WHAT
DO PATIENTS WANT?
Did you ever notice that the photos you see of award-winning
dental offices are usually of the waiting room? OK let's
be politically correct... the reception area?
Sure, if the photos are from a dental dealer, they will
probably include a shot of a treatment room with vast
amounts of cabinets and every high-tech toy imaginable.
We noticed this a few years back and it got us to thinking...
1. What do patients want in a dental office design?
Isn't that supposed to be our goal?
2. Could we produce offices that were:
- highly productive,
- patient-centered,
- economical, and;
- fun to work in?
3. If we could figure this out, would doctors understand
and build offices that satisfy the patient's desires
and not just the doctors?
When we studied this issue, we discovered that what
patients want is clear. They want:
- clean offices (which we translated to easy to clean!)
- enough intimacy to allow for rapid personal contact
with the reception/greeting staff upon arrival.
- timely performance of their dental care.
- the perception that the doctor is up-to-date.
From the study it became clear that what patients want
and what doctors build (assuming that money is available)
are two very different things.
It's a vicious cycle: doctors build excessive waiting
rooms that don't allow personal interface and leave patients
feeling isolated. Then, because the details of production
haven't been ironed out, the practice is forced to stack
patients in the waiting room because they aren't running
on time. The office is off schedule because the complicated
and overly expensive treatment rooms don't work as well
as they should. Since the doctors have spent so much money
on this equipment, they are pressured to schedule more
heavily... so they get behind... ugh!
It's
all backwards!
Dental offices bottleneck in three places: the treatment
rooms, sterilization and the front desk. These bottlenecks
rotate as production increases. Dentists receive no training
on how to reorganize and break open bottlenecks. What
often appears as a front desk bottleneck (for example,
before lunch) is often actually a treatment room constraint.
Anyway, what we discovered in the study of what in manufacturing
is called one-piece-flow, was that bottlenecks can be
prevented‹and not just by building cavernous waiting rooms,
and excessively complicated treatment and sterilization
space.
Doctors save money, patients receive better care and treatment
runs on time.
|
