Standardization & Systems Boost Practice Growth | EP 7

In this episode of Healthcare Marketing Edge, Tim Bouchard interviews Audrey Von-Maszewski, Practice Manager at Pause Wellness Center, about the transformative power of standardization and systems for healthcare practices. They discuss the importance of clear communication, the implementation of consistent processes, and the impact of electronic health record (EHR) systems on practice management. Audrey shares insights on how these changes have led to increased referrals, improved patient experiences, and a supportive team environment, ultimately contributing to the growth of the practice.

Tim Bouchard (00:00)
All right, welcome to the Healthcare Marketing Edge where we share stories and strategies to grow your practice. I’m Tim Bouchard from Luminus, a healthcare marketing agency specializing in helping practices acquire patients and grow their practice. Today we’re diving into how clear systems and standardized processes can transform a healthcare practice for both teams and patients. Our guest is Audrey Van-Maszewski, practice manager at Pause Wellness Center who’s been at the heart of standardizing systems and fueling their practices growth. Audrey, I’m excited that you

decided to come on. This is great. Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what you do at Pause Wellness Center.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (00:36)
Hi, yes, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. ⁓ So I am the practice manager at Pause Wellness Center. I started in the mental health care world doing direct care first. So I was doing ⁓ some counseling, residential and home. Eventually realized I kinda like behind the scenes a little bit more. So came to Pause, started as an admin assistant. And in that role, I eventually took over new client intake.

and then redesign that program and then did the same thing with our billing system. After about a year doing that, I moved into practice manager role where I am now. So now I supervise the billing process as well as new client intake. And then the rest of my job, big part of it is maintaining compliance on all fronts. So checking clinician paperwork, which can be a little exhausting for me and for them, making sure that everyone’s follows.

Tim Bouchard (01:25)
Mm-hmm.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (01:33)
following the policies and procedures we have in place. And then the leadership team we meet very regularly to address any issues that are coming up in the practice, making sure everything’s running smoothly.

Tim Bouchard (01:45)
So you went a little bit from the action side to the organization side. I can relate to that. I used to do web development. Now I’m in the people and business side too. So I get it. We’re kind of like twisted people. We like organization and things. ⁓ So let’s talk about that journey. How did you identify that the standardization was so important for the practice once you kind of got into the weeds? And what makes that so important for?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (01:49)
Yes.

Yeah.

Tim Bouchard (02:12)
the first step to a growth path for practice.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (02:15)
So it started out with everything was pretty separated. I didn’t really know what the clinicians were doing aside from the fact of, hey, I know you’re doing therapy, great job. But I didn’t know anything else. And then same thing for them. They knew that I was at the front desk. They knew I was working, but they didn’t really know what I was doing when I assigned them a client. They didn’t know how it got to that point. What was that client told?

Tim Bouchard (02:27)
You

Audrey Von-Maszewski (02:42)
And the billing end, mean, medical billing is a beast. I don’t blame them for not knowing billing. But that specifically was causing an issue. A client would ask their clinician something because that’s their point person. I don’t blame a client. The clinician’s right there. They’d ask them a billing question and the clinician would not know and it’s not their responsibility to.

So they would try to give their best guess, not knowing what was happening on the admin end. And that was causing a lot of issues when that was actually not accurate information. And if I was a client, I’d be frustrated too. So that’s when we realized, okay, we need to start making everyone aware of what’s happening and we need to have a clear procedure when these things come up.

Tim Bouchard (03:26)
Yeah, that support kind of bridges everything together. You obviously have to do the care side of things, but you also have to bring people through the process in a comfortable way, too. And the consistency in that experience is not only good from a care perspective, but it’s also good from a brand and recognition perspective, too. If someone is telling someone else about their experience, you want that same story to be replicatable across all of your clients and patients.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (03:36)
Yes. Yes.

Absolutely, especially when the client gets their foot in the door. I mean, that’s their first impression. So we want to make that process as coordinated and as seamless as possible. At intake, we say, here’s what you need to do to get set up. Here’s your clinician. The clinician, we do a handoff and they go, hey.

