Dentist @ Perth

As a practice that is currently recruiting for a new dentist to work alongside our dentist Vera, it has been clear that we have faced some challenges with our patient recalls for the past few months. Upon looking into the data deeper with our challenge consultant we found that our previous associate was not discussing the future appointments with the patients prior to their departure. 

We know that the best way to retain our patients is by ensuring they always leave with their next appointment booked, but we need to ensure our dentists are starting that conversation for the handover to reception. When we have our next dentist start, this is something we want to set as a standard from the start.

With Vera back from her 4 week break we feel the practice is really ramping back up with activity and we're going to be ensuring we're following up on our outstanding treatments and implement some automated treatment follow ups to assist with this. It's great to see throughout June we managed to pre-book 50% of our recalls as the past few months that had not been the case, still progress to be made but we are happy with the result.

We initially focused on streamlining a few processes for our practice and ensuring some of the basics were optimised before moving forward. A recalls and reminders specialist checked over the automation of our recalls and reminders to ensure we are truly maximising the efficiency of our communications and made some small changes. As a result, our failed-to-attend rates have averaged 0.6% since.

Now that we have complete visibility over how the business is performing we'll be able to start targeting certain areas that need improving on and working with our challenge consultant to tackle these as they come up. 

From a practice manager's point of view, I felt like we needed to take advantage of the Good to Great Challenge to improve the practice overall, whilst also focusing on specific areas such as increasing patient numbers, improving recall efficiency, reducing white space. I am also aiming to learn about and utilise everything that EXACT has to offer, for example the use of automated short-notice lists.