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| Gary Kadi |
Power Thought by Gary Kadi
How to Bring Accountability to the Front Desk
On a baseball team, everybody has a specific role to play. The pitcher pitches, the shortstop plays short, and they don't suddenly switch positions in the middle of the game. Your front desk ought to be the same way.
In most dentists' offices, the front desk has no accountability whatsoever. Oh, they all have jobs to do-they mind the appointment book, locate charts that have somehow fallen between the file cabinets, call patients to remind them of upcoming appointments, make coffee. But the reality is that when everyone is responsible for everything, no one is truly responsible for anything.
THE REALITY IS THAT WHEN EVERYONE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING,
NO ONE IS TRULY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING.
I want you to begin to move your front desk people into two specific positions: an appointment coordinator, to manage your time, and a treatment coordinator, to manage your finances. Ultimately, you want these individuals to be spending eighty percent of their time on those tasks. Otherwise, they will simply do the easiest, least confrontational things in the world, like confirming appointments. Meanwhile, if they don't fill the appointment book properly, your precious time is lost forever. And if they don't coordinate treatment with good agreements, you'll be back to where you were, with lots of accounts receivable.
Also, you don't want to have to be working on a patient while worrying whether Annie is on the phone at the front desk finding someone to come in and fill the suddenly vacant four o'clock. You want to keep your energies focused on practicing dentistry, not on making sure that other people are doing what they're supposed to do.
What exactly are these new positions, appointment coordinator and treatment coordinator?
The appointment coordinator has the responsibility of maximizing the effectiveness of your time. You want to set up a game with your appointment coordinator. Let's say you are a two-doctor, two-hygienist office. Let's say you'd like to have the office gross $2 million a year, while you only work sixteen days a month. Sound good so far?
Two million dollars a year breaks down to roughly $166,000 a month. If you want to work only sixteen days, your office has to generate $10,000 a day for each of those sixteen days. This means that each doctor should do $4,000 worth of dentistry a day and each of your hygienists should do $1,000 worth of work as well. Two doctors each grossing $4,000, plus two hygienists each grossing $1,000, equals that $10,000 a day. Multiply that $10,000 a day by the sixteen days you want to work (incidentally, that's just four days a week, with no nights or weekends). That's $160,000 a month . . . and that's just shy of two million a year.
Compensate your appointment coordinator based on her ability to reach that financial goal. Give her a bonus of $10 per provider per day that she books $4,000 worth of dentistry for each of the doctors and $1,000 worth of services for each hygienist. Many dentists worry about how much they'll have to shell out in bonuses, so let's take a look. Your maximum exposure equals four providers a day times ten dollars a day times sixteen working days a month. That's a maximum possible $640 a month, in exchange for which you'll be hitting your goal of approximately $2 million. Not a bad return on investment, wouldn't you agree?
Let's take a deeper look at the numbers. You'll find that your dedicated appointment coordinator will pay for herself from day one. If you pay her $12 an hour for eight hours, that works out, taxes included, to around $100 a day. A typical dentist, prior to the implementation of this system, often makes $400 or more per hour. If the appointment coordinator fills and keeps just one additional hour that would have gone open had she not been serving as your dedicated appointment coordinator, you made money. And that's just if she filled in that one extra hour. Imagine if you were compensating her with bonuses on a daily basis, so that she makes those goals every day.
To return to our baseball metaphor, fans and players alike sometimes forget that April games count as much as September games in the standings. It all adds up. In your office, you want to act as if every day was the World Series of cash flow. Most dental offices pay bonuses based on what their people do every month or even every year. These bonuses are often tied to a metric or statistic that has nothing to do with the actual job descriptions of the team members. For example, an assistant may receive a bonus for collections, an aspect of the practice with which she has no actual connection.
That method doesn't work, because people only start to focus on what they are earning or what they should be doing once bonus time rolls around. Or they're helpless to affect their bonuses, because there's no connection between what they do and what they can earn bonuses for. Sure, it's great to have a team that plays their September games with intensity. But you want them just as focused on those April dates as well! How do you make this happen? Have bonuses accrue on a daily and hourly basis. I'll show you how to do this later on, but this is the approach you want to begin to take.
You also want to turn one of your people into a treatment coordinator. This is an individual who closes cases, especially when your patients come out of hygiene. Here's how it works-the patient has his teeth cleaned with the hygienist, who notices and points out specific dental work that is necessary (and accrues a bonus for all cases that she initiates). In most offices, the patient goes directly from the hygienist to the front desk, to schedule an appointment. But the patient has not really agreed to any treatment. In fact, the patient may be simply making an appointment just to save face-he or she may have no intention of following through and actually showing up for the work.
That's not acceptable anymore.
In your new approach to practicing dentistry, make sure that your hygienist turns the patient over not to the front desk, but to your dedicated treatment coordinator. Your treatment coordinator will close the deal, get an agreement from the patient to show up, and have the patient agree to pay in advance, or at the latest, when the case is completed. Once people have made written agreements as to the treatment to be delivered and the terms of payment, they rarely back out of them. This is doubly true if they have put their money where their mouth is! (Couldn't resist that one!)
Incidentally, your treatment coordinator is also the person who will explain to new patients that "we are a zero balance office." You want to have that phrase tattooed on everybody'
s minds! A "zero balance office" is an office where patients are expected to pay in advance or when the case is completed. That way, you have no more accounts receivable-you just have cash in the bank. An excerpt from Gary Kadi's book
Million Dollar Dentistry.
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