Over the past few years we have noted an increasing number of occurrences that perhaps have always happened over history, but we are only now noticing because of the fairly large number of clients who are nearing retirement age. What is happening is that doctors are bringing on young doctors as associates and partners with the intention of transitioning out of the practice as the time for retirement comes.  That part is normal.  The change we are noticing is that the senior doctors, the owners of these financially strong and productive practices, are allowing their new young partners to make major practice changes, changes in policy, changes in staffing, changes in methods of marketing, changes in patient flow procedures, and even changes in the verbal skills used with prospective new case starts.  Even this may be interpreted as a normal part of a transition but the changes I am concerned about often result in abandoning policies that are working extremely well and abandoning those policies simply because of the thought that new ideas from a younger doctor must somehow be better ideas.  It is quite interesting that very often, the “new” ideas were simply another version of policies the senior doctor once had in his/her practice but had been abandoned as being ineffective or even damaging to the practice well-being.

In the most recent six months alone, we have seen these young doctors sign up for PPO’s, start charging for clinical records, decide to require consults on all patients, stop diagnosing early treatment, switch from 6-month recall to 12-month recall, require auto-debit, require fixed down payments, eliminate the sending of statements, etc.  I can probably cite at least another 6-8 additional examples of policy changes made by new, young doctors in mature practices that will eventually cause the practice grievous harm.

A young doctor starting his/her own practice can be forgiven for making mistakes such as these because there is no guiding presence to teach him or her otherwise.  But what about these senior doctors who have already been subject to the problems associated with these policies and have learned, again the hard way, that there is a better way of doing business?  Why are they passively standing by watching their young partners make these mistakes?

I had one of my clients, only a year or so away from his retirement say to me: “I am going to let him do what he wants.  By the time these policies cause significant damage to the practice, I’ll be gone and he can learn what works and what doesn’t the same way I did, by trial and error.”

These young doctors are walking into exceptionally clean, delinquency free, profitable, and high quality of life practices.  Cases are being finished on time, patients are keeping their appointments, brushing their teeth and sending their friends and relatives in to be new patients as well.  Not having had any other experience, the new doctors simply learn and believe that is the way it is in the orthodontic business.  They believe that their “new and modern” ideas will make things even better.  Unfortunately, and as I said a few paragraphs ago, most of these “new and modern” ideas are not new at all!  They are the same techniques, policies, and procedures that long ago were abandoned by the senior doctors as being barriers to building the type of quality practice that they have today.

I suppose there is some value in learning through the school of hard knocks, and maybe it is true that the new doctors will simply have to learn the hard way, but it seems to me that these senior doctors could save their young “protégés” a lot of grief by being a bit more assertive, providing proper guidance about the reasons for and value of current practice policies and not allow them to travel a path that, with good cause, the senior doctors long ago abandoned.

A Reminder to Dolphin and Orthotrac Users!

Both Dolphin and Orthotrac have “Zuelke written” financial software modules that are available as add-on features for the respective software platforms. Both provide significant benefits over the standard software, including highly sophisticated patient and insurance delinquency tracking and control programs, search engine features that allow doctors to identify posting errors, hidden delinquency, instances of employee theft, and a dozen or so other problems that are difficult or impossible to find in the basic software versions of these systems. Both also contain month-end practice management monitors that on a single page provide a comprehensive and easy to interpret view of each of the key practice performance statistics that determine the health and well-being of the practice. I personally offer a thorough (and free) review of each of the reports and other features of these modules to ensure that each user understands their module and knows how to obtain the maximum benefits the module offers. Check these modules out. You will not be disappointed!