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Embrace Progress: Organizing the Digital Office by Daniel Grob, DDS, MS, Editorial Director

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Embrace Progress Header: Organizing the Digital Office

It's been my experience that a practice that is small and organized will eventually become large and organized, which helps with staffing, training and treatment. On the other hand, practices that are large and disorganized will gradually become small and chaotic due to lack of clear guidelines for the doctor, staff and patients. And when it comes to a practice sale or transition, organized systems are essential!

You may also recall that in my December column I shared Dr. Ron Roncone's advice to write a page a day to gradually get you and your staff in order and build an enterprise. These pages serve as a guide for getting organized. By now, if you have followed Dr. Roncone's advice, you should have 50 or so pages that need to be organized in order to be useful. These pages may be lists, procedures or scripts.

Questions that need to be asked before proceeding are:

Who is in charge?

Where do we put the pages?

How do we all benefit from the work of the team?

A question that also needs to be asked is:

What happens if one of the team members leaves?

The three M's
One of the first steps in organizing a practice is deciding what departments or file cabinets you will need, not only now, but going forward. During my career this has changed many times, but if you look closely at the business of orthodontics, you'll see three major issues confronting us every day. They are marketing, mechanics and management, or the three M's.

Marketing is considered to be anything that involves getting the patient to the front door of the practice and into treatment.

Once in the practice and through the sign-in procedure and office tour, the patient moves into the mechanics stage. Here the clinical treatment begins and ends, and includes everything in between.

Management is keeping track of the money, staff and facility. This is everyone's job, and the necessary items, procedures, lists and scripts for this portion of the practice are kept in the management folder.

All three folders can have subheadings related to various areas of the practice, staff, and projects being undertaken.

The cloud
Anyone who has watched the maturation of digitization—from the first computer and software introduced in the '80s with floppy disks and tape backups, to small handheld devices—can attest to the fact that keeping your information available and safely backed up, is extremely necessary.

So you may appreciate the recent advances in cloud-based software and associated services available to the individual and business user. Many are available for free—or a minimal monthly or yearly fee—and almost all have individual and business versions.

For example, at our practice we have been using Dropbox for years, and have organized our practice so that our staff and the people that we deal with can benefit, as well.

Dropbox offers a free account with ample storage to anyone with an email account. A corporate or business account is also available with expanded features.

We have created a corporate account and utilize the shared-folder feature often. I suggest creating one main account with privileges for key employees. Folders can be shared with other employees, vendors or computer stations. Updates are automatic and simple, and with the corporate account, backups are available in case someone accidentally deletes or trashes some of the material in the folder.

File sharing protocols allow for confidential material to be kept in a master account, and other material to be shared in the less secure or shared folders.

Apple or PC?
Those of you who follow business may have noticed that Microsoft is getting much more aggressive in the cloud space, now that it has a new CEO. Quite honestly, its subscription-based Office product is much easier to use, and to add and delete from computers.

You can give permissions to staff members to download software onto various machines, and delete it when necessary. Monthly billing is easy and reasonable. A Hotmail account or Office 365 account makes it easy to get started!

Apple has been my longtime favorite, and its ecosystem makes utilizing Dropbox and other cloud-based services a breeze. Practically everyone has an iTunes account, and with it an Apple ID. I suggest creating one for the office as well!

It's good to have a couple of Apple computers around the office, if for no other reason than it is popular with a whole lot of the kids and adults we deal with. The presence of Apple computers makes the place look high-tech rather than medical and businesslike.

We have two Apple computers in the reception area in lieu of video games and air hockey. Select the limited-access option on the account and you and your patients are quite safe. Patients who were unable to fill out their health history at home may use these as well. And our Professional Relations Coordinator utilizes an iPad during visits to offices and schools.

There are management programs that run on Apple, but even if you don't have them, running your PC software within an Apple computer is quite simple. In fact, sometimes they seem more stable in there than in some of the PCs on the market! Software that enables this procedure is known as virtualization software, and VMware and Parallels are two popular products.

One of the reasons I like Apple is because at key workstations—such as the office manager's, the doctor's office and perhaps the consultation room—having the ability to run some of the iCloud programs is invaluable. Toggling between Apple and PC is a tremendous benefit to doctor, patients and staff.

We use the Photos app for showing before-and-after pictures to patients. We have an iCloud account for Facebook, which allows instant uploading of office marketing material, such as deband photos. Contacts are easy to create and share, and Safari allows you to sync bookmarks from one computer to the other.

Google it
Google is everywhere and we utilize it for our practice's benefit.

With Gmail accounts, your Chrome browsers can be synced across the office, and various computers may utilize them to store bookmarks for YouTube accounts, insurance company websites and passwords. Chrome allows multiple accounts to be open at one user workstation at the same time, so various users may store their specifics by utilizing one log-in name at the computer station.

Speaking of accounts, the amount of thought that needs to go into setting up these cannot be overemphasized. Do not allow staff to just create accounts and usernames without your direction. I have paid the price of such a process, and have had to undo some errors that cut down on efficiency and could lead to inaccurate SEO data and confusion.

Coherence or chaos?
You can see from the few examples that the sky—or should I say, the cloud—is the limit when it comes to getting efficient in the office. Taking the time to organize your thoughts, and involving the staff, will help to streamline the office procedure and enhance your system deployment. What are you waiting for?



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September 2025
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