Recent Articles

  • Going paperless: Saving your practice from its medical record nightmare

    Jessica Taylor Healthcare Administration

    ​Stop me if this sounds familiar: A medical practice with about 50,000 patients has a paper chart for each. Like many small practices, a majority of the patients have had the same doctor for almost their entire lives — equating to a rather large paper trail. Each day, the employees of this practice put away about 200 charts, but frequently aren't able to finish due to volume.Paper charts and filing are what they consider their worst enemy. Can you relate? Do you feel their pain? Digitizing may be your new best friend.

  • 3 ways physicians can improve their adaptability skills

    Clint Hubler Medical & Allied Healthcare

    Doctors who travel to new practices face a host of complex challenges. They interact with new colleagues and patients and often work with new tools and processes. Adaptability is one of the most important qualities a locum provider can possess. There are three tools that can help a doctor become more adaptable to new surroundings.

  • Lessons learned in bus tours

    Mark Hewitt Travel, Hospitality & Event Management

    ​I have learned a few things during my many years as a coach driver, and I would like to pass some of them on in the hope that others will learn from my mistakes. Putting all of these tips together on one trip could turn it into one of your most successful trips of the year.

  • Grouping students: Heterogeneous, homogeneous and random structures

    Erick Herrmann Education

    ​What is the typical classroom seating arrangement? Are students seated in neat rows, in a U shape, in small groups of 4 or 5, at tables or at desks? Teachers have long recognized the power of grouping students together for a variety of reasons: to collaborate with each other on a project, for cooperative learning opportunities, to work with a small group of students on a particular skill and more. But how do teachers decide how to group students together, and when is a particular grouping structure best given the learning or task at hand?

  • Lead nurturing 101

    Sladen West Retail

    A common mistake among businesses is to automatically siphon all leads the marketing team makes off to the sales team. The sales team may try to act on those leads for a while, but when they find that the majority of those leads are still researching the product, they will quickly become frustrated and dismiss most of the leads sent their way as a waste of time. What is missing in this process is the act of lead nurturing.

  • Need for speed: Improving website load times can boost your business

    Stephanie Studer Communications

    No matter what you hope to gain from your online presence, whether it's sales or SEO, you can't expect to get it if your page loads at a snail's pace. So let's speed things up with a few simple tricks that are easy to implement.

  • Is your church jumping the shark?

    Mark MacDonald Religious Community

    ​Every service or product has a life cycle. It's rare that a successful product starts out with an instant "win" and maintains it. There's a natural bell curve that occurs throughout a life cycle. And it all takes a lot of hard work. Sometimes gimmicks work to attract a big crowd. Until you "jump the shark." How about your church?

  • Best practices are not the holy grail

    C. Fredrick Crum Business Management, Services & Risk Management

    ​In my travels I have heard many leadership teams tout with great pride that they are using best practices. So when I say, "You are using common practices," they always get a strange and puzzled look on their face. How can you dominate or lead in your market by implementing the same practices and solutions everyone else has adopted as best practices? The answer: you don't.

  • Don’t fear the feedback

    Michael J. Berens Association Management

    ​Day in, day out, associations accumulate feedback from members and customers. Some of it is solicited, some not. Some of it is welcome, some less so. Whatever form it takes, whatever the tone — positive or negative — it is valuable information, and someone in your organization should be scanning it for the nuggets it contains. More importantly, those nuggets need to be shared with the rest of the organization so everyone has a clear picture of what's working and what's not. Often, however, that does not happen.

  • 9 steps to more concise business writing

    Joe Latta Marketing

    In today's world of ultratasking and information overload, being concise is more important than ever. Whether reading a short email or 500-page business proposal, your audience typically doesn't have the time or desire to search for information.