Patient Experience

We are yet to come across a practice that believes that it’s patients really appreciate the way in which they cut corners and avoid certain responsibilities on a routine basis to keep the cost of care low. Patient’s like to know that their care is in the hands of a team of dedicated professionals.

(They just don’t necessarily want to pay for that level of professionalism…)

Equally, it’s pretty rare to find a practice where the basic standards of care have been agreed upon by all and written down. This isn’t to suggest that each individual on the team doesn’t know what their standard of care is, it’s merely that in most cases the standard varies from one team member to another.

Your standards of care need to be defined by your team, for your practice. If you do “what the insurance company covers” expect your patients to follow the same philosophy.

This is a sample of a typical ‘Office Standards of Care Example’ to help you with your deliberations Here is a document for you to write in your basic ‘Office Standards of Care’.

Very few practices don’t know what they should be doing for each patient visit. In fact, it would be fair to say that all practices have an excellent knowledge of what they should be doing. We could even go one-step further and say that most practices do everything they should do.

The problem is consistency. Doing everything that we know should be done, with every patient, every visit. It is often difficult to get a team to accept that they fall a long way below this standard.

There are many reasons why we might decide not to take a set of x-rays on a patient, but they only count if you made a conscious decision not to take them.

We encourage you to work on data rather than ‘feelings’ wherever possible. Performance Management of the practice is essential if you want to do things well consistently. If you pay attention to an area it improves.

We will address Performance Management in great detail elsewhere on the site, but to give you a taste here is a ‘Meeting Scorecard Example’ similar to those we use to drive and inform our bi-monthly client meetings.

Alternatively, you can create your own ‘Monthly Performance Monitor’. Performance Management is a powerful tool, use it.

It’s super important to prepare fully for the patient’s visit if you are going to deliver an acceptable Patient Experience. And to do that you must define exactly what you mean by preparing thoroughly.

For a basic hygiene appointment, the minimum should be:

• Insurance Verified – Patient’s Insurance is current, outstanding benefits are confirmed,
• history of treatment confirmed
• What is due this visit – What type of exam is due? What X-rays do we expect to take? Is the
• patient due to be probed? (This should be in line with your Office’s Standards of Care)
• Does the patient have an outstanding account balance?
• Does the patient have an outstanding treatment plan?
• What consent forms are required?

Having checked the above and amended the appointment the following can be prepared:

• Route slip
• Consent forms
• Medical history & medication update
• Copy of any outstanding treatment plans

This preparation takes time and therefore should not be left until the last minute, start prepping for a patient’s visit at least 3 days ahead.

At this point in time the Dental field has not fully embraced the use of checklists. This simple exercise that we would expect to be completed with 100% accuracy each visit is often only partially completed. A simple checklist would help address this. Checklists are great tools, you should be using them.