Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
Checklist Strategies for Streamlining Operations
Unlock the secret to a seamless dental practice with the power of checklists! Join me to reveal the transformative potential of a well-crafted checklist. How can you turn vague expectations into concrete action items? We address this question by focusing on specificity and practicality, ensuring your daily operations are not just completed but optimized for efficiency. By avoiding common pitfalls and embracing a structured approach, you'll discover how to enhance systematization and productivity in your practice.
Throughout this episode, we emphasize the importance of measurable outcomes and accountability, offering practical advice for implementing checklists that truly work. Explore the art of creating "today lists" and learn how to keep your team engaged and tasks on track. Plus, stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll switch gears to discuss how to craft and express your brand, featuring insights from the DPH coaches. Whether you're a new practice owner or a seasoned professional, this episode provides essential strategies for growth and a more fulfilling professional life.
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Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
I help dentists create thriving practices that make more money, require less of their time, and empower their teams to run the office seamlessly—so they can focus on what matters most.
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As a now 14-year practice owner, I have learned a few things over my time and my career, and one of the most powerful things that I have ever learned is how to use checklists to ensure that your practice runs in a consistent and predictable way. But so often we get really overwhelmed by checklists and you would be surprised to hear that a lot of times we can be doing the checklists wrong, so if you're not doing them correctly, they're not as effective and you won't get the true results that you really deserve from creating these checklists. So today I'm going to show you five of the biggest mistakes I see when creating checklists, what to do about them and how you can make your checklists more effective so that your team follows them, they actually get completed and that they are functional in the management of your practice. Let's get to it. You are listening to Dental Practice Heroes, where we help you create and scale your dental practice so that you are no longer tied to the chair. I'm Dr Paul Etcheson, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach and owner of a $6 million group practice in the suburbs of Chicago. I want to teach you how to grow and systematize your dental practice so you can spend less time practicing and more time enjoying a life that you love. Let's get started, all right.
Speaker 1:So, like I said, I have always been a really big checklist person and, honestly, for me, I have to write things down, I have to have things in lists. If you've heard me talk before, I've got a very elaborate checklist to-do list kind of system with five or six different lists. I move things around based on priority, but one of the things that is so critical to all of my checklists is that I always have a today list. All right Now. I used to have a list of things to do like it's a today list, all right Now. I used to have a list of things to do like it's a do list, like everybody else, but I always have a today list now, because the thing is is I want to check it off completely.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest things that I think just drives us into feeling like we're nonproductive is having a checklist that never finishes right. So we want to create these for our team. We want to create them for all the processes in our practice. This is how we systematize our practice. If you're finding you have checklists in your practice but they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. Chances are you might have to refine your checklist. One of the things that we do with coaching when I'm working with clients is we create all these checklists. This is what phase two of OmniPractice is about, and I always have my coaching clients. They send me their checklists and I see a lot of things, and these are mistakes that I make. We all make these mistakes, but these are the reasons these checklists don't work.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to give you just a quick example, just to think about just a generic checklist. Okay, I'm going to give you a generic checklist on how to be a generous person. Okay, ready. There's three items on this checklist. It's one be a good person. Two do nice things for people. Three be selfless. Now, how useful of a tool is that for you If you woke up every day and you said I got to do these three things today?
Speaker 1:Let's think about it. Those aren't really things that can be done. They're more like ways of being. They're more like larger expectations. They're not like a tangible thing that you can check off. It's not like you can say I did it or I didn't do it. There's a lot of in between. Be a good person. There's a lot of continuum there. What is good? What defines good? So I'm going to give you one more example.
Speaker 1:I'm going to tell you exactly how to systematize your practice. Here's the three-step checklist. You got to one create protocols. Two, you got to enforce the protocols. And three, you got to adjust those protocols. You're done, man, you did it. That's not a useful checklist.
Speaker 1:So we need to create checklists for a lot of things. I'll give you an example of like what we use them for in my practice. You know we've got checklists for 30, 60, 90s. We want to know what people, the skills they need to know at different points in them working at the practice, that we can onboard them correctly. We've got morning checklists. We've got end of day checklists. We've got weekly checklists, we've got monthly checklists. You can create a checklist for almost everything. We've got new patient phone call checklist. You know this is the information we need. Bam, bam, bam, bam bam. You want to build these protocols in your office, but you want to make them useful. So let's get into it.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the five most common problems that I see with checklists so that you don't have to make these mistakes yourself. And the first one is that it contains vague or ambiguous items. What I mean by that is that things are on this checklist that are unclear or they just leave way too much room for interpretation. So let me give you an example of this. You got a checklist, maybe for the front desk. One of the items on that daily checklist is check future appointments for scheduling issues. Okay, so what is a scheduling issue, and what do you mean by check? Does that just mean like see that they're there, look forward in the schedule and be like, yep, there's a scheduling issue? If I find a scheduling issue, what do I do with it? Another thing is like how far do we want to check ahead in the schedule?
