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Re-evaluating your work style
Jill Nesbitt Oral & Dental HealthcareA dental practice I know is changing offices — the accounting person, the insurance manager and the daily deposit person are all moving to new offices in their building. As they work through the physical changes — and they get the IT company to relocate all the computers, printers, network connections — the real opportunity for each of them is to reconsider their work style.
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Technology and medicine: Applying Google Glass in the medical field
Rosemary Sparacio Medical & Allied HealthcareEvery day, new strides in technology make headlines in all kinds of areas. Nowhere is it is more prevalent or exciting than in the medical field. And one of the most talked about new tech "gadgets" to come onto the scene and into the consciousness of just about everyone who follows the news is Google Glass. The last few months have seen story after story about Goggle Glass being used by physicians.
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Customized letters: Driving a response
Jill Nesbitt Oral & Dental HealthcareHow do you follow up with patients who do not schedule the treatment you recommend? Call them? Send an email? Send a letter? Drive to their house? What response are you receiving? Do the patients return the call, reply to your email? Perhaps it's time to look again at the content of your letter.
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Does your dental assistant motivate patients to accept treatment?
Jill Nesbitt Oral & Dental HealthcareIf you’re not measuring to find out which of your dental assistants is motivating your patients to accomplish treatment, then you could be making a big mistake by managing assistants as if they were all the same. Talk with your assistants about creating a tracking system to find out who is motivating patients to get treatment in your practice.
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Does your hygienist motivate patients to accept treatment?
Jill Nesbitt Oral & Dental HealthcareIf you’re not measuring to find out which of your hygienists is motivating your patients to accomplish treatment, then you could be making a big mistake by managing hygienists as if they were all the same. Talk with your hygienists about creating a tracking system to find out who is motivating patients to get treatment in your practice.
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Challenges an office manager faces: Managing the schedule
Jill NesbittOne of the most critical responsibilities an office manager has is to manage the schedule. The dentist wants it to be productive. The hygienists want it to be full. The assistants want it to have enough time to turn over rooms and catch up on cleaning instruments. The secretaries are busy trying to fill the schedule when it has holes and confirm and take care of patients when it’s full.
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Experiment reveals the ugly side of open-source journal industry
Pamela Lewis Dolan Medical & Allied HealthcareOver the past 10 months, Harvard researcher John Bohannon, Ph.D., has created more than 300 versions of a phony research paper describing the anticancer property of a chemical extracted from a lichen. Each paper was authored by a different made-up researcher who came from academic facilities that don’t exist. Despite Bohannon’s efforts to make the papers flawed and unpublishable, nearly 160 medical journal publishers accepted the paper for publishing, despite each one claiming to have a peer review process.
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An office manager’s role in preventive dentistry
Jill NesbittHave you ever heard of the Institute for Oral Health? This organization identifies best practices in oral health and then encourages collaboration between dental insurance companies, physicians, dentists (private practice, academia and public health) and researchers to benefit the public and the profession. This year's annual conference theme was on preventive dentistry, and I was lucky to attend.
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Emergency medical equipment donations in developing countries
Maria FrischIn the summer of 2012, I served in rural areas of Kenya, working with AMREF Flying Doctors to bring medical interventions to communities in need. To say this was a humbling experience would be an understatement. We flew by helicopter into areas not accessible by vehicle in order to assess community medical infrastructure and to aid in the design and provision of emergency medical management protocols.
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Workgroup recommends limited health IT regulation by FDA
Pamela Lewis DolanAs a general rule, health information technology should not be subject to premarket regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. But there should be exceptions for high-risk products and situations. This is according to the final recommendations for a risk-based regulatory framework for health IT adopted by the Health IT Policy Committee, a group of industry stakeholders convened to advise federal officials on a nationwide health IT infrastructure.
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