End of the year: What to work on

If you are in almost any aspect of the dental business, at this time of year, activity has downshifted from into a speed anywhere from slow to nonexistent.  A lot of orthodontic practices have either shut down operations for the rest of the year or are knocking out some final shorts and longs before settling in.  Suppliers are stopping deliveries to start working on year end inventory.  If you have a general dental practice, some folks may be coming in for last-minute, pre-holiday cleanings and whitenings, but major procedures will probably be delayed until after the holiday season.

Rather than shutting things down completely and spending your days watching A Christmas Story, this is the perfect time to work on projects and initiatives to get ready for the new year.

Specifically, here are the things to focus on:

The 3 best queuing statistics

Queueing systems can be nice (see a more detailed description of those) and enable you to identify and unblock traffic jams during the work day.  But those systems also generate a tremendous amount of data and to not use that information to improve your practice would be a waste of another resource to enable you to simultaneously improve the quality of patient service and your bottom line.

When you track every patient’s movement at every step of the process during a patient day, you can imagine the amount of data available to you.  Please do not print and review daily detailed reports.  That will lead you to errors with anecodotal stories (this one time, on a patient day, we knocked out shorts in 8 minutes) and confusion from the excess of data.

And please do not make the mistake I made early in my history by generating tons of data and reports that no one in his or her right mind would spend time poring over.  Rather, compile the data (or have us compile the data) into useful pieces and focus on the exception to norms or threshholds exceeded.  

With that, here are 3 of the top pieces of data you can generate from your queuing system:

Queuing systems: the vitals

In the last post, I mentioned that I would go deeper into queuing systems in the next writing.  As mentioned earlier, a queuing system basically tracks each patient as they move from point to point during a visit to the office.  In addition to noting which patients are where in the office, you can also see how long the patient has been in that area.

At My Practice Engine, the primary experience we have had with queuing systems is building one from the ground up.  Our patient flow protocols were already in place and our IT team built queuing into our practice management system around those protocols.  

In sum, a queuing system, when used properly, can provide extremely valuable information.  The key phrase there is “when used properly” because if used improperly, it is a waste of hardware and software.  We had one manager simply go in at various times of the day and mark every patient in the office as checked out.  So, at a specific time of day, 15 people all left at once.  I hope they had someone to hold the door for the rush of folks.  

When used properly however, there are a number of ways to use one.  One extremely simple way is to note the time a patient arrived at the office and the time that person left.  Now, that isn’t the hardcore “queuing” or tracking that the term traditionally implies, but can give you useful information.  Here’s how: 

Winning the waiting room

In our last post, we unearthed the somewhat obvious finding that people do not like to wait.  If it’s waiting for appointment day or waiting in the appropriately-named waiting room, people generally have better things to do than to sit around.  Here, we address the in-office waits that can cause blood pressures to rise and patient schedules to be upended.

We certainly understand that things happen during the patient day.  Shorts suddenly become longs, unanticipated discussions arise and even impromptu bathroom breaks can turn a day packed with patients into a day and night packed with patients.  Even the most efficient, well-oiled machine of a practice will experience hiccups.  

On the other hand, some practices can somehow take a light, 25-appointment day and turn it into a overtime-generating mess.

Here are some tips and techniques to minimize and soften the waiting room experience.

Here's what your patients are thinking

In previous posts, we’ve discussed polling your patient base via an e-mailed or in-office survey to gauge how they feel about important aspects of your practice.  That feedback can then help guide your future decision-making to provide the best possible patient experience.  

In our practices in Spain and Mexico, we recently surveyed a fair number of patients in anticipation of managers’ meetings in each country.  So that you can combine with your own surveys or get a feel for what patients are saying, here are some key findings that may apply in your own case.

At this point, just before the jump, I’d love to throw a little linkbait at you by telling you that the results are absolutely SHOCKING, but they aren’t.  

Pop analysis: the case of Sauk Valley Orthodontics

In this post, we examine the closing of Sauk Valley Orthodontics, a 2 office practice in Illinois.  If you are so inclined, you can read the news story about it here.  

Certainly, this practice is not the first to close nor will it be the last.   Moreover, I am not going to discuss what seems to be the rather abrupt closure of the practice.  Maybe they had a good reason for having to close with almost no notice or maybe they didn’t.  No need to speculate about that.  Our goal is to take the facts from the story and what we see online to determine what operational changes could have been made to enable the practice to survive.  

To do this, I am going to make one major assumption: the practice had to shut down because the volume of paying patients was insufficient to enable the practice to pay its bills.  In other words, the practice did not shut down because someone stole a bunch of money or major malpractice or a radioactive leak at both offices.

Here’s what I see:

4 quotes that should give you pause

In the vein of our previous post on declining practices, here are some quotes we’ve heard over the last few months that should cause a practice to pause and re-evaluate things.  Unlike the previous post on the topic, these aren’t necessarily indicators that the practice is in trouble, but if you hear them or find yourself saying them, any owner or business manager should take pause and reevaluate the situation.