Speaker 1:Because if this is a great example, let's put this on a checklist, follow up on unscheduled treatment and then go to your front desk at the end and say, hey, I saw that you checked this off. Did you do this? Yeah, I called a few people. You know it's like well, I mean, there's always more people to call. That checklist item will never end. It could literally go on for infinity. So if you ever saw somebody sitting on their phone or doing nothing, you could be like, hey, there's still things to do on your checklist and they're like I did it. You're like, no, you didn't, because there's still more people to call. It's not a good item to have on a checklist, so that is not something you want to put on a checklist.
Speaker 1:A solution is you want to be more concrete, you want to be more clear. So an example would be review all the appointments scheduled for the next seven days and ensure there are no double bookings. If so, correct. So now we're saying okay, we're looking seven days ahead where, if we find a double booking, we're going to correct it. It's very clear. It's something that belongs on a checklist and you can complete that for the day and be done with it for the whole day. Because you look seven days ahead. There's no need to look eight days ahead. That's not part of the checklist, it's only seven days.
Speaker 1:The second one is I see checklists that have a lot of like expectations on them versus like actionable items, and I've seen this with my team. Like I want my team to help create these systems in my practice. I want them to be involved because I know that when they're involved they'll be much more likely to follow the system or the checklist because they had a part in creating it. Let's think about this If you have on a front desk checklist okay, I'm gonna get to some of the ones that aren't front desk, I promise you. But let's say you had one, the checklist item, and it says answer phone according to the protocol. I mean, maybe you created a protocol, maybe you created a training document, maybe you've got a way that you want them to answer the phone, but does that belong on a checklist? Because really that's like an expectation we expect the team to answer the phone according to the protocol that we set, but there's no point during the day where you go check. I did it, it's done. And remember, we're creating these checklists because we want to make sure that all these different things get done without us asking for it.
Speaker 1:That's part of building a really functional, systematized business is that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing and nothing falls through the cracks, because everybody is completing everything they're supposed to complete and we're not going around saying, hey, did you do this, did you do that? So it's got to be items like that, things you can check off. So when we put expectations on there instead of actionable items, it really dilutes the purpose of the checklist because it doesn't. It's not something that's actionable. It becomes hard to check off because it's never complete, it's very vague, it's something it's like an expectation, but it's not a checklist item. So only put tasks on your checklist that are things that have a clear start and a clear end and something that can be checked off. So answer phones according to protocol no, that won't work, but something like call back all patients from today's missed calls. You know that could be part of the end of the day. It has to be done before they go home, right, all right?
Speaker 1:Number three lack of accountability. We see this often that we create a checklist item but we don't really assign it to anybody, and this often that we create a checklist item but we don't really assign it to anybody. And I've got a great fix for this at your practice and it actually just came up in our practice really, really recently with a newer employee. So lack of accountability. What do I mean by this is that you give checklist items to a lot of people but nobody is responsible for it. So when you have this task, well often they get skipped or they get delayed because of that, like free rider phenomena, everyone's like kind of thinking someone else is going to do that, someone else is going to handle that. I don't need to do this.
Speaker 1:So you want to make sure that everybody has ownership of certain checklists and, for example, our front desk checklists. They are different based on what chair each person is sitting in. We've got four people at our front desk at any given time. I know most offices do not have that, but we have different daily tasks for each of those four seats. I'm not saying that's what you need for your office, but what I want you to focus on. Don't give a responsibility to an entire department. Give it to a person, okay, and if there are some things that you want to assign to an entire department, I'll tell you.
Speaker 1:This is what we do in our office is we have the assistant daily end of the day checklist, all right, and the rule is not a single person goes home until it's complete. That's how we get some accountability on there. There's nobody like oh, I finished my patients early, took care of a few checklist items, but didn't finish the checklist and now I'm going home early. No, nobody can go home unless everything on that checklist is complete that can be completed. Like, for example, we do count our slow speeds, we count our piezo tips, we count our high speed hand pieces, we count our sectional rings. Now that's something that can't be done until the day is over. So if somebody finished all the things that can be done before the day is over and those are the only things that remain, our protocol is that that person is supposed to go to every single person and say is there anything I can do for you before I go home? And if they say no, that person is able to leave early. And this is something that came up recently at my practice. We had a new hire that really didn't know that was our policy and said that she was going home early and the other assistants were like whoa, hold on a second.
