Improving Dental School Clinic Operations Using Business Intelligence Data

Abstract

In dental school clinics, students spend a great deal of time waiting for faculty members to check and approve their work. Traditionally at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, students have left their cubicles to form lines behind supervising faculty members, and this line of students would follow the faculty member around from patient to patient. To address this problem and improve the patient experience, the school computerized the approval‐seeking process by building the Faculty Request System (FRS) to enable students to stay with their patients while seeking the necessary approvals. The FRS produced a large volume of time‐stamped, business intelligence data that enabled further evaluation. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of this change, including the quality/process improvement interventions that were possible due to information revealed by the FRS. The results showed no change in the number of students or faculty members per clinic session across the three years of this evaluation. With the FRS, the amount of time students spent away from their patients was reduced from 40.6 minutes to 12.1 minutes. After the FRS was implemented, there was an eradication of appointments that ended 30 minutes late (from 0.03% to zero) and a reduction of appointments that ended 15 minutes late (from 0.25% to 0.01%). There were also increases in students' starting appointments on time (9.8% of start checks to 25.8%), 15 minutes late (16.6% to 35.2%), and 30 minutes late (13.2% to 22.2%). By critically analyzing data from the new system, the school's leadership can analyze trends and make data‐driven decisions to alter operations. The results of this study suggest that this process can improve the patient and student experience and faculty utilization.

Using business intelligence and data visualization to understand the characteristics of failed appointments in dental school clinics

“…In addition, students were not trained in scheduling and used arbitrary methods to select the “next” appointment; we have integrated knowledge on attendance patterns into our clinic orientation sessions. Finally, in our system, students can schedule on any day and at any time; students value this kind of flexibility, but it leads to high variability and a mixture of extremely busy and extremely quiet days in clinics (we have previously published how Fridays were the least busy days in our clinics) 31 . We are moving to a model where students have scheduled days to treat their patients.…”

Can Utilizing Business Intelligence with Electronic Dental Record Data Improve Business Decisions for Dental Organizations: A Scoping Review

“…The organization was able to put controls in place to improve both of these trends. 19 The last included article by Filker et al had an aim to describe a quality assurance system and the impact of the introduction of an electronic dental record system on the dental school organization. While the aim of this article was not relevant to this scoping review, the authors discuss plans for the organization and determine that the data and reports from the electronic dental record can be used to determine unacceptable treatments and investigate reasons for poor patient outcomes.…”

Improving Efficiency in Dental School Clinics by Computerizing a Manual Task

“…We did not instruct students on how to spend the additional time gained from not having to stand in “Pied Piper” lines, and allowed this to evolve organically. We measured the amount of time that the patient was left alone before and after the implementation of the FRS [2]. We found that the average time moved from 41 min and 36 s to 11 min and 40 s (a savings of almost 30 min).…”

“…We conducted evaluations of our clinic operations and noted that, on average, student providers spent about 42 min per three-hour session waiting for faculty to come to operatory rooms and check their work [2]. This was worsened by the fact that UMSOD student providers called faculty by waiting in a physical line as faculty visited each student and patient, known as the “Pied Piper” effect.…”

“…While no such data are available on how often this occurs in the dental profession, a 2014 Forbes article suggests that 89% of workers waste at least some time each day [5]. Many improvements to operations were implemented from the use of business intelligence data gathered by the FRS [2]. The focus of this paper is on assessing the impacts of computerizing the process of requesting faculty and to evaluate its effects on student providers and their patients.…”