PART 4
I can’t quite figure out where it fits.
I believe for most practices that have taken a good hard look at digital patient flows, spent time researching platforms to help, looked at treatment modalities that are beneficial and brought some of them into your practice you are working within a broken system. Meaning you have found this piece, that piece and plugged them in where they fit trying to put the digital patient flow puzzle together but still very unclear or confused as to what the complete picture looks like.
When we take this approach of plugging in pieces without a clear path to the goal, we do at least one of the following things that provide severe blows to our progress.
1. We don’t fully utilize the capabilities of what we have purchased.
2. The staff is not trained properly on how to use the platforms or understand what it means to the big picture.
3. We believe that this piece will provide the solution to our problems (it likely helps a problem, but doesn’t SOLVE problem).
The problem is for practices in this category is that we have asked ourselves some of the hard questions, we know that there are things we need to do to “keep with the times” but we do not in our hearts believe the pace at which our industry is changing and bothered to ask the REALLY HARD QUESTION, and there really is one big one for practice owners … how am I going to survive in the field I spent 10-11 years of education pursuing?
External influences like DIY braces, general dentists, DSO’s, employee retention, physical costs, etc. need to be addressed loudly and head and often the answers will require new solutions to what you have been doing.