Ten minutes of your Monday morning meeting are dedicated to a review of key barometers of the prior week. The Weekly Performance Monitor form needs to be completed and filled out by the appropriate staff member, ready to be reviewed.

Rationale

Ever experience this? It's mid-March and you have had a nice little run. New patients are calling. Cash flow seems decent. And naturally, morale is on the rise. Staff members chirp in, "Things are really good lately, don't you think? Fewer cancellations. Less complaints." Sound good? Sure, but you can't learn from it. It's empty. The one and only way to really know how you're doing is through tracking. The Weekly Performance Monitor shows the barometers we track.

Why is this worthy? Let me give one example of a payoff. In the course of a year, each of us has had the unpleasant experience of examining a hygiene patient only to reveal caries on the distal margin of No. 15 crown that you did just two years ago. How did that happen? One of the more eroding factors to your profitability are re-do's - non-productive time. The only verifiable way to track the amount of these you do each year is to regularly record these "data." Contrary to my own and my staff's "gut" feeling, we found that we did more re-do's than what a quality office would deem acceptable. So, we re-instituted the dental school's protocol of a bitewing film prior to cementation. Feeling with an explorer just didn't cut it. This was equally true for how "on time" we had been or how "happy" the practice was - at least in terms of compliments.

The Monday morning review protocol is not unlike many in these newsletters. It requires discipline and patience before it will become habit. But the "dream" won't be built on "gut feelings" you have. It will be built on real answers. Answers you'll need to review each Monday.