Elsevier

Dental Abstracts

Volume 62, Issue 3, May–June 2017, Pages 120-121
Dental Abstracts

The Front Office
Patient and staff input

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.denabs.2017.03.007Get rights and content

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Background

The dental office is not just a clinical setting but also a business setting. Although they can readily find answers for making clinical improvements, when seeking to improve the business side of a practice, dentists may be at sea. They seldom have the time to find, read, adapt, and apply recommendations in the general business literature or other business sources. However, they can readily access two very important sources of information: patients and staff members.

Patient Input

The most common avenue for patient input occurs when the front-desk coordinator asks the patients at checkout how they felt about the visit. The coordinator may even be trained to elicit specific comments, document relevant feedback, or take immediate action, as appropriate. However, this informal exit survey has a couple of drawbacks in that there is no anonymity, which can keep the patient from offering potentially valuable negative comments, and there is generally no mechanism whereby the

Engaging Staff Members

Staff members can also bring good ideas to light, whether they work in the practice-patient interface area or behind the scene. These ideas can be accessed through staff meetings, system evaluations, and performance reviews.

During the regular staff meetings, in addition to including patient feedback, the staff members should be encouraged to provide their own observations and suggestions for improvements to be made. The method may be through brainstorming or dialogue, but dentists and office

Discussion

Both patients and staff members can offer good ideas for making a dental practice better. Both are intimately involved with the office in ways that the dentist often is not, so they offer a different perspective that can be highly insightful.

Clinical Significance

Wise dentists will ask patients and staff members about how things are going and what could make the dental care or delivery of care process better. Dentists can be blind to things that don't appear to fit their expectations, so the

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Levin RP: Improvement ideas from the experts—patients and staff members. J Am Dent Assoc 147:846-847, 2016

Reprints available from RP Levin, Levin Group, 10 New Plant Ct, Owings Mills, MD 21117; e-mail: rlevin@levingroup

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