A journey to greatness
Established for over 35 years and located in the Georgian Market town of Ampthill, Ampthill Dental Practice is owned by Miss K Saxby whilst being run by her daughter Laura Doherty.
Having used EXACT for 10 years, the family-run practice prides itself on its core values of delivering dental care in a relaxed environment for the whole family.
Our priorities when we started our good to great journey were:
- A more automated system to reduce fail to attends (FTAs) and maximise surgery time, allowing us to keep to our UDA target while expanding our private revenue without adding more burden to reception.
- Free up reception time to continue to give excellent quality service to all our valued patients.
- Use KPIs to become more aware of the vital statistics of the practice rather than just relying on gut instincts.
- Empower all the members of the team to maximise the practice potential to grow from a good practice to a great practice.
- Reducing FTAs
One of our important targets was to address our steadily rising FTA rate. The increase in FTAs was having a knock-on effect of increasing our forward booking, as patients who failed to attend needed to be rebooked. This meant that patients who needed appointments for treatment were having to wait longer.
We set up EXACT to email patients a week before their appointment, followed by a text reminder 48 hours before the appointment, this happens automatically so there is no extra burden on reception. Our consultant, Sean, also suggests “zoning” our diary to allow us to accommodate those patients that needed treatment.
The focus on FTA reduction worked really well. Short-notice cancellations have decreased by 15%, in part due to the automated emails a week prior to the appointments.”
Improving Patients’ Experience
“The automated functions in EXACT means there is no extra pressure on reception to send emails or make outgoing calls. By giving the practice extra notice of available time in the diary, the reception team can proactively fill that time – these actions have resulted in an increase of 2.4% in chair utilisation and improved our customer service.”