Tim Bouchard (04:01)
Mm-hmm.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (04:13)
Here’s what Intake just told you, if you need help, let me know. And then Billing is going to reach out to you with your out of pocket costs. So all of our systems are coordinating right at the start to really try to make it a welcoming place for clients.

Tim Bouchard (04:26)
And speaking the same language too, when you’re talking about things like billing or the different steps of a process or how you interact with the front office step too. Being on the same page for that, it’s kind of like having your own personal dialogue or way of carrying dialogue between the practice and the clients too.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (04:28)
Yes.

Yes, absolutely. We want to make sure that everybody is giving the client consistent messaging. We don’t have to have everyone handling everything, but knowing, hey, I don’t know this answer. This person does. You’re going to go to them. And we all know when that handoff is supposed to happen.

Tim Bouchard (04:56)
Mm-hmm.

And it’s impossible to scale unless you have consistency too, because then you run the risk of having like crazy either quality or potentially compliance issues the larger you get.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (05:16)
Yes, yes. ⁓ We definitely, I think the biggest concern for me, because I was at the start the one fielding all these client concerns. I always try to think, if I was, I know if I was a client here, and this happened to me, would I be annoyed? Would I be upset? And a lot of times the clients were very valid in their concerns. So when we started tracking our ⁓ referral sources,

Tim Bouchard (05:26)
Lucky.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (05:44)
The word of mouth was number one by far. It was more than double any other referral source. That’s a cue. We need to pay attention to these client concerns. We need to make sure that we’re maximizing this and creating the best patient experience possible to get more people in the door.

Tim Bouchard (05:46)
Mm-hmm.

Now, I wouldn’t say that word of mouth doesn’t ever become not important, but it is super important the more green a practice is in the market because it’s still trying to find its way. It’s still trying to create its impression on the public. And that’s big deal because word of mouth, especially early on, not a lot of people are investing a ton into organized marketing or outbound marketing. They’re relying a lot on

tapping into their existing network and then seeing if that network can yield like the next level of referrals from word of mouth. So to get to that point, how are you getting people on the same page? You’re obviously starting to use some sort of tools or systems or documentation. Talk about that process.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (06:33)
Yeah.

Yes. So every organization is going to have their HR policies laid out ⁓ very clear. This is what needs to happen. So we tried to take that model and just take any task that any person at Pause Wellness Center could possibly do and write very clear procedures for every single one. Every single question a staff member could have in any department.

there’s a policy for it and it’s all organized into this shared online library that we all have access to. So clinical does have access to billing policies and intake policies and vice versa. ⁓ That doesn’t mean they need to memorize all of them, but they have access to them. And that’s not just something we stress out onboarding. I will stress it out onboarding, but I always say to people, I’m giving you a lot of information right now. I know it’s a lot, you will get there.

⁓ But everything I’m telling you is organized in this library. It’s very easy to find active links. It’s a click away. So we found that that has been really helpful because they can revisit at any time. They don’t have to memorize everything at onboarding.

Tim Bouchard (08:00)
Yeah, are you using any software pieces or did anything else like trigger you having to even document some of this stuff, you know, between like a record system or a patient management system or anything like that? Do you have to also consider that as part of this process?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (08:19)
Yes, so we use a shared Microsoft Office suite. That’s where all of our internal documents are. ⁓ But the EHR system is actually the thing that really guides these policies and procedures. ⁓ We ended up doing a huge EHR switch and with that it meant almost redoing all the policies and procedures. ⁓ So all of our.

not all, most of them are directly tied in with how are we working within this EHR system. So switching EHRs, was scrap most of it, learn the new system, figure out how it works, create procedures that are gonna work for all of our departments, rewrite them, and then disseminate to everybody.

Tim Bouchard (09:10)
no easy task, I’m sure that took some amount of time and effort, was the leadership team as a whole little bit involved in that with you playing point?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (09:20)
Yes. So I remember the first meeting sat down, just the owner and I, and what we decided to do was let’s write down every single task we think needs to happen before the switch over, because we didn’t quite know yet. We weren’t in the system. Let’s look out when we think these tasks need to happen and who on staff is going to help with these tasks. ⁓ That was essential. And then from there, once we got in the system,

I was setting up a lot of the backend for billing and intake and then the owner and the clinical supervisor were taking more of the clinical paperwork backend.

