Are Inefficiencies Holding Your Practice Back?

Nobody wakes up and says, “Today I am going to be inefficient.” Yet if we were to evaluate our everyday routines, we would discover inefficiencies. So why do they happen? We are human. As creatures of habit, we get so busy just trying to make it through the day that we don’t stop and evaluate whether there is a better way to do things. And sometimes, even when we discover these easier, more effective ways, we still don’t adjust our routines because we feel uncomfortable with change.

The Importance of a Daily Huddle

Are you holding a 10- to 15-minute daily huddle every day? If you are, congratulations! If you are not, I would challenge you to start. Some common reasons we hear from offices when we try to implement a daily huddle are “We have been trying to do it for many years and it doesn’t work,” or “We start at different times so we can’t have them” and, of course, “We are too busy for a daily huddle!” If you have found yourself making any of these statements, maybe you don’t understand the significance of the information you can get from the Dentrix Daily Huddle Report, and how it can affect your practice.

The daily huddle serves two purposes. The first is that the Daily Huddle Report provides statistics for production, collections, new patients, case acceptance and schedule efficiency for the previous day, the current day and the rest of the month. By tracking these on a daily basis, you will not get to the end of the month and realize you fell short of your goals.

The second purpose is to have important conversations about patients on the schedule so the team can be prepared. For example, if you are a treatment coordinator, you want to see which patients have outstanding treatment plans and, if you have holes in your schedule, see if the patient can get that outstanding work completed while in the office. Or at least get the patient scheduled for their outstanding treatment plan. If you are a hygienist, you can review patients coming in tomorrow, for example, and see if someone is due for X-rays. And if you are a financial coordinator, you might want to see pending balances or outstanding treatment plans.

The average practice that uses the Dentrix Daily Huddle finds they are saving between 60 and 90 minutes a day, just in how long it takes to prepare for the huddle! If you were able to free up 60 to 90 minutes today, what would your team focus on during that valuable time? Would they focus on overdue hygiene patients or scheduling unscheduled treatment plans? Or would they have more time to spend with patients and enrich the in-office patient experience? Would there be more patient referrals? Would insurance estimates be more accurate? What would you do with the 60 to 90 minutes that you could get back in your schedule?

As the old saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” The power of the Dentrix Daily Huddle Report is that it enables practices to plan their days even better and maximize opportunities by placing valuable patient information at their fingertips. Dental team members are busy running a business and providing excellent patient care. The Dentrix Daily Huddle helps practices better achieve both of these tasks–and saves them time–by making all of this valuable information available with a few mouse clicks.