Challenges of an entrepreneur
When the young dentist took over the dental clinic, she was faced with a mountain of tasks. In addition to the basic practice concept, financing and takeover agreements, when starting a business as a dentist, the important topics as personnel, structuring and quality management are the focus. Dr. von der Gracht was determined to master all associated challenges as perfectly as possible and to implement her modern vision of her own dental clinic.
On the one hand, it was necessary to build up the team of employees and new colleagues and to familiarize them with new processes – including the founder of the dental clinic. The team grew significantly in a short time to the size of 15 employees desired by the new boss, some of them part-time, which was an additional challenge in terms of coordination and cooperation.
Just like the treatment processes, the quality management system should also be completely redesigned and meet the last requirements. It quickly became very clear that the provisions for dentists in this area have become so extensive that quality management can only be successful in everyday practice if it is possible to actively, efficiently and sustainably involve all employees in the process. She became aware of medikit through a presentation by a colleague.
The perfect project and knowledge management tool
medikit quickly turned out to be the ideal tool for preparing operations and then as a communication and knowledge platform for the whole team. The system was set up in no time and Dr. von der Gracht and two other colleagues involved in the process familiarize themselves with the intuitive tool in convenient online training courses.
As a first official act, the logical groups for the practical processes were established – e.g. “Reception”, “Assistance” or “Hygiene”. During the preparation phase of 2 months, in which no treatments had yet taken place, all basic articles with exact specifications in areas such as treatment, hygiene or materials in the digital handbook of medikit were created under “laboratory conditions”. In the same step it was also defined which groups should read the corresponding articles. medikit uses the automatic read confirmation to ensure that those affected have received the information that is important for their work. This means that every employee is always up to date on the topics that are relevant for them.
In addition, the ladies made full use of the extensive possibilities of systematic process design in medikit with the task and checklist tool, created all routine processes in detail and entrusted the employees responsible for this with a clear assignment.
It was awesome, especially in the early stages – I couldn’t forget anything. medikit made our work a lot easier in general. The usability is great and I was surprised how easy it was for everyone to start with the new system.
The owner found the task tool to be particularly helpful for her numerous tasks in the context of taking over the clinic: Dr. Ina von der Gracht successfully used medikit as a project management tool from day one, with which she could communicate with her colleagues at the same time and immediately included every good idea in the integrated ideas tool or wiki-like handbook.
We have really been able to map all processes so that nothing can fall down. In the meantime, we definitely don’t want to go without medikit.
As the implementation work was successfully completed, all employees were activated in medikit. The team was immediately enthusiastic about the usability. Those who grew up with Facebook & Co switched to using it as a matter of course, almost without comment, as the operation, in contrast to conventional software, follows the intuitive logic of successful social media platforms. And the less websave colleagues surprised us with lively participation and consistently positive feedback on the easy use and above all. Usefulness for each individual. The colleagues involved in the setup phase also enjoyed supporting the newcomers to the network with helpful tips on how to use them.
Their Success
The conscientious structuring from the preparation phase was extremely helpful and paid off. All processes run almost smoothly thanks to the automatic mechanisms that are unique to medikit, such as digital checklists and repetitions. Those involved are always informed in good time and reliably about their tasks and innovations that are relevant to them. The solidity of the processes handled in medikit is also particularly positive: everyday and unavoidable adversities such as short-term failures do not trigger expected process errors and so the loss of quality and unrest, but colleagues defined for this purpose are also automatically called for help if necessary through appropriately set escalation mechanisms. Here it becomes clear how perfectly this structure could be implemented in Tüblingen: The additional communication effort, e.g. Direct messages or comments are noticeably low in comparison with clinics that medkit has initiated during operation – an indicator that medikit is an extremely powerful tool for QM and communication in practices and is best tackled as early as possible.
The team of Dr. von der Gracht also saves a few work steps in QM and time: in the Tübingen clinic, for example, all activities are documented quite incidentally. Every click is saved with the time, place and executor and time-consuming filling out and filling of lists is completely superfluous.