Tim Bouchard (09:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think…

It’s not really like something someone can tackle by themselves. A lot of the times, even on the marketing side too, ⁓ you can have a marketing person on staff, you could be working with an agency, but you need some level of participation from especially like key players on the practice side too, because you can’t just make things up or you can’t make assumptions based on what the specialists need in place. So to have this type of initiative even for standardization and processes and systems, you have to have multiple people.

on board. can’t just like slap that on a manager or an operations director and say like, yeah, just go for it. It’s all you. You know, there’s going to have to be people that definitely contribute into that.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (10:40)
yeah.

definitely. mean, one of the people I am most thankful for is my office administrator, one of my supervisees. There were things that had to be settings that had to be clicked in every single client file. That’s hundreds of clients. So she went in, did that grunt work. I was so thankful for her because it allowed me to focus on the bigger systems and what needed to happen on the back end.

Tim Bouchard (10:58)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so you’re bringing all these people together and when

And you got these systems in place, which I’m sure wasn’t exactly like a flip of a switch. You probably had to gradually get step by step, get everything in there. So that took some time. ⁓ When did you start seeing down the road some kind of like fruits of the labor, like some positive returns from either patient feedback or even like team feedback on things? How long until you started to see that type of feedback come towards you?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (11:17)
No.

first phase right after the switch was definitely difficult. Everybody’s confused. Understandably, ⁓ the system we switched to, yeah, it was a lot more complicated than the old system, but that was because it allowed us to automate so many more processes. So I knew it would be worth it. What I saw, billing so many tasks we used to have to do manually became automatic, right? That fills up that

Tim Bouchard (11:46)
Thanks a lot.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (12:06)
frees up a lot of ⁓ admin time right there. One of the biggest things in terms of growth was how the intake process changed. ⁓ The new client form clients filled out on our website became integrated into that EHR system. So immediately, I don’t have to input your demographics. I don’t have to input your insurance information. It’s all there. I just have to have my intake person call you, up an appointment and

Tim Bouchard (12:22)
Yeah.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (12:33)
That allows us to process referrals so much quicker. So we were able to get clients in the door a lot faster and at greater numbers.

Tim Bouchard (12:42)
And

Another thing that makes that easy too is when you’re relying on the third party systems for that, you’re more easily in compliance for those things too, like digital intake forms and billing and all those. And that not only makes it easier for internal logistics, but that makes it’s mean, it’s a little bit of a pain in the butt for clients and patients to do that upfront, but it is self-guided and they can do it at their own time and their own pace. ⁓ No one likes looking up all that information to have it for the form. But once it’s done, it makes things so much easier and their onboarding goes smoother and billing

Audrey Von-Maszewski (12:50)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Tim Bouchard (13:13)
go smoother and it puts a little bit of power into their hands too.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (13:16)
yeah, absolutely. ⁓ And we know that when a client first starts out, it can be overwhelming. Setting up a portal account, doing your paperwork, filling out a clinical assessment, we recognize that. And so that’s why we give clients very clear instructions. Here are the three things you need to do. Here’s how you do them. And we give that to them at intake and then.

Tim Bouchard (13:23)
Mm-hmm.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (13:41)
their clinician gives them the exact same resources right before that they see them as well. So keeping that messaging consistent is key.

Tim Bouchard (13:49)
Yeah, and

I mean, I’m not going to plug any specific one, but there’s lots of different options out there for this stuff, too, that are all inclusive or things you can cherry pick and then combine a few different softwares, too. you know, it’s especially even maybe for the the sole practitioners out there. It’s not always a super awesome experience when you’re like, I’ll just send you a Venmo request when we get off of our session or, you know, speaking to some of the different divisions in health care. And it feels I wouldn’t say it’s like completely

Audrey Von-Maszewski (14:12)
Yeah.

