Starting Each Business Day
Most Dental offices have one lucky staff person who’s job it is to come in an hour before everyone else and does some sort of early morning checklist. The idea is that a small additional increase to the hourly wages can insure that the rest of the office is able to get off to a great start. This person does 30-40 tiny tasks that make the office ready for business. Of these tasks, usually 10 or so are important enough to put down on a list.
Example of Items you may have on your Startup Checklist:
- Turn on the x-ray machine
- Turn on all the OP computers and frontdesk computers.
- Turn off the answering service
- Update the patient lobby message/ turn on the keurig.
- Check to see if all patients are confirmed.
- If your office makes coffee- do so.
- Start making reminder calls.
But there is something missing from this list that needs to be added.
Check the backups!
Two things to look out for.
First. The backup job needs to be done running. If the backup job is still running, your system will run dog-slow as the staff start to put a load on the server. If the load is too high, you may encounter extremely slow systems, time-out errors or a possibly a system crash that requires you to reboot the server while patients are in the chair. Not Good! Backups that don’t complete in time are usually a sign of something wrong.
Second. The backup job needs to be inspected. Backup programs are notorious for saying they are “Complete” but when you inspect them closely you find that the database was skipped because it was left open, or that the files transferred total exactly 0.0MB. Tiny little misconfigurations, such as changing a password or renaming a folder can throw a backup job into disarray.
So, just as a recap. Have your morning person add “checking backups” to her morning routine. Make sure she knows HOW to actually inspect the backup jobs and to make sure that the really intense “full backups” are done running before the doors open.
