#872: Are Your Systems Outdated?

The Dental A Team Podcast

It’s a very techie world out there, meaning there’s probably a more streamlined way to perform some of the systems in your practice. In this episode, Kiera talks about how to go about innovating before you're forced to. She touches on different points to check on in your practice, and gives ideas for outsourcing opportunities to make that day-to-day all the easier.

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Transcript:

Kiera Dent (00:00.91)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and I love podcasting. I love when I get to hang out with you guys. I know I'm not sitting there with you, but I just truly do get excited. I told my husband I had to like take a shower and wash my hair fully and as women, those of you who know, you know, but washing the hair to get it ready to go is a big deal. My husband's like, you got to do your hair. And I was like, yeah, because tomorrow's podcast day. And he said,

then you must love it tomorrow because you always love podcasting. He's like, I always know when you're doing podcasts because you're so happy. And I really am. I enjoy being able to share ideas with you. I love to be able to give you guys tangible tips. I love to work with our sponsors and looking for industry leaders and share them with you. And truly it's just a joy for me to serve and to be able to give back to an industry that I love so much. I hope you guys love today. I hope you are enjoying today. And as always, please go leave us that review. Those of you who are doing it, I just want to say thank you.

Go leave a review wherever it is because your reviews keep us as the top podcast. So leaving the reviews and also sharing this in Facebook groups. You guys are hanging out in there. People are asking for it. Just be like, Hey guys, I love the Dental A Team podcast. If you're ever looking for a new podcast, something as simple as that is going to help us truly get into the hands of every single dental practice to bring positivity, to bring joy and to bring tactical practical that they can implement today. So today I wanted to dive into

are your systems dated? And the reason that this came to me is because my grandma is quite elderly. So my grandma and I actually share the same birthday. That's kind of fun. My grandma, great grandma and myself all actually have the same birthday. So all on the maternal line as well. It's a very random fact about me. And I was born at 11 55 p at night. So I barely made the day. My grandma, she is very elderly.

But I was watching her and my grandma was very disappointed because in the past, what she used to do is she would have a system for printing pictures. My grandma loved to take pictures. And I remember my grandma and grandpa, whenever they'd come, she had her little camera and she had a little notebook and a teeny tiny pencil. Like my grandma would like sharpen that thing clear to the little like aluminum portion of the eraser. But my grandma always had her little pencil and they had it numbered for the film numbers and she would write what every picture was and where she was at.

Kiera Dent (02:18.734)

And I remember I was talking to her a couple of days ago and she's like, I just get so annoyed, Kara, because there's nowhere that prints film pictures for me anymore. And I have to do it on my phone. And I was thinking about my grandma and I thought about some practices. And so I wrote down the podcast topic of are your systems dated? Meaning are we doing things just because we've always done them, but there could be a better way to do it. So for example, I did a podcast with Moolah, a credit card processing company and

just hearing all the things they do of managing memberships and having online payments and being able to send statements and be able to have drip campaigns, be able to have texts to pay. How many of practices are not staying up to date with the technology that's coming into play? There's another office that we chatted with and they have a virtual assistant who's working in the front office and it's very cool through Reach, which is another company that I love. But they're using a virtual assistant that's in Brazil that's actually sitting on camera.

and they're able to answer phone calls and they're able to have real time training with the practice. So it's basically like you have somebody there, but it's for a discounted rate for sure. There's virtual assistants in the Philippines. I've got some companies that I'm currently vetting for you guys. And as soon as I love them, I'm going to refer them and share them with you. But just thinking about the systems, thinking about how we set up for crowns, thinking about how we do our sterilization, thinking about how we answer our phones, thinking about how we do our insurance verification with so much technology coming into play.

are your systems dated or do you have systems that people are even following? Like I said, I thought about my grandma with her little camera and her camera roll and all of us would be like, that is ridiculous. But it was a good system. My grandma always knew what her photos were. She knew where she was at. She knew which ones to do. She knew who was in the photo and she had a very good system for that. But that's a very dated system for today's world. And so thinking about our charts and like if you go back in time and we all had charts, I hope you don't have paper charts.