Speaker 1:That's not how we do things here, and I think that's a great thing to have part of your culture, because it fosters teamwork Everybody's in it together and it gets you around having these situations where people are just like why am I always doing this? Why am I the person that always has to do this task? Nobody else ever does it and you're getting all mad because other people are never doing it. In reality, the other people are looking at it like, well, I'm not going to do it because that person always does it. There's resentment. You can get rid of all that resentment if you just make it everybody's responsibility and say nobody is to go home until it's done, all right.
Speaker 1:Number four lack of measurable outcomes. We've got things on our checklist that don't have measurable results. So it's Maybe you've got one follow up on overdue accounts, okay. Well, how many accounts should I follow up on? What is an overdue account and what defines follow up? So look at these items and say is this clear? Does it have an outcome that is tangible? So something like this might be call 10 overdue accounts and document the outcomes in your notes, in the patient notes, in the com log.
Speaker 1:If you're going gonna put items on there that you want your team to do, put a number on it, make it measurable, make sure that they can do it and check it off so that these things constantly get attended to. And the last one is we create the checklist and we never follow up on them. You've got to follow up, you've got to make sure that they're completed, you've got to check to see if there are things on there that don't need to be on there. For example, maybe something doesn't get completed every day and you're checking this checklist and you're like why isn't this getting completed and the wheels don't come off the bus? Maybe that doesn't belong on a checklist. Maybe it's a redundant item that is diluting the effectiveness of the other things on there. Or we're not asking our team how is this working? Is there something that we need to add onto there? Is there something somewhere we're dropping the ball somewhere on in some aspect of our practice that it belongs on a checklist? So these things are always. You don't create it and just never look at it again. You're always building on them, you're always updating them and you're always communicating with your team to find out what you can do better or what's not working on them. All right, I want to give you just a few examples of one that I got from a coaching client pretty recently. All right, this is an assistant checklist.
Speaker 1:So one of the items on here is turnover rooms, clean and prepare treatment rooms for the next patient within five minutes after each visit. Does that sound like a checkable item? No, it's not. It's an expectation. That's an expectation, it's not a checklist. It doesn't belong on a checklist because it can't be checked off. It's tangible. You can either you did it or you didn't do it. You turn and set up your room within five minutes of every appointment, but it's not something you can really check off, so that's an expectation. Here's another one Dr Trace, set up trays for the entire morning schedule, ensuring all required instruments and materials are included. That's a good checklist item. That's a good morning checklist item because you can set up the trays for the entire morning schedule and you can have it done. You can check it off. It's either done or it's not, so that's a great one, all right. Clinical notes Write and finalize all clinical notes in Open Dental promptly after each patient. Again, that's an expectation, right? That's not something you can check off, it's like an all-day thing. It's not a check item, but it could be at the end of the day checklist saying all clinical notes for every procedure for the day are complete and finalized.
Speaker 1:Flush water lines Flush all water lines once daily to maintain compliance with infection control standards. Now, that's a great item. You can check it off. I might word it differently, but that's a great one. For the end of the day checklist All right, let's do two more.
Speaker 1:Clean floors and hallways. Sweep and clean to maintain a hygienic environment. Again, that is an expectation. Now, you can put this at like a morning checklist. You can put it at end of the day checklist. You can put it at a midday checklist for certain positions to go check and sweep the floors, and this is something that you know. We have it at our end of the day checklist at my practice, but I promise you it happens during the day and it's because it's important to me, it's an expectation and I stay on my team for it. Hey, can you sweep? It's kind of getting bad over here. I don't walk by leaves in the hallway, I pick them up. It's just an expectation.
Speaker 1:And the last one it says downtime tasks Use downtime to organize, clean and assist where needed. Well, you know that's vague. There's no, it's not measurable, it's not something that you can really check off. So I mean you could create a downtime priority list to see what people should prioritize when they have downtime, but this is not something you can check off, you know. To summarize, we have so much power at our fingers when we're using these checklists, but we got to make sure that they're functional. So the best thing to do is to create one. See how it goes.
Speaker 1:Talk with your team and look through the items and ask yourself is it specific? Is it clear? Does it focus on an actionable item and not an expectation? Are accountability measures in place? Am I having this checklist handed in to somebody to check that it's done? Am I assigning it to too many people? What is going on so that it actually gets completed and do we have measurable outcomes? Is it clear on what needs to be done so that someone say, yes, I did it, or no, I didn't?
Speaker 1:And the last thing being, you got to talk to your team. You've got to stay on top of it. You've got to update your checklist as needed. So if you stay on top of these things and you create checklists all over your practice which is so much to do with systemization your practice will run so much better. But you've got to do it effectively. You've got to do it effectively, you've got to do it correctly and this is how you build systems. Thank you so much for listening. Later on this week we're going to be talking about creating your brand and how you express that to your patients. We got our. Next episode is going to be with the DPH coaches. Come back on Wednesday. For that one, thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you then.
