I was in an office up in Alaska a couple years ago and when I walked behind the counter into the front office I was shocked at what I saw. Completely filling the front side of two cabinet doors was a wallpaper of color coded post it notes. I asked the front office gal "What in the world is all of that?" Her response was "Well, that is our ASAP list and messages from patients."
When I see post it notes all over the office I know the team does not have a good way of communicating between each other or making effective notes inside of the practice management software. In today's article I want to tackle the intra-office communications, here you go . . .
Eliminate the Sticky Note Syndrome
Every office is unique. You might be a specialty practice, a group practice or a solo practitioner. You may have a team of 5 or a team or 25, but you all have one thing in common ... Post-it notes and messages everywhere. Almost every front office I walk
into has colored  Post-it notes all over the desk and almost every doctor has piles of charts on his or her desk. I hope you all have stock in the 3M company for all the colored sticky notes you use. Let's figure out a way to clean this all up.
Let's look four effective options for improving your Intra-Office Communications. This relates to how you all communicate with each other inside of your practice. Since you all live in your practice management software all day, I want you to create an Intra-Office Communication system within your Dentrix software because this will help you be as efficient and productive as possible.
- My favorite option is to use the Office Journal for communicating with your team. Did you know that not only every patient has an Office Journal but every team member as well? You can create your own TO-DO list or put a task on someone else's TO-DO list. You can also set up future reminders and have your Office Journal "pop-up" every morning and set up your day for any tasks that are due. What if your doctor needs to write you a narrative or phone in a new RX for a patient? What if you need to remember to call a patient back in April or send in your doctor's license renewal by June 1st. Putting a Reminder on the Office Journal will solve all of this.
- You can use the Appointment Note as a TO-DO list for the entire office. This note is located in the upper left corner of the Appointment Book and it is just a blank piece of paper you can make notes on. Think of it as a big sticky note.
- The third option for Intra-Office Communications is to use the Dentrix integrated IM system, Dentalink. You can set up Dentalink and send messages back and forth from workstations to alert team members of things happening. If the hygienist is running behind, he or she can send an IM up to the front alerting them. Or maybe the front office wants to send a message to the doctor's office workstation. These IM messages show up as a "bubble" in the lower right of the workstation and are good for today only.
- The final option for you is relatively new and has more features than just a communication system. One of my favorite companies, Simpifeye, has integrated their schedule management tool into the Dentrix software. The system pulls the Dentrix appointment book into the Simplifeye dashboard where you can follow the patient appointment from reception room all the way to check out. The reason I am showcasing it here is that you can send a IM to your entire team or a specific person throughout the day.
Save on Post-it notes, clean up your desk and communicate better with your team with these three options for Intra-Office Communications.
Dayna Johnson, author - The Dentrix Office Manager blog
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