Records and controls are essential in daily dental practice

When I advise fellow dentists to record and control everything, they are usually amazed and consider my guidance exaggerated. I like to point out that your reports and controls can assist you in developing your services by analyzing your errors.

The basic law of ISO 9000 licenses is: record and control everything. Without controls, it is virtually impossible to perform day-to-day stock analysis.

We need to clearly identify factors such as: how many calls are made to confirm a query, and what is the average time for each call; how many x-rays were taken, who took them, where they are right now, who filed them; what material we need and how much we have in stock, how much is used per month / day, which is the cheapest supplier.

Ultimately, these controls enable managers to understand their business and thus their decision making becomes less empirical and more professional.

Important day-to-day controls at the clinic, among many more specific ones, depending on the business, are:
- inventory and use of materials;
- of prosthetic works;
- radiographs and documentation;
- sterile materials;
- calls for consultation confirmation;
- customer recall calls (recall);
- prophylaxis for control or follow-up of clinical cases;
- communication with customers on special dates or internal promotional actions.

They are usually simple controls and can be digital (Excel spreadsheets are great for this), or even physical. It is up to the manager to assemble them to have data that can be statistically tabulated.

Marinho Pinheiro Teixeira: Dental Surgeon - Unicid; MBA in Health Management and Marketing - São Leopoldo Mandic; Training of Dental Auditors - Fundecto; General Coordinator of the Management Center and partner of Altera - Service Intelligence Center.

Source: Implant News Prótese News. Available at: http://www.inpn.com.br/Materia/OdontologiaNegocios/132549. Access on: 11/21/2019.