Smile Manchester

The practice is expected to reach 96% of the UDA target and an 85% increase in private revenue since October 2016. This has enabled us to build an extra surgery at the practice and building work commences this month. Going forward I am going to start working with Yasmin to capture my own KPIs and workflow compliance using MPC.

Following our last blog at the practice, we have been working closely with Yasmin to ensure the practice improves month by month. Firstly Yasmin provided training to my reception team using the follow up tab to enable the practice to increase chair-time and reduce short notice cancellation, such a small task and effort proved to work as the practice decreased its short notice cancellation by 5.6% which put us in the top 5% of EXACT users (sigh of relief from the management).

In the last few months the practice has achieved a great deal, from increasing our workflow compliance, chair-time utilisation, and UDA predictions. We have welcomed a new member of staff to our very busy practice.

The KPI reports that we go through with our consultant help the management team highlight areas which require attention and following each KPI report we set new targets for the month ahead. The targets are discussed with the team using a flip chart and brain storming sessions, I also find that this boosts staff moral as they have more of an input into the practice progression.
Although we are now at 88% workflow compliance(!!), our FTA rate is still a bit of struggle to combat therefore we have implemented telephone calls for patients who do not have an email address or mobile contact number.

We are welcoming a clinician back to the practice in February 2018 following her maternity leave and I have started the planning and preparation of this by ensuring she is fully trained and up to speed with the practice’s progression and new procedures. My Customer Success Consultant has talked me through the SOE Customer Portal which has hundreds of blogs and videos to help us utilise different features within EXACT, so I will be setting time out of my diary to go through this both for myself, and the team. We also talked about the Academy Online for more in depth training so that’s something we’ll look into if needed.

I have been working closely with my success manager and we have also made some further tweaks which have seen massive changes resulting in boosted private income, and also managed to increase our UDA activity by 20% - meaning we are now on track to hit target! 

FTA appointments also started to become an issue, therefore we created some FTA letters in Campaign+ which are now automatically sent to patients meaning our FTA rate has reduced from 11.6% to 5.8% - a massive 50% reduction!! Our email address collection from the workflow has jumped from 37% to 62% which we have been advised is also key in keeping the FTA rate to continue to come down, and gives us a free method of contacting patients!

Using our MPC dashboard I can see the practices success and failings on a daily basis and I am now looking forward to having full access to MPC.
 

Now a few month’s into using EXACT and I couldn't be happier, the help desk go above and beyond to help all member in staff in need.

At the start of our journey with EXACT, a computer technician came to the practice to help with the installation of the software, as like any dental practice we got chatting and he asked who my IT company was I explained unfortunately the practice never had an IT technician prior to takeover and I'm not sure which company to contact.

The gentleman advised me to speak with a company called Microminder and discuss a possible contract with them, and I have to say, this advice was worth its weight in gold, as just a few days later we suffered a ransomware attack on our computer.

The practice was very lucky and thankfully it did not affect our EXACT software. Microminder worked on our systems from 8.00 AM into the evening daily for a week to get us back to normal and despite the problem not being software related, we had a call from our Good to Great Consultant to ensure everything was OK.

We made the switch to EXACT for a few reasons, one being the fact you do not have to fill any spaces in the book, the short notice system will automatically do this for you. The system is also able to inform you that you have fallen below target NHS or private and it grows as your practice grows there is no limit to it. Almost all dental software companies charge the practice to upgrade your system to its newer version, but SOE offer this to all its customers for free and is almost as easy to upgrade as your software on your iPhone with no bugs or hacks.

I encourage dental practices to bite the bullet and transfer to SOE, especially if they have outgrown their current software or like myself are constantly on the phone to them trying to correct errors, with anything in life of course there will be teething problems (pardon the pun) change is inevitable in dental so why not make your life harder for 2 months but have years of satisfaction. Practice managers have a lot of stress to deal with daily, take the worry of computer software and performance of the list.