Performance review template for Healthcare

The performance review with the columns a provider needs: every line read on attended appointments rather than enquiries, capacity for the period stated beside the result, and causes that include the two things advertising does not control — availability and how enquiries were answered.

Everything else is the general review, unchanged. Planned from the plan, variance separated from cause, cause held to evidence, one decision with one owner and a date.

Run it monthly per service line, and again after any change in practitioners or availability. Those changes move the result more than most campaign decisions do, and a review that does not account for them will attribute their effect to the advertising.

Run it far enough after the period that the appointments have actually happened.

The result column reads attended appointments wherever the practice management system records them.

The reason is arithmetic rather than philosophical. In most providers a substantial proportion of enquiries never arrive, and that proportion varies by creative, by service and by how the enquiry was handled. A review read on enquiries therefore rewards whatever produces the most messages, which is frequently not what fills a clinic.

It makes the review slower, because appointments happen after enquiries and some of them happen weeks later. That is the correct speed. A review run a week after a campaign ends is reading the fraction of the outcome that arrived first.

Every row states what availability looked like across the period, taken from the appointment book rather than from memory.

A line that ran while the service was full will show a poor cost per attended appointment, and the advertising will have been fine. A line that ran while a practitioner was on leave will show the same thing. Without the availability column, both are attributed to the campaign, and the response — new creative, a new audience, less budget — changes something that was never the problem.

With it, the cause is obvious and the decision is usually to move weight rather than to rebuild anything.

The second thing advertising does not control is what happens when somebody makes contact.

A fortnight where enquiries were answered a day late will show materially worse attendance. So will a period where a booking system rejected a particular appointment type, or where a confirmation stopped being delivered.

Where the practice records response times, put them in the row. Where it does not, the finding for that row is that the most important cause cannot be measured, and the decision is to start measuring it. That is a legitimate outcome of a review and it is usually worth more than anything else in the document.

A practitioner joining or leaving changes capacity, changes what the service can claim, and sometimes changes which creative is even accurate.

Record the date, and treat the period either side as different measurements for that service. A month spanning a departure describes two different practices, and comparing it with the month before will produce a conclusion about advertising that is really a conclusion about staffing.

Where a practice advertises to referring practitioners, those rows are reviewed separately and judged on referrals received.

Their cost per action is much higher by nature: the audience is small, professional and expensive to reach. Placed in the same table as patient lines and compared on a cost per enquiry, they will look like the worst thing in the account every single month, and eventually somebody will cut them on that basis.

State the metric in the row, keep the comparison within referrer lines, and note what proportion of the service's work actually arrives through referral. That last figure is what makes the spend arguable at all.

Four decisions, and in this category they usually follow directly from which cause was identified.

Continue, where the result held and availability was normal. Move the weight, where availability was the cause — to another service, another location, or another period. Fix the handling, where response time or the booking path was the cause; that decision belongs to the practice rather than to marketing, and it should still be recorded here with an owner. And change the creative, which is the right decision considerably less often than it is taken.

Investigate is the correct decision for any row where the cause is not known and the money justifies finding out, and in a small practice that threshold is lower than people expect.

The accumulated reviews answer the questions a practice cannot otherwise answer.

What each service actually costs to fill. What its enquiry-to-attendance rate really is, over enough periods to be trusted. Whether referral or direct advertising is the cheaper route to an appointment for each service. How much a practitioner's arrival or departure moves demand.

Those are planning questions, and they are answered from a shelf of consistent monthly reviews rather than from any single one.

Where a practice runs several sites, every row is reviewed per location as well as per service.

Availability, catchment and practitioners all differ by site, and a blended result hides the case that recurs: one location full and one quiet, both funded at the same weight, producing an average that looks acceptable and describes neither.

It is more rows, and each of them takes a minute. The alternative is a review that is technically accurate about the group and useless for every decision anybody actually has to make.

One more note worth making in every review: the practice management system and the ad platform will not agree, and the gap is normal.

Platforms attribute on their own windows and their own rules; the practice system records what happened at the desk. Where a review reads on attended appointments, it is reading the second, which is the right choice and which means the platform's own numbers will look better.

Say so in the notes once, rather than re-litigating it every month. A review that has settled which source it uses spends its time on decisions instead of on reconciliation.

Seven checks. Every row is read on attended appointments where the system records them. Availability across the period is stated beside every result. Response times are recorded as a cause, or the row says they cannot be measured yet. Practitioner changes are recorded with dates and the period is split at them. Referrer lines are reviewed apart, on referrals received. Every decision is one of four, with an owner and a date. And the finished reviews are kept by service line.