Tim Bouchard (14:20)
I’m professional, but it’s not quite as organized. And you know, this kind of helps bridge the gap between the practitioner and the client.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (14:31)
Yeah, absolutely. It is so helpful to have a system where everything is integrated. We don’t need a separate system for anything that we do.

Tim Bouchard (14:41)
and it’s super secure and super compliance based and you don’t have to worry about managing that systems technology stack and security stack. You just have to make sure you’re managing the data the right way to get it in and out and use it in productive and patient friendly ways.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (14:45)
Yes.

Yes, absolutely. And if anyone is out there trying to pick an EHR, I would definitely recommend you look into once I switch, what’s the level of support I’m going to get. Something I really love about this system is they’re always updating, which is great. But also that means I have to go update procedures and learn new things.

Tim Bouchard (15:09)
Mm-hmm.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (15:19)
I can reach out to a support rep at any time and they are very responsive. ⁓ They also did meetings with us leading up to the switch and we can to this day still reach out to our implementation manager and we’ve been on the system for almost a year. So I think look at how much support are you going to get after you switch?

Tim Bouchard (15:37)
How have the practitioner and clinical side teammates felt about being more exposed to the administrative side as it made their jobs easier?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (15:48)
⁓ I think it has. They definitely feel more supported. Whereas before, they didn’t know what to do if a client had a billing issue. ⁓ Now they feel really confident in saying, hey, this isn’t my area of expertise, but our billing specialist, she’s amazing, here’s what you’re gonna do. ⁓ And they also know if they have a question that’s not related to their clinical work, they know exactly who to go to.

Tim Bouchard (15:55)
Mm-hmm.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (16:17)
to get that answer right away. So I think it’s been really, really helpful.

Tim Bouchard (16:23)
And it probably happens less frequently now too, because it’s so much smoother on the client side.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (16:30)
I will say the clients will still treat their clinician as the point person. I mean, as they should. I get that, right? That’s the person you’re talking to. Yeah, exactly. I don’t even think they know what I look like and I don’t blame them. I don’t think they know what our admin people, they’ve never really seen us unless they’re at the front desk. So I understand that you want your clinician to have all the answers. ⁓

Tim Bouchard (16:34)
Yeah. Yeah. That’s where the trust is.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (16:53)
We want them to feel confident in saying, I don’t have the answers, but I know this person very well. I know exactly what she does. She’s going to be able to help you. And that handoff has always worked really well. We’ve never had a client resist that.

Tim Bouchard (17:05)
So you’ve done all this work, which sounds great, and it sounds like everyone’s really bought into it. How has that affected the practice?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (17:13)
It’s been really amazing to see. ⁓ Once we started to get everybody on the same page, I stopped having to field a bunch of client concerns. So personally, that was really nice for me. We saw a big increase in not just word of mouth referrals, but also ⁓ different

outpatient programs, inpatient hospitals, in the community were starting to hear about us. So we were getting other partners and then they’re wanting to come in, meet us, get to know about our practice. So we’ve been able to expand our referral sources from this ⁓ and to see the practice working more efficiently on all ends. Clinicians are having to spend as much time on paperwork. We’re not having to spend time going back and forth trying to figure out what each department said.

Tim Bouchard (17:40)
Mmm.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (18:07)
everything’s running smoother. since I started, ⁓ when I started, we were in one suite. Now, almost four years later, we’ve expanded to two office suites. We’ve doubled our number of clinicians, ⁓ which means that the number of clients we’ve been able to reach has just skyrocketed. And that’s amazing to see because it’s really making a difference in the community.

Tim Bouchard (18:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and facilitated by standardization and consistency. Both of those things being able to bring on all those extra.

clinicians because you have the processes and systems in place. But you brought up something that’s very important. The ability, you know, in health care marketing, we talk about building trust with the clients in the patient pool and the public, right? And building your reputation and trust points so that, you know, not everyone always needs health care right away. They’re always their ears are open looking for options that they feel like they can trust in the future to go to if anything happens. Providers, referral sources at the professional level need the same type of trust

and confidence that if they send people to certain outlets that they’re not going to send them to the wrong, the wrong organization that doesn’t have their stuff together or has inconsistent patient experiences. It’s a big point.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (19:06)
Yes.

