5 Ways to Keep Your Team Improving

Your dental practice has a lot of moving parts, and each is strategically aligned around setting and achieving team performance goals. 

Even with those in place, there’s no guarantee that everything will sync up effectively. You still need to constantly recalibrate your goals to reach new levels of practice growth and quality patient care.

Add Some Kaizen

Kaizen is an ancient Japanese philosophy that embraces a culture of continuous improvement. Team members at all levels work together to achieve regular, incremental improvements to processes. Lean Production notes that Kaizen as a philosophy that “combines the collective talents within a company to create a powerful engine for improvement.” 

The same article summarizes the Kaizen process as follows:

1. Plan
2. Do
3. Check
4. Act 

Generally, the Kaizen philosophy encourages your teams to think differently about their workflows and the tasks that drive them on a daily basis.

There’s a cumulative and collaborative effect to the continuous and ongoing improvement at the core of a Kaizen mindset. The more specifically you apply it to your team performance goals, the greater the potential for an aligned practice culture.

Let’s look at five ways you can implement this philosophy to help your team keep improving.

1-Production Improvement

This might seem like a no-brainer. But it’s easy to become complacent about production metrics. There is a perception that scheduled patients will naturally lead to production volume, but as you know, not all patients on the books convert to treatment. 

There’s also production that relies on reimbursements and collections. 

Give strategic attention to your production improvement loop:

• Monitor your scheduling pace
• Manage and reduce patient wait times
• Make treatment presentation quality a priority

With careful attention to strategic things, you can improve your practice’s production.

2-Hiring and Team-building Improvement

Your team members can feel a sense of ownership or obligation relative to your dental practice performance goals as you do a few key things.

• Hire for development potential
• Empower team members to take ownership in goal development, goal achievement, and goal evaluation
• Invest in team-building and ongoing educational opportunities

You can’t meet your practice goals. Involve your team so everyone is working together to continually improve your practice.

3-Workflow Efficiency Improvement

Your efficiency often rises to the level of your systems. And your systems typically require ongoing improvement to stay efficient.

Focus your attention on those high production zones within your dental practice.

• Scheduling
• Marketing
• Patient communication including follow-up and appointment reminders
• Team-building
• Collections and reimbursements

Improving efficiencies in these areas will increase efficiency all around.

4-Marketing Improvement

Dental marketing is about acquiring, engaging, and retaining patients. Leads and referrals flow toward intentional marketing strategies as you:

• Track patient acquisition data
• Listen to your patient’s questions, concerns and input
• Create marketing messages that resonate with patient personas
• Ask for reviews and referrals 
• Consistently evaluate and improve the patient experience at every touchpoint within your practice

Improving your marketing processes helps to keep your chairs full not just in the immediate future but long-term.

5-Lifetime Patient Value (LPV) Improvement

A worthwhile goal for dental patient retention is creating long-term, loyal patient relationships. You’re after the relationships that evolve into a high and consistent LPV. 

Track and measure this kind of patient behavior that produces and highlights loyalty to your practice:

• Treatment acceptance history
• Inquiries about your services
• Financing and payment history
• Referrals and reviews

Your dental practice data analytics provide vital perspective for ongoing improvement around team performance goals. Data is more than facts and numbers; it provides useful operational strategies you can use to drive improvement. 

Check out the following resources for more insight about mining your data for continuous improvement:

Follow a Data Mining Primer to Maximize Your Available Dental Patient Data

5 Ways to Transform Your Results With Dental Analytics

Data-driven Improvement Strategies Develop Around Proven Analytics Tools 

The Jarvis Analytics platform helps you ensure that you’re tracking the important metrics and staying on track with your goals as your dental practice grows and expands. 

Experience Jarvis in action. Request a demo today!