Great feedback from last week; thank you. Yes, you know distractions are the things that rob you of your daily productivity and some are certainly better than others when it comes to Team Member focus.
This goes for the Doctor all the way through each area and department of the Practice. You absolutely have to review this on a frequent basis. No different than athletes practicing the basics, you have to make sure that distractions are not interfering with your team’s daily objectives even if it seems elementary.
There is one and only one way to do that – that is to have clarity on specific priorities for each and every individual team member for the type of patient visit to the type of clinical day to the type of objective or responsibility in the practice’s daily operations.
Prioritization is part art, part science, just like dentistry. When you are doing a procedure on a patient there is an order to it, is there not? That is the very definition of prioritization: an order of importance.
In fact this is a great place to start.
For each area of your practice, there are specific responsibilities and they certainly can’t be all done at once. A room has to be cleaned before a patient can be put in it. A treatment plan has to be input in the computer before it can be charged out, well depending on how you are doing it but it does have to be diagnosed. Patients have to be confirmed before their appointments and appointments have to be set before they can be confirmed.
You get the idea.
Here’s one that many people don’t see as a priority and they get distracted with and they forget…
Collecting the money.
Yes. Can you believe that?
Collecting the money!
Insanity. I hear people every day who say, “We’ll catch you next time” or the phone rings or the patient is told in the back they aren’t sure of the amount or there is any other number of reasons that patients leave without paying.
Oh, did I say reasons, I meant excuses.
Because it wasn’t a priority. It has to be. There is nothing that should be so distracting that you forget, avoid or fail to – collect the money.
We simply have to get our priorities straight.
I have long suggested that you pay team members based on a percentage of collections. I mean, why would you not. Why would you not pay everyone the percentage of their pay check that is equal to the percentage of the money that was collected from the patients.
You are not paying your team members, your patients are paying your team members.
Now, I know I will get a lot of slack for this since this message goes out to more team members probably than any message in the entire industry – but our team members, yours and mine, they are smart, very smart and they get it.
Focus on priorities.
If you do not have crystal clear priorities for Hygiene, for Assistants, for Front Desk, Treatment Coordinators, and every other compartment then you are going to risk distractions taking over and wasting away the day.
I gave you some straight forward homework last week, this week really clarifies it and pulls it altogether. Prioritize. Every team member should make a list of their priorities for the day and make sure they all align properly with the goals of the practice and the necessary essential results that must occur to have a victory.
This goes for the day and each visit. I don’t have to tell you there’s a lot that happens every day so I better let you get to it…
