PDF Version - Glidewell Dental Labs

DH: Yes, refusal to delegate is one thing. Another sort of
related symptom is refusal to cross-train. A lot of these
people come off as perfectionists. They tell the dentists
that if somebody else does it and messes it up, then they
have to fix it. In the meantime, your cash flow suffers
because all these claims have been sent to the wrong
place. The employee convinces the dentist that he or she
is a perfectionist, which generally we consider a positive
with employees rather than a negative characteristic. So the
dentist tends to be receptive to this argument and the thief
gets away with it.
MD: It has to be even more confounding for a dentist to have an
employee with all these fantastic traits that they wish all their
employees had, and then to find a knife in their back with that
employee’s fingerprints on it. Are you aware of some dentists
who have been embezzled from multiple times?
DH: Definitely. In fact, once you’ve been embezzled from
once, the probability of you being a repeat victim is actually
higher than the general dental population. About two-thirds
of recorded embezzlement is from people who have already
been a victim. The probability goes up from 50 to 60 percent
to something closer to 70 percent.
MD: How do you explain that?
DH: I think the short answer is that some dentists are
probably easier to steal from than others. What makes them
easier to steal from could be anything from personality to
how they run their office to who else is working in the
office. There could be a lot of factors. Again, the chances
of hiring a bad apple in your career are pretty good. The
chances of hiring two are also pretty good.
MD: Once somebody in the office is caught and nothing about
the way the office is run changes, do you think it gives other
people in the office the idea to do the same thing?
DH: I don’t think that is what happens. I think five years
goes by, somebody else gets hired and that person steals.
The not checking the day sheet thing is a little bit of a red
herring. But if I’m a nice, easygoing dentist, for example,
the staff might get the idea that they can steal from me
without me really doing anything, because I’m just way too
nice. So I think if one staff member can form that opinion
about a dentist, so can two or three more.
MD: Let’s say I think I’m having an issue in my office and I give
you a call. Can you tell me a little bit about what the process is
like after that?
DH: Sure. The first thing we do is have somebody reasonably
senior at my company interview the dentist to see what the
dentist is seeing, and just try to validate that there could
be a problem. Sometimes we get dentists who don’t really
think there is a problem, but they have an employee who
did one thing to them once three years prior that they
think could be symptomatic of stealing. We usually tell that
doctor that if this person is embezzling, they’re going to see
more manifestations than one instance three years ago. We
try to help the dentist sort out what the employee is doing
“
One message I’ll give
your readers is that it is
really important to have
individual logins for your
practice management
soft ware. Some offices
have what I call the
‘unicode,’ a single code
that everybody uses to
log in with, which makes
it very tough for us to
track who is doing the
dirty stuff.
”