Is Your Practice on the Brink of Chaos?
“Sandy, I need help! My front desk person had to leave suddenly due to a personal situation, and may not return. We are all struggling without her! I have deposits hitting my bank and have no idea to whom they belong. I can’t access my own practice’s website, email, or Facebook account. We can’t even attach x-rays to our e-claims! Can you help me?” This type of call happens more often than you would think.
Organizational knowledge is something many business owners take for granted. They have someone taking care of it and don’t give it much thought…until it’s too late. When that one employee with all of this information leaves, so does critical information about your patients, business, processes, and personal finances. In this age of digital access, electronic protections, HIPAA, and white-collar crime your business depends on this information. Dental practices that don’t have a system for capturing this invaluable knowledge, are putting themselves at risk for complete chaos.
What types of organizational knowledge am I referring to? In a dental office, I categorize them under three basic areas: personal, behavioral, and procedural.
Personal information is the everyday data that we need to do business, such as usernames, passwords, websites and vendor information.
Behavioral information is knowledge about your dental patient preferences. These are things like payment habits, appointment preferences, patients who can come on short notice, patients who need extra confirmation calls, patients who refer regularly, and patients who are usually no-shows.
Procedural information refers to the ins-and-outs of how the dental practice runs. This includes how to access and process your EFT payments, how to process overdue balances, how to attach narratives to e-claims, how to obtain real-time insurance estimates, and how to file medical insurance claims.
All of this helps a dental practice run efficiently and effectively, and without it every aspect of the practice is disrupted, including the patient’s experience.
Do you have a system to capture all of these details? Can you easily access them when needed? Don’t wait for a crisis; once this information walks out the door it may be too late.
