Barnfield Dental Studio

Short notice cancellations are still an issue and the problem seems to coincide with when the diaries are very full. When we have a lot of choice or availability, patients are less keen to use this option. I am trying to motivate my reception staff to use this regardless so will be keeping a very close eye on this with my customer success consultant Andrew.

We’ve hit 91.4% chair-time utilisation! How did we get there? Short notice cancellation book!!! We love it. It is such a great tool and patients love it too.
Easy for reception because they just click on the open slot in the diary and then send a text block out to all suitable patients for the allocated slot. The first patient to reply to the text by saying ‘book’, will then automatically be booked in and receive a text confirmation…

There was some ambiguity and confusion with the first few texts which went out, and we did have to change the wording on the initial text to remind patients that they have to wait for the confirmation before the appointment is guaranteed, but with a bit of testing we now have it perfected!
 

On this month’s call with Andrew we discussed how cancellations are now the single biggest loss of time in the appointment books and as such a real push is needed to ensure Utilisation Manager is being put into place in a timely manner. Cancellations are an inevitable occurrence in any practice… however, we need to effectively fill those gaps. So we need to try and motivate patients not to cancel at short notice and also utilise the short notice cancellation book going forward. 

We have now put in a process to fill gaps at 10am each day with short notice cancellations. All of a sudden, we could see how much revenue we were losing with little gaps here and there. A short notice list was placed together which enabled us to book all the small gaps as well as the bigger gaps. This short notice list has a great feature in such that you can hover over the space, it will tell you which patients can fit that slot from your short notice list, and then you can click to send the patient a text to ask if then would like the gap… if the patient replies ‘book’, then the gap automatically gets filled without any further intervention from reception!!! Still amazes me.

The change over from our previous provider to SOE was not a walk in the park but we were told that it would be a steep learning curve. There have been no issues with the transfer of DATA from one system to another, but everything obviously works different. SOE can be very much individualised and it took us a while to figure out exactly what we wanted and how we wanted to do things to set it up appropriately. The clinical staff all took to it swimmingly, but the reception staff are struggling more.

As the manager, I am finding that I need to do a lot of initial ‘hand holding’ and taking a lot of time to ‘tidy up’ the system from the changeover. The DATA we held were incorrect in some formats and most patients did not have a correct recall or dentist allocation…. Thus, it has become a bit of a ‘spring clean’ which took longer than I anticipated.

The system is very much windows based and therefore quite intuitive to use. The online help is brilliant and my monthly phone calls from my appointed ‘saviour-and-know-it-all’ is without a doubt, the essence of what kept me going. Staff ask me how to do something and if I do not know how, I make a list and get Andrew to look at it. He really is very good at what he does!