Dr. Mark Murphy is a principal at FunktionalTracker.com and lead faculty for clinical education at MicroDental. He also serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Detroit Mercy and the Pankey Institute, where he also served on the board of directors. He practices general dentistry on a limited basis in Rochester, Michigan and lectures internationally on leadership, practice management, communication, case acceptance, planning, occlusion, and TMD. He is an informative and entertaining speaker blending a stand-up style of humor and anecdotes with current evidence based research that you can take home and use in your practice right away.
In this episode we discuss:
- FunktionalTracker.com
- Using tracking to improve daily operations of your practice
What is FunktionalTracker?
Everyone has practice management software and that is fantastic, but it measures outcomes. How many new patients did you have? How many dollars did you collect? How many open hours did you have? If you want to change how your outcomes look, then figure out what behaviors you want to measure, measure them, and you will start to see some improvement in those behaviors impact and effect the outcomes. That’s what FunktionalTracker does. It measures behaviors in real time, patient to patient, day to day, inside your practice that move the needle. What gets measured, we become more aware of, and therefore it improves. The software helps measure those behaviors and makes it fun. You can have avatars and badges. You get rewarded for stuff. You can graph it out. But the idea here is not how you track, its that you track.
How does it work?
Its a monthly subscription, and one you get signed up we ask you some questions about what your goals and objectives are, and based on what you tell us you are trying to accomplish, we have a set up trackers that we recommend for you. Using your email and password, you sign into the software, you put in your schedule, which takes about as long as it takes to 8, 9, 10, etc. We don’t care who the patients are, we care about the behaviors you did, or didn’t do on each of those appointment opportunities. Then you go through your day, and after every patient at that appointment time, you click the trackers that pop up for that time. There are videos for each trackers that help explain each tracker like a virtual consultant built into it, along with articles, weekly motivational pieces, and quarterly lunch-and-learns thats recorded for all the clients. And this is all included in the subscription fee.
Can you give us an example of how it benefits a practice?
The worst practice we worked with, that we have tracked, was a practice that average increase for them was about $240 per day, which was about 48K a year. The paid us 3k a year and they received 45K back. They were ecstatic about their return investment and we were sorely disappointed that they didn’t do better than that. We have had other practices that have grew hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now usually these were bigger practices, but I would never say it was the trackers that did all that. It was the team that did the heavy lifting, the trackers were just what kept everything, and this will sound cliche, but kept everything on track.
So it basically holds everyone accountable for their own actions?
I will tell you whats really interesting about accountability. If you interview or survey employees in dental practices, the vast majority want to be accountable for their actions. Now what they don’t want, is to be held accountable for actions that support a non-vision or a non-goal. Held accountable for someone who is changing their goals, every week, every day, every month. They want to be held accountable for a team that is being led by someone that really knows where the want to go and how they want to get there.
So it helps your practice grow, and it’s fun with minimal effort?
The key thing that I would have never thought to put in this, is the same thing that makes Candy Crush or Words with Friends fun, is there are these little packets of positive reimbursement by playing this behavior tracking game. Its called dopamine. I mean when you get a Candy Crush thing, where you get to go to the next level and you get a star or a badge, you get a little dose of dopamine and that feels good. The software has a game application in it where you are rewarded points and you can use the points to buy avatars and go up levels and earn powers and access to things so it’s really really fun to what I probably should be doing anyhow. So once you put a little fun in it and don’t take a lot of somebody’s time and you give some positive reinforcement, good things happen. We are not the first and not the last to do this kind of thing, that’s very popular today.
Anything else we should know?
For any of your listeners, if they did want to take a look at FunktionalTracker, they could just go to the website FunktionalTracker.com, and take a look at the videos on there, the software, and the description. If they do want to something with it, if they find it interesting email me at markmurphy@funktionaltracker.com. If they tell me that they heard it on The Passionate Dentist, then I will make them an incredible offer and I will do something extra for them like some coaching calls or something like that. In the first three months, you’ll see a dramatic increase in those metrics that you are tracking and the outcomes that they are tied to. We see results very quickly.