I have done the job I am now advising on.
Karen Harris, Practice Management Consultant. More than twenty years in dental, most of it running the business side of practices while the clinicians got on with dentistry. Practice risk and compliance is where I do my best work.
How I got here
I started in dental as a dental assistant and receptionist. I learned the industry from the chair side out, which is the part a lot of consultants skip.
From there I moved into practice management and eventually into managing a multi site dental group. Everything that touched the business ran through my desk: recruitment and training, rosters, accreditation, policy, budgets, KPIs, patient finance, the software, the difficult conversations.
Somewhere in there I took a paper based practice fully digital across both of its sites. If you have ever lived through a practice management system migration you will know that is not a software project. It is a people project with a software deadline attached.
What I kept coming back to was risk and compliance. Training staff and fixing rosters matters, but the thing that can genuinely damage a practice is sitting quietly in its policies, its records handling and its advertising. That is the work I care most about now.
The part that makes me useful
Plenty of people can tell you what good looks like. Fewer have had to build it on a Tuesday with two staff off sick and a full diary.
Career
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Most recently
Group Practice ManagerMulti site dental group. Operations, people, compliance, budgets and systems across the whole group.
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Before that
Practice ManagerA series of Adelaide dental practices, running the business side of each one.
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Along the way
Dental emergency servicesI have managed the emergency side of things for every practice I have worked with.
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Where it started
Dental Assistant and ReceptionistChair side and front desk. It is the reason none of this is theoretical.
Systems I have actually worked in
Software is where most practice problems either get solved or get buried. I have used these hands on, not sat through a demo of them. Dentally, Exact and Oasis all sit under Henry Schein One, so moving between them is familiar ground.
Compliance I have worked to
Accreditation is a lot easier when the policies were written to be used rather than written to pass.
Training
Want to talk it through?
A conversation costs nothing and it is completely confidential. If I am not the right person for your situation I will say so.
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