Exactly. Yeah, when we have ⁓ a partner that we know really well, if they’re going to send us a client, they will say, hey, I’ve got a client coming your way. We’ll make sure to keep them updated on that referral. Say, hey, yep, they reached out. We’re going to get them set up and we let them know when they’ve ultimately been matched with a clinician so they know that we’re going to follow through and they’re going to send us more in the future.

Tim Bouchard (19:41)
Yep. ⁓ Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that factors in this conversation that you’re dying to say that I haven’t prompted out of you yet?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (19:51)
one thing I would say the sense of team internally that we’ve been able to create has also felt really, really good. Cause when we all know what each other is doing, you start to appreciate one another’s role and realize, wow. I really appreciate what filling is doing to help my clients and taking that off of me. That’s amazing. And so.

I feel like as an office, we’ve been able to create a really positive place that people wanna work at and they wanna keep working at. And big issue in mental health is clinician burnout, ⁓ which means there’s gonna be a lot of turnover and clients are being bounced around to clinicians so often in this field. ⁓ What we’ve done in cultivating this really positive space has…

definitely lowered clinician turnover. So clients are getting to stay with their clinicians longer as they should.

Tim Bouchard (20:53)
Yeah, it’s funny you think.

we’re going to make standardizations and build systems. You’re like, that sounds so robotic and data driven and procedural. But what it does is it frees up everyone to think about other things that are more soft touch interactions and team connection and all that stuff. So that’s really good too. You did mention that this was a pretty big change though. Do you have any advice for someone that’s thinking about undertaking a systems overhaul or software or even platform overhaul?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (20:59)
Yeah, it sounds boring.

Yeah.

Definitely plan as soon as you can. Get a list of everything you anticipate that needs to be done. There will be more that you’re not aware of. Everything you anticipate, who’s gonna do these things? When do we need to do them by? And you also need to be ready to adapt because when new features are introduced that you never even thought about, that’s a whole new conversation. So you…

do need to be ready to adapt to those changes. I would recommend using those support reps that you’re allocated, hopefully, ask questions. If you can ask for extra meetings with them, one thing that I did that was really helpful was I asked for a completely separate meeting with one of their billing team members. And if I didn’t do that, I don’t know if we would have had our billing system set up as quickly as we did. So it was

Tim Bouchard (22:21)
Mmm.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (22:22)
really essential. Be proactive.

Tim Bouchard (22:25)
Cool, good, good, yeah, and a good software and platform company will have a good onboarding process and really good reps too. So, you if you’re doing your research on that, you’ll end up in a good spot. That’s a good one. Cool. Well, this has been a really good conversation and it flowed really well. You’ve been awesome sharing this side of what you did at the Wellness Center. Do you want to tell people little bit more about where they can find you and more about Pause Wellness Center too?

Audrey Von-Maszewski (22:32)
Yes.

Thank you. ⁓

Yes, so Pause Wellness Center, we are outpatient mental health therapy in Northborough, Massachusetts. We provide both in-person and telehealth therapy. So if you don’t live close to Northborough Mass, but you’re anywhere within the state of Massachusetts, we can see you over telehealth. If you’re interested in learning more about us, go to Pausewellnesscenter.com or you can email us at info at Pausewellnesscenter.com.

Tim Bouchard (23:21)
Awesome, cool. All right, listeners, if you want to take your practices, brand and patient recruitment to the next level, take advantage of Luminus’ patient pipeline blueprint session offer. It’s a workshop to uncover how you can attract new patients and convert more inquiries into appointments for your practice. You can look it up at Luminus.agency slash blueprint. And if you want to hear or watch more content like this, subscribe to Healthcare Marketing Edge on Spotify, Apple or YouTube for more. And we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks, Audrey.

Audrey Von-Maszewski (23:50)
Thank you.