Elwood Family Dentist

We are officially half way through our Good to Great Challenge! The highlights for month 6 were that we had an increase in recall effectiveness and a 0% FTA rate. Within my 4 years working at Elwood Family Dentist, I don't think we have ever achieved zero FTAs in a month.

On another note, Veronika (practice manager) will shortly be heading to Europe for 2 months. Therefore, the challenge will be placed on hold until her return in early October. The rest of the team will continue to implement what we have learnt and hopefully the clinic will continue to head in the right direction.

To be continued in October 😊

There has been an increase in revenue for the month of May compared to previous months this year, along with a rise in our average hourly earnings. Short notice cancellations and FTAs are also at an all-time low!

Recall effectiveness is still a work in progress and not where I would like it to be. The team are using new strategies to convince patients to pre-book, and as a practice we are going to keep a focus on our recall departures ensuring that we secure patients for their next recall appointment.

I will also be looking into ways to reach out to our existing patients who have gone off the radar, as well as how to attract more new patients as we all know practices constantly need patient growth.

Stay tuned...

This month we have seen an increase in chair-time utilisation of 10%, an increase in workflow compliance of 3%, a decrease in short-notice cancellations by 25% and a massive 80% increase in new patients, hooray! Revenue has continued to be steady since the beginning of the year, by focusing on our recall effectiveness and through following up on our care manager list we should start to see some growth.

Sam our Good to Great consultant suggested we should pay some attention to boosting our Google and Facebook reviews. This has been a recurring topic in our staff meetings, so it was great to have Sam's input. Together we created an email template to send to selected patients, with a link to review our practice. Previously we were only verbally communicating this with our patients. In one month we've already had 4 new reviews as opposed to our average of 1 per month.

Bring on month 5!

With a little bit of focus, determination and team work, we have managed to increase our recall effectiveness by a whopping 37%!!! Our team is working hard to make sure we are pre-booking appointments, I’ve also registered for next months ‘Best Practice Recalls & Reminders Webinar’ to hopefully gain some more insight and tips.

There has also been an increase in our workflow compliance by 7%, average hourly earnings by 3% and chair time utilisation by 4.8%.

After discussing FTA’s during our last team meeting, we decided a good method to decrease our FTA rate is to start including our cancellation fee in our patient’s apt reminder text messages. We’ve had a good response as our FTA’s have decreased by 35%!

Our Good 2 Great consultant Sam introduced me to a great feature ‘Short Notice Cancellation’ list which we have unfortunately been neglecting. Although it is very useful to fill in any last minute cancellations and white spaces, we are finding it time consuming to enter in the times and days patients are available.

Although we had a lot of improvements this month, we still need to focus on increasing our revenue. We currently made the switch to a new payment plan provider which is much more convenient and allows our patients to have their loans instantly approved, hopefully this way we can convince patients to complete their treatments. We are also going to start looking into patient marketing.

Despite it only being the start of our Good to Great journey, we are pleased to already see a few positive changes in our clinic. Our earnings compared to last month have increased along with our chair-time utilisation. I am finding it a lot easier using MPC to track our targets/KPIs and it's great being able to display the figures to the team when we have meetings.

This month we have mainly been focusing on updating our website to make it more user-friendly and easier for patients to booking online appointments and trying to pre-book all recalls. For patients who are unable to comply with pre-booking, we have been sending them an SMS with our online booking link so they can do it once they get home.

A new feature we have been utilising is Care Manager, prior to this we found that keeping track of unfinished treatment plans was difficult, whereas now it's very simple. Since it's easier to manage our unfinished treatments, we are calling our patients while the information is still fresh in their mind and the majority of those patients seem to be booking their next treatment.

Overall our first month was good but there is still room for improvement with our recall effectiveness, which will hopefully over time decrease our white space.

Our goals at the end of the G2G Challenge are to recruit more staff and extend our opening hours. We hope to achieve this by increasing our new patient numbers, recalls and revenue. Overall, we hope by doing the G2G Challenge it will help us to get a better understanding of all the features EXACT has to offer. We can't wait to begin this new journey in 2018!