Orthotown March 2016 - (Page 8)

embrace progress // column Organizing the Digital Office By Daniel Grob, DDS, MS, Editorial Director, Orthotown Magazine It's been my experience that a practice that is small and organized will eventually become large and organized, which helps with staffing, training and treatment. On the other hand, practices that are large and disorganized will gradually become small and chaotic due to lack of clear guidelines for the doctor, staff and patients. And when it comes to a practice sale or transition, organized systems are essential! You may also recall that in my December column I shared Dr. Ron Roncone's advice to write a page a day to gradually get you and your staff in order and build an enterprise. These pages serve as a guide for getting organized. By now, if you have followed Dr. Roncone's advice, you should have 50 or so pages that need to be organized in order to be useful. These pages may be lists, procedures or scripts. Questions that need to be asked before proceeding are: Who is in charge? Where do we put the pages? How do we all benefit from the work of the team? A question that also needs to be asked is: What happens if one of the team members leaves? The three M's One of the first steps in organizing a practice is deciding what departments or file cabinets you will need, not only now, but going forward. During my career this has changed many times, but if you look closely at the business of orthodontics, you'll see three major issues confronting us every day. They are marketing, mechanics and management, or the three M's. 8 MARCH 2016 // orthotown.com Marketing is considered to be anything that involves getting the patient to the front door of the practice and into treatment. Once in the practice and through the sign-in procedure and office tour, the patient moves into the mechanics stage. Here the clinical treatment begins and ends, and includes everything in between. Management is keeping track of the money, staff and facility. This is everyone's job, and the necessary items, procedures, lists and scripts for this portion of the practice are kept in the management folder. All three folders can have subheadings related to various areas of the practice, staff, and projects being undertaken. is also available with expanded features. We have created a corporate account and utilize the shared-folder feature often. I suggest creating one main account with privileges for key employees. Folders can be shared with other employees, vendors or computer stations. Updates are automatic and simple, and with the corporate account, backups are available in case someone accidentally deletes or trashes some of the material in the folder. File sharing protocols allow for confidential material to be kept in a master account, and other material to be shared in the less secure or shared folders. The cloud Those of you who follow business may have noticed that Microsoft is getting much more aggressive in the cloud space, now that it has a new CEO. Quite honestly, its subscription-based Office product is much easier to use, and to add and delete from computers. You can give permissions to staff members to download software onto various machines, and delete it when necessary. Monthly billing is easy and reasonable. A Hotmail account or Office 365 account makes it easy to get started! Apple has been my longtime favorite, and its ecosystem makes utilizing Dropbox and other cloud-based services a breeze. Practically everyone has an iTunes account, and with it an Apple ID. I suggest creating one for the office as well! It's good to have a couple of Apple computers around the office, if for no other reason than it is popular with a whole lot of the kids and adults we deal with. The presence of Apple computers Anyone who has watched the maturation of digitization-from the fi rst computer and software introduced in the '80s with floppy disks and tape backups, to small handheld devices- can attest to the fact that keeping your information available and safely backed up, is extremely necessary. So you may appreciate the recent advances in cloud-based software and associated services available to the individual and business user. Many are available for free-or a minimal monthly or yearly fee-and almost all have individual and business versions. For example, at our practice we have been using Dropbox for years, and have organized our practice so that our staff and the people that we deal with can benefit, as well. Dropbox offers a free account with ample storage to anyone with an email account. A corporate or business account Apple or PC? http://www.orthotown.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Orthotown March 2016

Orthotown.com Highlights
Embrace Progress: Organizing the Digital Office
Wired for Success: Google Voice: The Future of Patient Communication
Welcome, Dr. Edmund Khoo, to the Orthotown Advisory Board!
Industry News
Simplifi ed Correction of Class II Using PowerScope
Looking Toward the Social Media Horizon
What’s On Your Tray? Tray for Bonding Brackets
Herbst Fixed Functional Treatment for a Severe Class II
I’ve Done a Tongue Guard … Now What?
Modern-Day Retention
Retainer Clasps
Message Board: Retention
New Products
Software Showcase
Product Profile: Burleson
Poll
How to Manage Overhead Percentages in the Practice
Ad Index

Orthotown March 2016