything we need and recycle or otherwise dispose of everything we don't need. If you're wondering whether this is a reality in our practice, wonder no more. We don't live up to these ideals, at least not on an everyday basis. However, through the process of transitioning from being an independently owned veterinary practice to being part of a much larger corporation, we have experienced some healthy purging of records and other items.
Now, I don't think the DVMs who formerly owned our practice are unique in their conservational style. In fact, I have worked in other practices boding the same type of thinking: the need to save everything. Take a look around your desk, office or hospital and you'll probably see many of the same kinds of things we saw - copies of veterinary medical or management journals dating back to the early 1990's, phone log books that have faded with age, lab requests that have no possible future use, retail fixtures that are broken or missing pieces, redundant equipment that is 20 years old, and the list could go on and on. And if that's how our practice environments are, I wonder what our garages, workshops or storage sheds at home look like. I'd be embarrassed for you to see my garage and workshop in their present state. So, why do we do this? Why do we hold onto things we don't need, that we're not using to further patient care or client care? We cling to them because we think we cannot do without them. Also, many DVMs who own practices are children of those who survived the Great Depression and have instilled within them an ethic of conservancy and resource scarcity. For such people, it’s difficult to part with anything of perceived value. Another valid reason for not tossing items that have outlived their usefulness is to protect our planet. The reasons go on and on but, ultimately, it is incumbent upon each practice owner or manager to determine what is best for your practice. Many recycling programs are available through the U.S. and Canada that will support your practice’s goals in this arena.
Our practice recently engaged a document shredding company to come onsite to physically destroy more than 50 cases of unnecessary documents. This was the third, if not forth, such batch of purging. In the process we terminated our lease for a 40' mobile shipping container in which we easily lost track of its contents. While the benefit of saving approximately $2,000 per year isn't going to balance the national debt, the psychological freedom that it has created is huge!
Hopefully, you're not as far into Cluttersville as were we, but one tool that has been essential for us is our Records Retention Schedule. In 2011 Jennifer M. Nelson, CPA presented a webinar for the VHMA on the topic of record keeping and record retention. She made the important distinction that it is critically important to follow not only federal, but also state or provincial record-keeping laws. Our practice’s retention schedule has been developed and refined over the years with the help of our CPA, veterinary practice management consultant, and attorney. Certainly, one doesn't have to store paper-based records since digital records are quite useful for many purposes, but if you do store records in a more traditional way, then I hope the above discussion gently prompts you to assess what you have that you might not need. If you store records electronically, or if you don't, please stay tuned for next month's blog article where I plan to explore methods and benefits of storing electronic records.
Marsha Heinke, DVM, EA, CPA, CVPM was gracious enough to provide some policy samples to help you create and/or update your Record Retention Policy.
Jon Cunnington, MBA, CVPM
VHMA President