By Karen Moawad
Dream for a minute. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to run a list each month of Growth Guidance and Phase II Pending patients who were due but have not yet scheduled their recall visit for last month, this month, or next month, including those due for those same 3 months this year and every year in the past? In other words, the report would be designed to include all patients for 3 months. And all patients would keep their original recall until they schedule an appointment.
In January, you would have recalls due in December, January, and February. What if, in January you could send texts to all these patients? And then in February, you would have recalls due in January, February, and March. You could hit one button and send an email to all these people. And in March, April, and May, the cycle of texting, emailing, and calling repeats and continues throughout the year.
Three different contacts to each patient, three months in a row, and then one waits 9 months and the contact process starts again.
Hummingbird Associates and the programmers at Dolphin Imaging & Management Solutions put their heads together, and this process is working well now as one of the Hummingbird Reports on Dolphin Management. The reports are free for users. Other orthodontic software programs might offer similar reports. Thus, each practice should explore with their own software provider if such a report can be created.
We also developed another Hummingbird Report that gives a list of Growth Guidance and Phase II Pending patients who don’t have a recall. This allows for the creation of recalls for patients who may have “slipped through the cracks” because their recall was cancelled when they made a growth guidance or Phase II Pending appointment and then cancelled it without rescheduling. Using DIRT (the Dolphin Interactive Report Tool), they can be easily rectified.
And it is always enlightening to look at how many Growth Guidance patients are 14 and older. Except for severe Class IIIs, most of these patients should be in treatment. A report listing these names is also helpful.
In the end, reports like these can go a long way to growing your practice.
Karen Moawad is the founder and CEO of Hummingbird Associates. Hummingbird Associates is an international management consulting firm dedicated to developing the human and business side of orthodontic practices. Moadwad works as a coach/advisor/facilitator. She is a specialist in business strategy and organizational effectiveness and knows how to enhance the relationship between the two dimensions.
