Introduction

Dental practice success is directly proportional to the quality of the operational systems in place. Those systems determine how tasks are conducted day-to-day. They allow the dental team to work with great efficiency and speed and achieve desired results. Operational systems consist of a series of steps to be followed that allow for the most efficient process and also function as an educational and training opportunity for the team.

Practices with excellent operational systems often perform better than others, but there is one other factor when designing operational systems that can make a significant difference in how effective those systems are – adding guided conversations (previously referred to as scripts) to the systems. The concept of guided conversations is not new in dental practice management, but it is one that has often been ignored, or once implemented, gradually declines in regular use. Although dentists have learned and implemented guided conversations (in the form of scripts) as part of the implementation of better systems for years, it is only a small percentage of practices that actually use them. There are multiple reasons that will be discussed in this course, as to why guided conversations are either never implemented or implemented and then gradually ignored. Properly designed and implemented guided conversations for all the operational systems will result in the practice operating at peak efficiency and profitability.