The hardest thing for you to deal with right now is the uncertainty of what day you’ll been given permission to reopen your practice, take care of every patient, and get back to doing what you do best.
The challenge for me in writing this Report is there are a multitude of different approaches to practice, patient, and team management during this pandemic. I guess that just goes to show that these guidelines, mandates, and suggestions are open to interpretation.
I preface this with those two paragraphs because I don’t want to you to bypass these important steps just because you may not yet have set your date to reopen (or have been told when you can, depending on how you are looking at it). With that in mind, over the next few weeks, I’ll be giving you plenty of items to focus on, execute, and prepare. The only difference will be how many weeks from now you put them into action.
For some, they have already begun, fully prepared to begin seeing patients the last week of April, for most the first week of May, and others it might be mid-May. It’s doubtful that even the most radical governors are going to be able keep people locked in their homes until June.
So, I’m considering this a three, two, one week Re-Open Countdown to be used as you wish in whatever intervals you want. We’ll call it about thirteen, a bakers dozen, of specific tactics that you have to account for.
Yes, I’m talking about the boring stuff. We’ve covered for weeks the exciting part… the videos to patients, the team sharing about ‘quarantine’ ideas, reading books, catching up on your ‘never get around to it’ lists, and all the wonderful things you’ve never achieve because you don’t work ‘on’ your practice long enough.
There’s still time. You can get so many things accomplished. It ought to feel very rewarding. And if you’ve got nothing to do… relax.
Here’s the thing, you aren’t yourself right now – you can’t be. You are still you, it just feels different when you can’t express your ambition, you can’t fuel your fire, and you can’t get up every day hit the ground running to go into your life’s work. You’ve been benched but not for much longer (though it will seem like forever). You will be back on the field, in the game playing again!
The only question is: will you be ready? Well, I’m here to make sure of it. First, you simply have to cast out all negative thoughts. With the right mindset (and a few of my tips), you can be the leader your team and patients need right now.
Okay, at some point you’ve got to set a date to re-open and begin to schedule patients. Most people have rescheduled patients to some day into the future even if they have to call them again and move it. This for the emotional benefit of the patients, retaining control of the schedule, and convenience of the team. It’s a lot harder to cancel an appointment, chase down a patient later on, and get them back on the books than it is to reschedule them when you are on the phone in the first place.
The good news is, whether you have a date or not, the following still applies because we have sufficient time. You want to get these items out of the way so the two weeks coming back into the practice can be full-speed execution.
At some point here you have to re-engage your team. With very rare exception, I find that teams are gathering at least once a week (via phone or zoom or facetime or google hangouts or some virtual format). If you aren’t, you have to rally the troops at least once to establish the game plan.
If you no longer have a team or able to communicate, you can do the next part yourself; otherwise, I’d do it altogether.
There are two critical keys to the re-open strategy that have to be decided and determined before anything else can be. They are critical and they are completely up to you.
You have to decide how are you going to handle the missed clinical days. Simple question with a complicated answer.
Right now, you will have incredible demand with so many patients rescheduled. While it might take some time for the practice to feel as though you are back to your full capacity and pace, using the demand that was removed from the schedule it should buffer that time.
If it were me, I think I would try to get all of the patients who were cancelled back and rescheduled as quick as possible (within the first few weeks of the re-open). That means you’ll need an extra hour a day and an extra day per week. It will somewhat depend on how your patients respond and whether or not you’ve been communicating with them during the shutdown.
Besides the fact that most doctors have finished all of their deliveries and post-ops during the shutdown so their schedules could be clean and clear for nothing but diagnosis and procedures when they get back. Others have finished all procedures that were on the schedule so patients weren’t waiting (and therefore turning into emergencies during the shutdown time).
What the government is incapable of understanding is a lack of dentistry creates dental emergencies. Like not washing your hands spreads germs. There is actually less (dentistry) to do if we can all do a little in advance.
I digress… you can wait it out and see what demand looks like or you can go ahead and add days to balance out your schedule as you come back.
The other thing you can do is simply refigure your monthly goal and just make up whatever days you lost spread across the rest of the year. You could do it by adding two days to every month or by adding x dollars to every day.
Understand: it is NOTHING BUT A MATH PROBLEM – that is all is. Please stop fixating on the money. Live off a credit card for a month if you are in that position but the money isn’t the problem, it’s the time and people that are the coveted assets.
If you want the money back, you have to be focused on the people (not the money). You need to be prepared to diagnose, educate, motivate, and influence patients about their health.
If you have hygiene or for our specialists if you have a lot of follow-up visits that you chose not to see then you have to figure out where those go in the schedule so that you don’t blow up your ability to rebound fast with diagnosis and production. Just because the schedule is full, doesn’t mean you are making up for lost time; you could simply be treading water – or worse.
Once you decide on the make-up the time/money structure, then have to decide how you want the schedule to be organized… what procedures take precedence?
You might go for the ‘turn over more same-day dentistry to catch up and get patients while they are there’ strategy; or you might go for ‘line up as many comprehensive exams as you possibly can’ during the first week or two at the sacrifice of the production but load up on dentistry.
You probably can do 50/50 depending on the production that you cancelled or rescheduled. However, you have to get back to focusing on creation and diagnosing fast if you want your numbers to bounce back quickly.
Don’t worry about patients’ mindsets and decisions. I have Doctors in New York, Florida, California, Texas, and other states seeing patients (with emergencies) and having no problem getting case acceptance. For those practices who are engaging patients and doing virtual consultations, their patients want to come in to get work done. They are anxious to do it and they all will be.
There will be some who will remain timid, but there will be enough for you. The patients will reflect YOUR MINDSET like they did before. Especially if you are willing to tell them the truth – about everything.
Once you layout your schedule structure (which will probably look different during the first couple weeks, the following couple weeks, and back to some version of normal into the 6-8 week range), then you’ve accomplished the most important decisions you will have to make that will determine your success in the first 30 days you are back.
After these two items, it is important that you review the protocols and guidelines for seeing patients related to sanitation and sterilization; which may even modify before you open but at least you need to inform your team, plan for supplies, and consider what is necessary.
Finally, if you aren’t already, you have to make sure that you are capturing every single call that comes in. Someone can answer at their home, keep a log, and take appropriate follow-up steps with each patient. If you can’t require team members to monitor the calls, then find a freelancer or independent contractor. These calls are too critical to be unattended and sent to voicemail.
So there you go, date or no date; team or no team…
Get prepared to re-open based on your decision on lost time, schedule structure, procedural priorities, sterilization protocol updates post-pandemic, phones, phones, phones (if you are at all worried about money, for goodness sake then you ought to be treating every patient, every call, every opportunity like gold).
It is NOT surprising to me in the least that the people who aren’t sweating the money or the time off because they are in a stable position are the ones being the most proactive, answering every call, stacking up new patients, doing virtual consults to line up diagnostic opportunities, reaching out to their patients. They are taking care of their assets now like they always have.
The opposing mentality (the ones with the most worry, angst, and concern), are fixated on money, cutting expenses, neglecting their patient relationships, and unprepared for return. They are doing nothing to protect the assets as if they are already out of business and staying that way.
Of course, it’s practical and prudent to manage cash-flow, but the longer you focus on the opposite of what is going to make the difference the longer you are going to be stuck with the problems you are fixated on.
At some point, as the weeks go by faster and faster, you have to turn your focus to the future and start materializing what you really want to come out of this.
Next week, we’ll move into stages of date setting and action taking to position your two-week blitz to re-open. While we may not know when it is exactly, we certainly know what to do and how to prepare. Stay tuned.
