Effective Customized Morning Huddle for Dental Teams

Discussing and strategizing the day together gives the team a clear understanding of their daily workflow. “What to discuss during your meeting depends on what your team needs. However, having a specific agenda to follow each day provides structure and consistency. The goal is to keep the meeting on task and create order for the day. To start you will create a list of topics to discuss in an efficient and easy-to follow format. Be sure to touch on all areas of the practice: Financial, scheduling, hygiene and restorative. It is a total team commitment to understand the needs of the patients and team for that day. Not just their own schedule or department.” (2019 ADA Practice Guide to Leading and Managing the Dental Team.) Talking through the schedule allows the team to work together and map out their day to create optimum work flow.

Our proprietary software system has several reports that may be utilized for the morning huddle: Such as the Morning Meeting Report and the Hygienist Meeting Report.

Daily huddle may include the following:

Motivational statement: Ask any dentist or team member, the tone for the day is determined in
the morning meeting. End each meeting with a positive quote, a joke, or an online review from a patient. Have your team rotate and bring these to the huddle.
Today’s schedule: Discuss any problem areas and how to deal with them before the patients arrive. Difficult patients, intricate procedures, overbooked schedule or openings in the schedule can all be discussed ahead of time.
Emergency time: By selecting the emergency times before the day begins, you eliminate the need to put the patients on hold and run back to ask the dentist or assistant.
Patients who have a medical alert or who should be pre-medicated: Reconfirm who has medical alerts and need pre-medication. This allows you to provide your patient the best in medical and dental care.
Problem patients and procedures: Do you have a chatty patient, a patient who does not get numb easily, or a patient who is always late? Now is the time to discuss and put a plan of action into effect.
Patients with outstanding restorative needs: The hygiene team should be aware of hygiene patients with undone treatment and how they and the dentist should approach the patient.
Personal Information: Let the team know about important events in patients’ personal lives. Talking to patients about their life changes, marriages, children, vacations and careers show you care about them as people, not just as patients.
Who to target for a review or ask for a referral: The best patients come from word of mouth. Invite key patients who love the practice or have had a great experience to post a review or refer a friend to the practice.
Lab/implant cases: Have you ever seated a patient and not had the crown back from the lab or the implant part in house? This a good time to check in with your team to make sure you have everything you need for appointments today.
New Patient information: Reviewing the new patient referral source, chief complaint, and dental needs ahead of time allows the team to impress the new patient the minute they meet them.
Next available major appointment: When the team knows the next available large production block, they can help the business team keep the schedule full and productive by suggesting times
to the patients in the back.
Next available minor appointment: To help ensure the schedule meets the daily production goal, less productive appointments may be spaced out in the weeks to come.
Financial information: Let the clinical team know who needs to stop by the front desk to discuss finances.
Daily goal for today: Has it been reached? Reinforce that it is a team effort to meet the production goals. Ask your fellow team members for suggestions of patient to call to fill the schedule productively.
Yesterday’s schedule: By discussing the previous days’ schedule and what went right and what went wrong, the team can make scheduling changes for the future.

“Unity is strength…when there is teamwork and collaboration wonderful things can be achieved.”
Mattie J.T. Stepanek