Summary: As orthodontic practices shift from analog to digital workflows, the role of a dedicated digital coordinator is emerging as a game-changer for efficiency and patient management. By streamlining digital processes, orthodontists can focus more on patient care while reducing unnecessary administrative burdens.
Key Takeaways:
- A dedicated digital workflow coordinator can significantly enhance a practice’s efficiency, often replacing the need for multiple additional hires.
- Digital treatment coordinators help orthodontists delegate repetitive tasks, allowing them to spend more time on patient care and practice growth.
- Efficient digital workflows ensure smoother patient management, reducing missed appointments, lost appliances, and administrative inefficiencies.
As software unlocks efficiency and opportunity for orthodontic practices, a digital coordinator can help manage all that data.
By Steven Martinez
There was a time when orthodontics was a mostly analog profession, but today’s practices are repositories of digital data that handle everything from scheduling to monitoring a patient’s progress.
Innovations like digital impressions, remote monitoring, and custom appliances promise to increase the efficiency of a practice by reducing the time a doctor and a patient need to spend in the same room together. However, while this has the potential to open more opportunities for bringing in new patients, it also changes the workflow for orthodontists and staff.
“You’re seeing a shift from analog orthodontics, where I have to physically glue braces on and bend wires, to more of a digital practice,” says Barry Glaser, DMD, owner of Glaser Orthodontics in Cortlandt, NY. “We’re going from bending wires to bending pixels, where my treatment planning now happens on a computer.”
That’s where the idea of a digital coordinator comes in. With large amounts of data coming into a practice and different staff members devoting themselves to each process, having positions dedicated to streamlining and keeping track of these digital workflows can hold the key to unlocking their full potential.
How orthodontics is like rocket science
One of the things that a digital coordinator can unlock for a practice is reducing the time a doctor spends doing unnecessary tasks outside of their needed expertise. Running an orthodontic practice is more than just seeing patients and if a doctor isn’t careful about how they delegate those tasks, they could find their valuable time being eaten up.
“Having a digital treatment coordinator is going to help to free you up from some of the repetitive tasks that can be delegated,” says Glaser. “You could spend less time in the office so that you could focus on other things like the patients and managing the practice and marketing.”
Glaser says that in his practice, his digital treatment coordinator handles everything until the patient decides to proceed with treatment. A child of the ’60s, Glaser remembers watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon when he was 7 years old and listening to the radio chatter between Apollo 11 and the NASA engineers back on Earth. One aspect of the launch that fascinated him was the almost invisible handoff from Launch Control at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral to Mission Control in Houston. Two separate, dedicated groups of NASA engineers were handling different mission stages. Glaser sees parallels to that in how his practice functions in the digital age.
“Lindsey, my treatment coordinator, she’s Launch Control,” says Glaser. “She’s handling everything all the way up until the point that the patient makes a down payment and says, Yes, I want to start treatment.”
His digital treatment coordinator handles new patient acquisition, taking the diagnostic records, presenting fees, and compiling all the information. Once the patient commits to treatment, Lindsey sends Glaser an electronic note in his practice management software to tee up the next stage of the mission.
“Mission Control is actually everybody else in the practice, handing it off to me and the clinical staff that see the patients on a monthly basis,” says Glaser. “Shifting the roles of your staff from doing things physically on a patient’s tooth versus sitting on a computer does make the practice more efficient. If you still use your old analog workflows, you’re kind of missing out.”
Keeping track of patients
Glaser’s practice is on the smaller side, with only a single location and a handful of dedicated staff. Still, he says, the efficiencies unlocked by these digital workflows have also required some additional maintenance to ensure everything is running smoothly.
Every Invisalign patient at his practice uses remote monitoring, so each quarter, Glaser and his staff set aside a morning with no appointments to sit at their computers and review all their systems to bring up every patient’s files. Instead of going from chair to chair and seeing patients, Glaser goes from desktop to desktop and looks at images that the patients have sent in to ensure they haven’t missed anything.
