Since you are the owner of a business, I encourage you to occasionally step outside of your role as the top producer and dentist and into the role as a CEO. I urge you to view your business form a vantage point of “outside and slightly elevated” and to employ the concept of Ruthless Honesty when assessing the daily operations of your practice. Today I’m asking you to start looking at your dental practice systems.
Some team members complain that formal systems, protocols and procedures make it difficult to treat patients as individuals and get in the way of providing the “personal touch” in the patient experience. Although I agree that teams need to be conscious of not being robotic with their patients, well-defined systems actually help accentuate the personality of the care providers. In addition, they help guarantee a predictable outstanding experience for every patient and quantifiable results for the practice.
You’d Never Let An Assistant Tell You How To Practice Dentistry
Every dental assistant that begins working in a practice is hired with the training, expertise, and good & bad habits they developed while working in another office and with another dentist. It’s the only position that a dentist will take a chance and hire someone with no training or experience. However, once chair side, the dentist takes great care in teaching and grooming that assistant to be a valuable auxiliary support. Actually, this is the most support any employee will get in a dental practice. The dental assistant simply needs to conform to the systems and standards of that dentist to be successful; if not, the assistant may be looking for a new office.
However, in most dental practices when a new hygienist or front office staff member is hired the dentist allows the new hire to implement their own systems and protocols; essentially, the doctor has turned over the keys to a multi-million dollar business (and their future) to a stranger. Remember, this team member was hired with the training, expertise, and good & bad habits they developed while working in another office, but this time there is no grooming process.
Over time any current systems, protocols, and even policies fall by the wayside as a new generation of team players restructure the departments. The dentist/business owner has little knowledge of what is going on within the various domains of the practice. It’s a mystery to the dentist until an expectation is unmet either for the business owner, for another team member, or even worse, for the patient.
Lack of a Formal Hygiene Protocol
I have a client with four highly capable dental hygienists. Each has several years of experience and a quality work ethic. However, each has very different opinions about the patient experience and approach to quality of care.
The dentist had attended an annual dental conference and was intrigued by an advanced oral cancer screening product. Believing that this product would provide an additional service valuable both to the patient in the form of care and to the practice bottom line in the form of profit, the doctor invested heavily into this system and presented it to her team. The presentation was met with mixed emotions, some of the members of the hygiene team adopted the new technology and began presenting and administering to patients, others opted to leave the new technology out of their protocol and continue offering patients a visual screening. As a result there was an inconsistency in the department. All four hygienists were committed to offering a high standard of care, but the standard itself was compromised. Also, the hand-off to the Dr. during the examination was different with each hygienist causing the Dr. to adjust her patient interaction (wait, whose name is on the front door?). The practice was missing out on potential production revenues and collections as the advanced oral cancer screening procedure has a fee. And finally, the practice was at risk that any patient may actually have signs of oral cancer and because the screening protocol was not consistent within the practice (each patient was not offered the same service and/or the same standard of care), the practice may be held negligent.
As with the dental assistant the Dr. must present her vision and expectations of how the position is to operate, otherwise, whenever there is a change or addition in personnel in that department the business retreats to step one and has to reestablish itself.
You have the vision. You call the shots. Take Control.
Do you know enough about the workings of your business to make sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing? Are team members clear on your expectations? Can you keep tabs to see that they're doing an "excellent job"? Every part of your operation should be based on processes and systems.
Look at your practice from a CEO vantage point. List the key processes and systems that underlie your business. Work on cleaning up and documenting one process at a time. You may want to choose the most high-impact system to document first. Write down all the steps involved in clear, simple, step-by-step language. All systems must have complete documentation. Documentation transforms an organic process into mechanical process and brings predictability to the results.
Then, make sure you have quality people that can execute the systems and can bring some additional ideas to the game. Get the systems and the right people in place and build a practice that serves you, not one that consumes you.
What systems do you have in place that allow you the freedom to spend more time with patients, vacation, or simply decompress? Leave a comment below.
- See more at: http://www.dentaltown.com/Dentaltown/Blogs.aspx?action=VIEWPOST&b=423&bp=2045#sthash.TN8IAeke.dpuf
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