There's one office I'm calling them out. They do listen to the podcast and he had paper charts when I met him and I'm like, you didn't think to tell me that? Like that is a very dated thing, but he progressed and we use route slips and we have different types of handoffs that you can give people or different route slips or different charting that you can have, but just really going through and assessing. And so to give you guys kind of just an overview of some systems to be looking at, we have our 12 systems, which I'm sure you guys all know of and.

Kiera Dent (04:35.758)

The reality is I love our 12 systems because I think it's just a good overview checklist for you of looking at them. So what I have is like looking at your leadership and your office manager and like, what about your systems? And I read a good book, we did the book club on it, but come up for air really talked about systems and are we dated and are there ways that we could do it simpler, like a different way for email and for communication and Slack and how do we respond to it? We're in such a digital age of...

are we staying up to date or are we becoming dated and outdated like my grandma? I don't want you guys to get there. So looking at these 12 systems, I'll go through them and just kind of thinking of, is there a way that we could optimize and make it a little bit more efficient or are we doing some things a little more archaic and is there maybe a company that could offload this and make it a little bit easier would be a question I'd ask. So in our leadership and our office management, have we read the books like Come Up for Air or Buy Back Your Time or Traction? Are we implementing those things? Are we kind of dated and...

you know, we don't delegate, we don't have a process, do we have a software where we track all of our action items and that we're, we have a project management software where we're truly tracking it. I know that sounds silly and you're like, no, we have a piece of paper, Kiera. Well, truth be told, that's dated. It might work for you, but it is dated. I had an office that I was consulting and she's like, Kiera, I track all my numbers. And then I showed her a digital KPI scorecard that's in the cloud in the drive.

So when she's not at home or not in the office, she could actually see all these numbers and metrics. And she's like, gosh, Kara, I've been doing this. But again, that is a dated system. I'm not saying that paper is wrong, but I'm saying, is there a way that you could have better metrics, better ways that you could be tracking this more consistently if you just updated your system? So looking at all the things, what am I doing? And is there an easier, faster, more effective way that I could do this? And I know it sounds timely and it sounds like, well, why do I want to spend that much time on it?

The answer is because yes, there might be a startup cost of time, but then it becomes easy because for this doctor, for example, with the KPI she was tracking, what's awesome is now that we put it digital and it's in the cloud. All of her team can actually put in all those KPIs for her every single week. They're now looking at the numbers along with her and she doesn't have to do all the work. So yes, it's going to be a lift of about five ish hours for her to transfer the data. I think that that's still.

Kiera Dent (06:56.014)

ridiculous, I would say more like two hours to transfer it in and to get it all into place. But then she delegates it to her team. And now she doesn't have to track those numbers. And it's all there for her. Also, what's amazing about it being digital is she can actually create graphs of year over year over year growth to see how is she doing year over year, what's going on with it. And then she can also track and measure month over month as well. So just so many things that can be done. And that might even be a data system. And there might be an even easier way, but at least getting it to current to digital.

is going to help out. So back to our 12 systems, leadership and office managers, accountability and KPI tracking. What about our marketing plan? How's our marketing and is it dated? And can we digitize it? Can we make it more up to current times and trends? What about our patient journey and experience? What about tracking results? So KPIs, metrics, production per hour, diagnosing and closing, our reputation management.

quality control within the practice, time management and delegation, our meetings, and then our fulfillment in life. So that's for the doctors and for teams. I kind of have it a little bit different where I've got the leadership, then accountability. Sorry. For the teams, that's going to be a little bit different of a 12 system. So for the teams, what we do for them.

to see edit this portion. So for the teams, what it's going to be is we start out with that ownership in addition to leadership. Then we go to culture and accountability, then raving fans. What's our process for raving fans in our practice and getting those reviews?

