It's time to perform a special audit in your practice! This one is called the Invisible Friction Audit. Kiera guides listeners through how to catch problems that might not be very obvious, but are total gamechangers in terms of practice operations.

Episode resources:

Transcript:

The Dental A Team (00:00)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and today is going to be a great topic. I hope you guys are excited about it because it's going to be an audit of your practice. I think that there's oftentimes invisible friction that's happening inside practices and offices oftentimes don't catch it. They don't understand what's going on and they're like, something's happening and it's just this invisible friction. And so how can we actually catch this sooner in your practice? If you guys are new to our podcast, welcome. I'm Kiera Dent, host and founder of the Dental A Team and the Dental A Team Podcast.

I'm obsessed with all things dentistry, including my last name being Dent. Our mission is to possibly impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible and to influence, inspire, and to motivate you to have the best practice, the best life, and the best team that you could ever imagine. I genuinely know and believe that running a successful practice does not need to be hard. I've had hundreds of thousands of clients tell us that, Carrie, you've changed our perspective. You've made this to where...

I feel happy about going to work. You've inspired my team. We've got team members that text us telling us how much they love working with Dental A Team. And that's our mission. That's our passion. That's what we are truly experts in the field for. And today, this is one of those things of like, when you have friction that's invisible, how do you actually fix that? How do you actually make this thing better? How do you make it to where, my gosh, like, like we don't know and how can we catch this? So I wanted to just help you see like, here's the quiet, invisible, almost like.

cobwebs in the back corner that if you are able to figure this out, fix it so it's not there, you're not just walking past it, hopefully your practice will be able to thrive. ⁓ So number one is just like, how long does it take to make decisions to move your practice forward? And delayed decisions, I remember one of my favorite quotes is, a wrong decision is better than like indecision. ⁓ Indecision actually impacts far greater than making a wrong decision and...

I remember I was at this really big financial conference and they were talking about how one of the presidents of the United States, I don't remember which one it was, came in and there was this big thing of who we're going and what different things they were going to do. And it had serious impact. And the president came in and made a decision. like, well, how do you know that's the right decision? He said, I don't. But what I know is us sitting in indecisions costing us more than making a wrong decision. And I've thought about that a lot of, I don't even think half of the decisions we make in a day and day out of a practice.

would impact millions of lives and different pieces. And yet I think we sit on them acting as if they are these big audacious decisions rather than just making a decision. And I think it also builds the decision-making bone in our body where it's like, okay, we just make decisions and we move forward. And I think empowering your team to be able to make those decisions without needing to come through you to make every decision. So for example, like delayed decisions on.

treatment sitting in unscheduled. like, are we calling on those people who's taking responsibility for that? Like, let's just get unscheduled treatment called in on a consistent basis. What about like billing and insurance errors and issues? What about lab cases not being tracked? What about our Invisalign and Ortho cases? What about team members where it's like, let's circle back later, let's circle back later. Like, just make the decision in the meeting and move forward and make sure we count about it.

What about like patients who need multiple touch points to commit and to say yes to treatment? Like, why did CareDent get so good at closing cases? Because I hated the follow-up. So it was always, and like, it's a two, two, two follow-up. But these like delayed decisions or who are we going to hire or what things do we need to have for this or what budget do we have? And I understand that being a business owner is like death by a thousand cuts. Like you just get pummeled with question day in and day out. So it's like.

Let's have set days where we make decisions and like, let's make the decision and move forward. All of us execute on it. Attraction by Gina Wickman is very big on, we come to the table to solve and make decisions and we move forward and we solve them forever. So I think when you have like practices, like this is just invisible friction that you don't realize is there, but it's all these things sit there like looming storm clouds because we're not moving forward. We're not getting them done. We're not actually executing on things. And then we have to,

follow back up and team members need to remember. And I'm just big on interaction they teach a lot about. We have our weekly leadership meetings and we solve the issues. Now, if there's something that's gonna take longer and doesn't need immediate care today, it can actually go on what's called a parking lot or long-term issues. And I think having this in your practice, having this as part of your cadence, if it doesn't need to have your decision today, get it moving, but stop the friction. And what we've seen is like,

When I have practices that start working on this and people have clear owners and we stop the decision fatigue and we stop having a lag in this treatment goes up, schedules get more full, tasks start to get resolved, team members feel like they get answers, doctors don't feel like there's so much sitting on their shoulders. And that's honestly just you moving things forward and having owners of it. So I also think of like when a treatment coordinator owns all of the unscheduled treatment and they own our

monthly goal and they own how many people are supposed to be in there, we increase our scheduling. Like I was your treatment coordinator. So we start getting more people on the books sooner. We start hitting our daily goals sooner. And I've got a cadence of if you don't schedule today, I call you in two days, two weeks, two months. And then I send you a letter. There's no question marks of how I follow up with these people. There's no like, well, call people, Kiera. No, like it's just a set process that we follow. And then we make sure that people are being accountable to that. I think it's just great. Like it's not changing anything. We're not having to bring in more patients. We're not having to change up.

Our marketing, like we just move things along without having the delay. So I think when you guys are sitting in meetings or you're looking at it, like look to see how can we make decisions sooner and solve things forever rather than sitting here and being like, well, we'll get back to that. We'll solve that later. We'll solve tha...

Has Your Practice Undergone the Invisible Friction Audit?