He says during these reviews, they often find a half dozen to a dozen patients who haven’t been sending in any images for their treatment. The review acts like a safety net to catch these delinquent patients and get them back on track.
“We’re going to catch stuff like that, worst case scenario, every 3 months,” says Glaser. “It’s important to have some backup systems to make sure that you don’t become complacent and over-reliant on digital technology.”
READ MORE: Dr Glaser’s Top 10 Reasons to Use Virtual Treatment Monitoring
But at a larger practice, the number of patients and their associated digital footprints can become unwieldy. Blake Davis, DDS, MSD, manages two practice locations in the Greater Seattle Area, and he realized that he needed somebody to take charge of all the different moving parts so that his staff could use their digital tools more effectively.
“When we used to just have things on the shelf, we could take a bracket, it didn’t matter where the patient was, and throw it on a tooth,” says Davis. “But once we started using aligners and other things that were customized to the patients, it became a whole new world, and I realized I needed somebody to manage this massive inflow and outflow of product.”
Davis’ first solution was to assign a lead assistant to manage the product workflow for his practices, but he says they still struggled daily with missing appliances and appointments that they weren’t prepared for. As his practice grew, his workload outpaced the old systems for managing patients and their treatment. That’s when he decided to appoint someone to manage it all.
The digital workflow coordinator
Davis created a job listing on Indeed for a Digital Workflow Coordinator without really knowing what the job would entail. He knew what he needed to fix, the inefficiencies that were creating headaches for him and his staff, but it wasn’t until he hired Allie Erickson as his digital workflow coordinator that the two were able to flesh out what was at first only a sketch of a position.
Erickson had no previous experience in the dental field. She had a degree in biology but was working at a Starbucks and thinking of transitioning to a dental assistant career when she came across Davis’ job listing. Once she was hired, it became clear that nobody at the practice was entirely sure what her role would be.
“I think that people were a little unsure exactly what my role was when I came in,” says Erickson. “But within that first year, almost every single member of the staff said, now that you’re here, I don’t have to worry about this.”
The position was created collaboratively with Davis, directing Erickson to develop new workflows, systems, and game plans to smooth out the problems his practice had been experiencing. His practices deal with many custom appliances, aligners, and custom brackets, and Erickson was tasked with tracking the appliances from the entry of their prescription to their delivery at either practice location. She is also the point person for new projects, customer support issues, and any troubleshooting needed with the practice’s systems.
With Erickson’s changes, a patient’s journey from entry through treatment follows a preset path, regardless of how unique their case is, so that Davis and his clinical staff can focus on the parts that matter most to them. Davis also taught Erickson aspects of digital design for patients, which he says has cut down on the amount of “digital homework” he had for any given case.
“There’s probably 10 to 15 things that are involved in getting a patient prepped for delivery in the clinic,” says Davis. “And I really only have two touchpoints out of that, which is pretty amazing.”
A dedicated role
In his estimation, Erickson’s role and the workflows she has created and implemented have saved Davis from needing to hire three additional people. He gives a lot of credit for the success of his digital workflow coordinator role to Erickson’s innate qualities, like her obsessive attention to detail, high level of organization and critical thinking skills, and her ability to work independently while still being a team player.
“Not everyone on the team has the characteristics to be highly organized and focused on the details of the flow of appliances in and out or why all that matters for our schedule,” says Davis. “So, to take that off their plate and allow them to focus on what they’re good at makes everyone much happier, and I think if you ask anyone now, they couldn’t live without someone like Allie.”
Davis says that he doesn’t think that a digital workflow coordinator is a role that could be tasked to a random assistant who wasn’t as busy to fill in the gaps. It requires somebody who is focused on pushing the entire practice forward by building out and executing systems that improve everyone on the team’s life.
“I think if most orthodontists were honest with themselves, they would look in the mirror and say they spend far too much time doing things that are not even their strengths,” says Davis. “So why not have somebody support them and support the practice in a way that elevates everybody’s level of care and attention to detail?” OP
Steven Martinez is the associate editor for Orthodontic Products.
Photo: ID 77094687 @ Undrey | Dreamstime.com