Five -star patient experience, the journey, our billing department, our scheduling, our case acceptance and treatment coordinators, our dental assistants, our hygienists, our operations manual and systems, again, going back to meetings and then hiring and onboarding. What are the systems in all those different areas for you and how is your practice doing on those areas? So really looking at those 12 systems to see, are we dated in our culture? I was just asked the other day about,

Kiera Dent (09:16.878)

What can we do to incentivize our teams and how can we make this more fun? And I'm like, you could do an Amazon shopping spree, give them 10 minutes and people be like, my gosh, I never thought about that. That's getting up to current speed. So looking at other industries and sometimes even looking outside of dentistry, I love to pay attention when I go to grocery stores or to Home Depot, I love to pay attention to Amazon. I love to read up on books of bigger companies. How did they do it? But really listening, like that's why I recommended the book, Come Up for Air. That's why I recommended some of these other.

books, buy back your time, because they'll teach you efficiency models that you could do. So instead of being like my grandma, I think all of us would be, we think it's ridiculous. My grandma like, no grandma, you can just go click on that picture. You can see where you are. If you even search somebody's name, it's so smart. It will pull up all the pictures of that person. You can put them up in the cloud. You can put them in the drive. You can have them in Dropbox. You can print them out if you want. You can even buy a camera where you can take those photos and have it print out in a Polaroid. But for my grandma,

That feels hard for her. That feels like, no, the paper and pencil work just fine. And my grandma, she's well into her 80s. So maybe it's not time for her to update that system. And for some of you who might have an older practice or you might not want to be as innovative, sure. But I think modernizing it and getting it up to speed, looking at our payment processors, looking at how we do insurance verification, can we cluster things, looking at how we schedule, are there softwares out there that could help us? Are there virtual assistants that could cut down the time?

It was so crazy. I was talking to some really, really successful business owners and they said that they had a virtual assistant for every lead on their team. And I thought, how crazy would that be if offices actually did that? And all those mundane things could actually be transferred over to a virtual assistant that would be able to take it all. What about AI and what things have come into play? Are you using your softwares to the fullest? Are we using them so when we...

close it, are we actually doing like monthly CE within our software to figure out how to maximize and optimize our software? Are we looking to see how can we make our crown preps more efficient and effective? Are we doing trainings to get it even faster when we're doing scans in the mouth? Are we looking for our patient experience and optimizing that? Are we tracking our cases and making sure we're following up on that? What systems do we have dated?

Kiera Dent (11:30.926)

and how can you modernize them is my question. So I love to do this. I love to work with practices. I love to give them ideas. I love to help them set up Google Drive. I love to help them see how they can use these. I love to show them how to run traction and use a leadership team. I love to show them how to track KPIs. And so if that's something you're like, I don't even know if my systems are dated, sometimes having an outside come into your practice and take a look can help you figure out where could we optimize and make it more efficient.

based on looking at hundreds of practices, because that's a vantage point we have as consultants that maybe you don't get to have. So I'd love to help you see are your systems dated, but really pick one or two, read some books, look to see where can we have it. So that way you're not like my grandma being so dated that you actually have missed the mark to get back on track. I'm so proud of my grandma that she doesn't just use a camera anymore, but the reality is she would still to this day be using a camera if they were still like printing film photos. So force her to innovate. And I say,

practices innovate before you're forced to because it's much easier, more efficient for your time and you'll be able to get a better bang for your buck with time, with team turnover, with team morale, with being able to minimize that team turnover and have better morale because we're actually maximizing and we don't have to work as hard and we can work on higher level projects as human beings and let softwares and technologies help with those lower projects. So really truly, I would just encourage you guys to reach out, look at it, reach out if I can help in any way. Hello @ TheDentalATeam .com.

but let's not have our systems dated. Let's be up to date. Let's be current. Let's optimize one area within each of those 12 systems and see where could we make one small shift that would help. I guarantee you we did it in our company and it's crazy because we switched to all internal communications in Slack and only external communications in email. Well, now for me to go retrieve information, I'm like, okay, I had that conversation with Shelby. It will be in Slack versus thing like, is it in the drive? Is it in Gmail? Is it there?

It sounds like the simplest, smallest change, but that truly did update our system. And now all of us know where to go to retrieve information. And it has truly cut down the scavenger hunt of trying to figure out information. So looking to see where do you maybe have some scavenger hunts? Where do things get clunky? And could we fix that in one way or another? That might be a good place to start. As always, we're here to serve. We're here to help. We're here to make your life easier. Hello @TheDentalATeam .com. And as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.