Treatment Planning for Success
by Barry Freydberg, D.D.S., F.A.G.D., F.I.C.D.
This simple monitoring effort can help you tap into your greatest source of lost production. Treatment plans are more than road maps for solving our patients’ oral health problems. From a business perspective, they are literally the inventory of our practices.
Over the course of most of our careers, many of us unwittingly become what some practice management consultants refer to as "filing cabinet millionaires." That is, we compile charts containing upwards of $1 million in uncompleted treatment.
We sometimes lose sight of this vast source of potential production. We become so preoccupied with finding new patients and getting more patients to refer to our practices that we fail to maintain proper contact with scores of patients in our files—patients who already like us and trust us and yet, for whatever reason, have not completed treatment.
Granted, some patients who haven’t completed treatment may be “lost causes.” But the fact is most of them aren’t. Through effective use of your office computer system you can dramatically improve your bottom-line performance by converting these cases to completed treatment—typically with a much lower investment of time and money than it would take to recruit new patients.
Making the change
The key is to make one relatively simple change: record and store treatment plan data on your office computer system. This won’t require much work on the dentist’s part. With the demands we face in performing procedures, the last thing we need to do is run the computer system, too. We do, however, need to direct the staff on capturing this data.
Start by realizing that treatment plans are the heart of your practice. To maintain a healthy practice, you need to consistently maintain contact with patients through treatment completion. This can be done with paper records, but it is far more labor intensive and less precise than maintaining electronic patient records. (Just ask anyone who’s conducted a chart audit with paper files.)
Next, talk with your staff about why you want to make this important change and how it will help them simplify the management base. If you’re not now using your practice management system for this purpose, consult your user’s manual or contact your vendor for guidance.
Gain with little pain
If your practice is decentralized and you schedule or enter diagnostic information at chairside, odds are you have already thought about treatment planning on the computer. But for those who have yet to bring computers into the operatory, electronic treatment planning makes sense as well.
Instead of dictating or transcribing a patient’s needs, you need to direct your staff to enter all this information into the computer. Current practice management software programs make this process easy and efficient.
Among the data you’ll want to store in the electronic treatment plan are:
- Prescribed treatment.
- Estimated fees for the procedures.
- Records of the calls that have been made to the patient and why the patient declined or delayed treatment. (Many practice management software programs have data entry fields that enable system users to enter this information in just a few keystrokes.)
- Whether the treatment is to be completed in a single visit or scheduled in phases (perhaps due to financial or insurance reasons).
It’s important to note that the treatment plan differs from an appointment plan. The treatment plan covers how you will meet the patient’s treatment needs, while the appointment plan outlines the sequence of when treatment will be completed.
The benefits of going electronic
Once you maintain treatment plans on your computer system, you’ll be able to generate reports that will help you and your staff:
- Improve communications with scheduled patients and those who have become inactive in the practice. Your staff can make reactivation calls from the computer, with the patient’s treatment needs readily available.
- Dramatically increase efficiency in reactivating patients.
- Conduct chart audits faster and more efficiently.
- Prioritize patient reactivation calls.
Likewise, dentists who store treatment plan data electronically can instantly analyze case acceptance rates by provider, case completion rates and the amount of dentistry diagnosed per patient by each dentist. These can be great tools for removing some of the subjectivity when trying to evaluate associates, not to mention in helping you develop a clear picture of your practice’s overall performance.
Storing treatment plans in the computer also has many benefits for your staff. Let’s say a patient leaves the office and says she’ll call next week to schedule an appointment for a crown you’ve recommended. The patient calls back, but can’t recall exactly what the procedure was that you recommended. With the information in the computer, the receptionist can quickly access it and schedule the appointment for the appropriate amount of time without having to pull the chart or worse yet, bother you while you’re treating another patient.
The key to successfully converting to electronic treatment planning is to be consistent once you’ve made the change. In our group practice, I meet with my staff weekly to discuss our progress.
Reviewing the data is quick and easy, and it helps us address small problems before they become large problems. And in the end, our team efforts help us maintain control of our most precious inventory—our patients.