During the course of managing a practice, you’ll likely have to argue an unemployment insurance case at least once. You may think it futile to even try to win suits like these, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes not opposing a case can be costlier to your practice in the long run than arguing one, according to Ken Kruger, president of the Healthcare Human Resources Consulting Consortium, LLC, in New York City and T. Hensley Williams, JD, coprincipal of The Williams Group in Des Moines, IA. A former employee can collect unemployment insurance for up to 26 weeks, according to the Department of Labor.

Ask any leprechaun the secret to protecting the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and he’ll likely say a combination of quick thinking, communication, and a bit of magic. The same is true of your practice’s pot of gold. To keep your patients happy, use all of the above to create great customer service. That was the philosophy by which Rhea Dawn Buskirk, CMM, worked when she joined the obstetric/gynecology practice of Philip A. Crooke, MD, as his office manager. However, despite working in medical offices for 23 years, the bustling Bloomington, IN, practice with a staff of five posed a customer-service challenge: The doctor often departed unexpectedly to deliver babies, leaving a waiting room full of unknowing patients.

Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series. To increase revenue at your practice, you don’t necessarily need to generate more business; you might just need to plug a few revenue leaks. Last month, in part one of this series, healthcare consultant Jennifer Bever, MS, CHE, of Chicago-based KarenZupko & Associates, Inc., explained five revenue leaks that your practice can only control indirectly. This month, Bever discusses five revenue areas that you can directly control and ways to correct them.

You draft your will, purchase an extensive life insurance policy, and set up a trust. You work diligently with an attorney to get the legal matters of your estate plan in order. Everything seems in place, but you still feel like something is missing. "It’s often not very satisfying to have only the typical estate plan," says estate-planning attorney Dagmar Pollex.1 Most estate plans are one-dimensional and focus only on legal matters, ignoring other important facets of life such as family and beliefs, she says. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Increasingly, people are filling the emotional void left in traditional estate plans with "family love letters" and ethical wills.