2020 brought a lot of disruption and among that, has been an opportunity for my team to stretch and grow in new and unexpected ways.
One of our realizations was that the tools we had available did not allow us to communicate and organize our work in an effective and efficient manner.
Before I became a dentist, I went to business school. There, I learned that one of the essential staples in modern management and communication came from Toyota. Their ascendency in the automotive industry and in organizational management was due partly to what is called the Kanban system (pronounced ‘can’ ‘ban’).
Kanban allows teams to visualize workflows by translating the process into manageable tasks that move along steps (or columns) in the process. It helps teams communicate with transparency while practicing accountability.
The most basic representation of a Kanban board is broken into three status/columns; To Do, In Progress, and Done. A team can work together to get all cards (patients in our case) into the done status.
There are a number of platforms like this built for other industries available such as Trello, Asana, and Monday.com however, they are not connected to the PMS or EDR, are not HIPAA compliant, or are too costly for most practices.
At my practice, we developed a Kanban board in Healier to handle our asynchronous communication, both from the hygienist to the dentist, as well as the back and forth communication between the front and back office team members.
This 360° approach is the core of Access Teledentistry’s four-phase approach to teledentistry. Care coordination is the critical and arguably, more important piece that needs more attention than the clinical execution of teledentistry.
In this process, the hygienist captures all necessary x-rays and photographs (we recently replaced photographs with a 3D intraoral scan).
Second, the hygienist fills out an online form to capture more in-depth data for the dentist regarding their signs and symptoms.
Images are stored in the patient’s electronic dental record and a copy of the form’s text is used as the hygienist’s assessment note. The form submission is sent to Healier and the patient is placed in a queue for review and examination by the dentist.
In most situations, there are more than three statuses to represent a workflow. This is definitely the case for teledentistry and follow-up care.
The first step for the doctor is to take the next patient in the queue, complete the exam in the electronic dental record and move the patient card to the appropriate column for the treatment coordinator to follow up with the patient.
In Healier, a notification is automatically sent to the treatment coordinator so the doctor doesn’t need to send a separate message. This allows for seamless transitions of care and ensuring that no patients “fall through the cracks”. It’s easy, it’s efficient, and when you open a patient card, you can even carry on conversations between all of the care team members.
Many practices have been using the schedule view of their PMS/EDR to manage these types of visits. This method can come with some unintended consequences that we have learned the hard way.
We have found the Kanban system much more suitable to manage our asynchronous teledentistry visits while allowing for collaboration on the follow-up process. We’ve now set up many other workflows in our practice using this methodology like implant cases, pre-determinations, specialist referrals, and more.
Find out how easy it is to use Kanban and help your practice stay organized. Sign up now to use a trial at no charge. I think you’ll be surprised how easy communication and workflow management can be.