As your practice grows and evolves, you will inevitably see many things get more complicated. Employee management, clinical caseload, digital work, communication, and many other factors of orthodontic practice become more challenging as your patient base increases. As the growth of your team also adds more complexity, leadership skills become paramount. In addition, more clear aligner patients lead to a bottleneck in ClinChecks or other CAD work. Thus, your digital workflow management becomes critical. More complexity can limit the productivity of a team and lead to burnout. Let’s review these three ways you can simplify and magnify your orthodontic work.
Rethink
Consider a productivity mindset fostered by avoiding bottlenecks in your practice that prevent team members from getting things done. Rethink office systems, simplifying them so an orthodontic team can deliver great care to patients without complex and bureaucratic steps. Every business is fraught with organizational obstacles that prevent growth. Likewise, orthodontic practices are no different.
Subtract
With time and growth comes what I like to refer to as clutter. Like an old home builds mess in the garage or basement, an orthodontic practice can develop organizational complexity by stacking procedures and a process that has marinated for many years. This clutter leads to significant process bottlenecks. In these cases, consider that subtracting steps and complex issues adds to the experience in your office. Removing redundancies and actions that don’t add value to patients and the practice is liberating. Imagine that instead of a long to-do list, you reached the same outcome without having to do a lot of busy work. Measure the results from the daily actions of your team and reconsider removing tasks that don’t add significant benefits.
Systemize
Developing simple and commons sense systems allow a business to grow and improve the patient experience. Creating a recipe for success takes time to sit down and distill the key ingredients that are repeatable and impactful. In orthodontics, we deal with many complex issues and a wide variety of malocclusions. But we can systemize routine steps to delegate appropriately. We can leverage an orthodontist and team simplifying 80-90% of what they do to magnify excellence and attention to the 10-20% unique aspects of patient care that receive more attention due to proper systems.
“Solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple so that you have no sense of how difficult this thing was.” – Steve Jobs
