Set Your Practice Up for Success in the New Year: Five Systems to Streamline Your Practice

The new year is the perfect opportunity to refine your systems and ensure your practice is running at its best. By setting up the right systems, you can simplify operations and ensure everyone on your team has the tools they need to succeed. PracticeVital consolidates all the essential data you need into one easy-to-use dashboard, making it easier than ever to implement these systems. Here are five specific ways you can set your practice up for success in the year ahead:

1. Performance Tracking and Data-Driven Supervision

In the first session, make sure clients understand why regular, consistent sessions are crucial—especially in the beginning. Weekly sessions allow you to build rapport, maintain momentum, and make steady progress. While some clients may want to space out sessions due to time or budget constraints, explaining the benefits of a consistent schedule early on can help them see the value in committing to this frequency.

Keeping clinicians accountable and helping them grow doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With PracticeVital, you can track performance metrics like session counts, client retention rates, and rebooking trends all in one place. Supervisors can use these insights to guide clinicians, set clear goals, and celebrate wins.

How to Set It Up:

• Schedule weekly or monthly check-ins with clinicians to review their performance metrics.
• Use data to create tailored growth plans, focusing on areas like increasing rebooking rates or decreasing client cancellations.
• Set specific goals with each clinician and evaluate progress on a quarterly basis. 

2. Easily Track Overdue Documentation

Timely documentation is essential for compliance, billing, and client care, but it can often fall by the wayside in busy practices. PracticeVital makes it easy to monitor overdue notes and keep everything on track.

How to Set It Up:

• Choose a day each week when you will look for any notes that are overdue. Send a screen shot of the list of overdue notes showing the day and time of each appointment to each clinician who has overdue notes. 
• Create a system of contingencies based on the number of notes that are outstanding. For example, if there are more than 10 outstanding notes, you might pause giving any new clients until clinicians are caught up. If there are more than 20 outstanding notes, you may require clinicians to attend a co-working hour where they get caught up. 

3. Simplified Payroll for Hourly or Salaried Clinicians

If your clinicians are compensated using a flat hourly rate or a salaried model, tracking completed sessions for payroll can be a headache. With PracticeVital’s completed sessions report, you can easily pull accurate numbers without relying on manual timesheets from your team.

How to Set It Up:

• Visit the completed sessions report and input your payroll dates to easily view the number and breakdown of each type of session for each clinician in that payroll period.
• Input the numbers directly into your payroll system.
• Eliminate the need for clinicians to submit timesheets, saving them time and reducing errors.
• Share a screen shot of session summaries with clinicians so they can review and verify the data if needed.

4. Rebooking and Scheduling Workflows

Consistent scheduling is key to client retention and clinician productivity. PracticeVital helps you track and improve rebooking rates so clients stay engaged in care and your practice maintains steady revenue.

How to Set It Up:

• Monitor rebooking rates for each clinician and share insights during supervision. Encourage clinicians or your intake team to book out at least 8 sessions with all new clients.  
• Check the upcoming bookings for each clinician to ensure they are scheduling enough sessions to account for cancellations (determined by their cancellation rate). Give each clinician a guideline in terms of the number of sessions they should schedule each week. For example, if a clinician has a goal of completing 20 sessions per week and they have a cancellation rate of 15%, they will need to schedule 23 sessions per week to account for cancellations. 

5. Proactive Client Care Through Retention Data

Understanding why clients stay or leave is critical to improving care and practice success. PracticeVital’s retention insights allow you to take a proactive approach to addressing churn and enhancing the client experience.

How to Set It Up:

• Regularly review the “clients” report under “data sheets” to identify clients at risk of discontinuing care. 
• Develop action plans for clinicians to re-engage those clients, such as sending follow-up reminders or scheduling check-in sessions.
• Use retention data to inform team-wide discussions about improving client engagement and outcomes. Share PracticeVital blog posts on retention to educate clinicians on some simple steps to ensure clients stay in therapy for long enough to have success.

Start 2025 Strong with PracticeVital
Implementing these systems now can help you run your practice more efficiently and set everyone up for success in the new year. By tracking performance, streamlining payroll and enhancing client retention, you’ll create a practice that thrives.

The tools are all here. All you have to do is put them into action. Let’s make this your best year yet!