People & HR

How to run a performance review cycle as Independent Clinic Owner-Operators

People & HRFor Independent Clinic Owner-Operators4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You run reviews once a year — maybe twice — and every cycle you're cobbling together the same fragile process: a Google Form you built three years ago, a spreadsheet where half the rows are stale, and calendar invites that conflict with the one Tuesday your MA is actually in clinic. You're asking three providers to self-evaluate, writing narrative feedback for each of them yourself, and somehow also covering afternoon patients. There's no HR department. The 'system' is you remembering to do it, a Notion doc nobody updates, and a folder in Google Drive called 'Reviews 2024 FINAL v3.' Meanwhile, the part that actually matters — whether your front desk lead is ready to supervise the new hire, whether your PT's productivity numbers justify a raise — gets a 45-minute conversation squeezed between a 4pm patient and end-of-day notes.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Independent Clinic Owner-Operators4 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured review cycle — self-evals, manager notes, and ratings — tracked in one place so you're not rebuilding the process from a blank doc each time

An automated prep workflow that pulls action items and meeting notes from prior check-ins so your review conversations start with context, not 'remind me what we talked about last quarter'

A task board that assigns follow-up commitments (raises pending approval, training goals, schedule changes) to the right person with due dates, so decisions made in the review room actually get executed

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Task Manager Meeting Notes Knowledge Management Project Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Google Calendar data on a schedule to detect scheduling conflicts and auto-suggest review meeting slots. Gmail is connected so the agent can pull prior email threads with each provider as context for the prep brief. Notion is connected through Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries your existing docs live when building the performance standards wiki. Google Docs and Google Drive are reachable from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live to surface prior review documents. For any staff scheduling tool (e.g., a web-based rota system with no direct API), Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a performance review tracker for a three-provider clinic. Each review needs: provider name, role (physician/MA/front desk), review period, self-evaluation score (1–5) across five dimensions (clinical quality, patient communication, team collaboration, admin reliability, professional development), manager rating, a narrative notes field, and a status column (not started / self-eval sent / manager draft / complete / follow-up pending). I want to filter by status and sort by upcoming due date.

Before each review meeting, pull all meeting notes from the last six months where [provider name] was mentioned. Summarize the key themes, any commitments they made, and anything I flagged as a concern. Give me a one-page prep brief.

Create a team wiki section called 'Performance Standards' with pages for: what a 4 vs 5 rating looks like on each dimension, our raise and compensation review policy, and a template for 90-day improvement plans. I want to be able to search it during a review conversation.

After each review meeting, extract all action items — things I committed to do, things the provider committed to do — assign them with due dates, and add them to the clinic task board under the tag 'Review Follow-Up Q2 2026'.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open Starch and describe your review structure in plain language: 'I need a performance review tracker for a three-provider clinic with self-eval and manager rating fields across five dimensions.' Starch builds the app; you tweak the field labels to match how you actually talk about performance in your clinic.

2 Connect Google Calendar so Starch can sync your schedule and flag the two-week window you've blocked for review meetings — it will surface open slots for each provider and draft calendar invites.

3 Two weeks before reviews start, trigger the prep-brief automation for each provider: Starch pulls notes from the Meeting Notes app, any flagged emails from Gmail, and prior action items from the task board, then generates a one-page summary you read the morning of the review.

4 Send each provider their self-evaluation link (a Starch form you built when you set up the tracker). The form feeds directly into the tracker — no copy-pasting scores from a Google Form into a spreadsheet.

5 Fill in your manager ratings and narrative for each provider inside the tracker. If you're doing this from memory, the prep brief is open in a side panel; if you took notes in the meeting, Meeting Notes has already extracted the key points.

6 For any provider whose score on a dimension dropped more than one point versus last cycle, Starch flags it in the tracker and prompts you to either add a note or create a 90-day improvement plan using the template in your Knowledge Management wiki.

7 After each review conversation, open Meeting Notes, confirm the action items Starch extracted, and assign them: raises that need payroll action go to you with a due date before the next pay run; training goals go to the provider; schedule changes go to your front desk lead.

8 All review follow-up tasks land in the Project Management board under the tag 'Review Follow-Up Q2 2026.' You can filter to see everything outstanding, sorted by due date, without hunting across Slack messages and sticky notes.

9 Once all reviews are marked 'complete' in the tracker, Starch generates a one-page cycle summary: average ratings by dimension across the team, any outliers, and a list of open follow-up items. You send this to yourself as a reference for next cycle.

