Think of your practice as consisting of a series of workflows. These might be administrative workflows that are exercised with every patient or they may be clinical workflows that might change with the services being rendered.
A technology change may affect one, several, many or all of these. The larger the affect, the greater the risk of the change. If you are changing the adhesive you use to cement crowns, it will only affect a small number of clinical workflows and unless there are significant preparation changes, they will have little effect on these.
On the other hand, let’s say you are going paperless in your practice. This will touch on almost every administrative workflow and many clinical processes and increase the “process” risk of implementing the change greatly.
Here are my pointers to improve the odds of success in the “process” area of introducing change.
- First identify all of the processes that will be impacted by a technology change.
- For each process ask the question, “Will the process be more efficient?” You might think that a technology change will always introduce more efficiency, but this is not always the case. Maybe you are giving up time in one area to improve patient safety or to improve your A/R. If the process will become less efficient, then allow for more time to complete the activity.
- Who is responsible for this process? Make sure they are fully trained in the new technology and that they understand the overall goals in making the change in the practice.
- Look at the impact this change will have on adjacent processes. If you become wildly more efficient in doing “X” and the “X” process feeds into “Y”, what will be the impact on the “Y” process if the work comes more quickly?
- If the technology were to fail, do you have a work around? Can you revert back to the old process permanently or temporarily while the failure is addressed? A plan “B” is a handy thing to have
A technology change consists of technology, people and process. Success in all three is definitely a right click.