10 Archive the cycle in the Knowledge Management wiki under 'Performance Reviews / 2026 / Q2.' Next cycle, you start from the same structure — not from a blank doc — and Starch pulls last cycle's data as the baseline for the prep briefs.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q2 2026 Annual Review Cycle — Three-Provider Clinic

Sample numbers from a real run

Providers reviewed	3
Self-eval completion rate	100
Manager narrative fields completed	3
Follow-up action items assigned	11
Items resolved within 30 days	8
Cycle duration (days, start to last follow-up closed)	22

In late May 2026, the clinic owner-operator opened Starch and typed: 'It's review season. Build me a tracker for three providers — Dr. Reyes (physician), Janelle (MA), and Marcus (front desk lead) — with self-eval and manager ratings across clinical quality, patient communication, team collaboration, admin reliability, and professional development. Status column, due dates, and a prep-brief automation.' The app was ready in under two minutes. Self-eval forms went out June 2; all three were completed by June 6 with no follow-up nagging because the form fed the tracker directly. Prep briefs for each provider pulled six months of meeting notes and flagged that Marcus had mentioned twice wanting to take on more supervisory responsibility — something the owner-operator had mentally noted but not written down anywhere. In the review conversation, that context was already on the table. Post-review, Starch extracted 11 action items: a compensation adjustment for Dr. Reyes (flagged for the next payroll run), a CPR recertification deadline for Janelle (assigned to her with a due date 30 days out), and four scheduling changes Marcus had requested. By day 22, 8 of 11 items were closed. The 3 outstanding were escalated automatically in the task board. No spreadsheet. No v3 final doc. Same structure ready to reuse in Q4.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Self-evaluation completion rate before scheduled review meeting (target: 100% — if a provider hasn't submitted, the meeting gets rescheduled, not rushed)

Days from review conversation to follow-up action items assigned (target: same day or next morning)

Percentage of follow-up commitments closed within 30 days (raises processed, training enrolled, schedule changes confirmed)

Cycle duration: days from first self-eval sent to last follow-up item resolved

Year-over-year rating trend per provider per dimension — flags if clinical quality or admin reliability is declining before it becomes a patient-facing problem

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Forms + Sheets (current state for most small clinics)

Free and familiar, but self-eval data lives in a separate place from your notes, follow-up tasks, and last year's review — you spend more time assembling context than actually reviewing.

BambooHR or Rippling (HR platform with built-in reviews)

Purpose-built review workflows, but priced and configured for companies with a dedicated HR admin — a three-provider clinic will pay for features they never use and still manually export data to run a meeting.

Notion with a review template

Flexible enough to hold the data, but you're building and maintaining the template yourself, there's no automation for prep briefs or action-item extraction, and nothing nags you when follow-ups slip.

Lattice or Culture Amp

Strong review tooling for teams of 25+, with calibration features and engagement surveys — overkill for a three-provider clinic and expensive enough that the math rarely works at that headcount.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — task manager, meeting notes, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch integrate with my EHR — Jane, SimplePractice, or Kareo — so I can pull in productivity data for the review?

If your EHR has a web-based reporting dashboard you can log into, Starch can automate it through your browser to pull productivity numbers — no API needed. For EHRs with formal API access, check Starch's integration catalog to see if a live-query connection is available. Either way, the productivity data can be pulled into your review tracker as context. What Starch doesn't do is sync EHR clinical records — that's not what this workflow needs, and it keeps things simpler.

I'm not SOC 2 certified — is Starch safe for storing staff performance notes?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. Performance review notes for clinical staff aren't PHI, but if your practice has data-handling policies that require SOC 2 certified vendors for any HR data, that's worth checking against your current requirements before connecting sensitive documents. Honest answer: it's on the roadmap, not available today.

Can I use this for a 90-day check-in with a new hire, not just annual reviews?

Yes — the tracker structure works for any cadence. Just describe it differently when you build it: 'Build me a 90-day check-in tracker for new clinical hires with milestone columns at day 30, 60, and 90, a competency checklist specific to our front desk workflows, and a notes field for each check-in conversation.' Starch builds the app; you add the competency items that are specific to your clinic.

What if I want to keep the self-eval anonymous from the provider until after I've written my manager notes?

You can describe that logic when you build the app: 'Don't show the self-eval scores to the provider in their view — only I should see them until I've completed my manager notes and marked the review ready for discussion.' The app is built to match that workflow. This is a common request from owner-operators who don't want their rating anchored to whatever the provider wrote about themselves.

My front desk lead is also involved in reviewing the MA — can multiple people contribute to a review?

Yes. When you describe the app, include that: 'The front desk lead should be able to add a peer-input section for the MA's review — separate from my manager rating, visible to me but not part of the final score.' Starch builds the fields and access logic. You don't need a formal 360-review platform to do this at a three-person scale.

Will this work if I have the review conversation in person and don't record it?

Yes — Meeting Notes works best with a recording or transcript, but you can also type a quick summary into Starch immediately after the meeting and tell it: 'Extract action items from these notes and add them to the review follow-up board.' If you do want transcription, running the review over a video call and letting Meeting Notes capture it works well even for a five-minute debrief.