Oral Surgery Admin's Time Out: Practice Management Success Tips

Join host Jill Dunnam and co-host Halisi Tambuzi (CEDR HR Solutions) as they cover The Great Resignation... or The Great Job Hop, cultural fit versus culture add, plus the whole interview process, including two types of interview questions and interview methods... have you conducted working interviews?? Uh-oh!

Host Audra and Guest David Nye, SOMSA Conference Chair, briefly discuss SOMSA's founding as JAWS Society in 2005, but really explains our educational goals the 2019 Annual Conference in Savannah, GA.

David and Audra chat about the record number of attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors. David explains the theme of LEARN | GUIDE | PERFORM, and Audra shares how the 2019 Presenting Sponsor CEDR HR Solutions has helped improve the cultural health of her OMS practice and their continued support for her practice after their initial assessment.

David gives a speaker showcase, displaying the educational value of the conference, starting with the pre-conference courses offer, as Terri Bradley returns with her Coding & Billing course and we bring in Donna Grindle for a HIPAA and cyber security course on Sunday. Audra asks about the double-headers on Monday and Tuesday with Joe Mull and Liz Allen Fey.

Plus... David drops a few hints about the 2020 conference location...

Our intro sound is Ticking Clock Sound recorded by KevanGC shared under the Public Domain. The other sound you hear in our podcast is Tropic of Cancer 1 by Creative Commons from SoundCloud. It's a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC 3.0). You can find more information about the license here.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/#.

This is a transcript of episode 101 of our podcast Oral Surgery Admin's Time Out Podcast: Practice Management Success Tips, which you can listen to below or find wherever you listen to podcasts. If you enjoy it, please leave a 5-star review.

Host Audra and Guest Linden discuss how the Society of OMS Administrators rebranded from JAWS Society to Society of OMS Administrators and how the new logo, including the honeycomb icon, was selected.

[ticking clock intro]

[Host Audra Lansdown] Welcome to the Oral Surgery Admin’s Time Out Podcast, for Practice Management Success Tips. This podcast is brought to you by the Society of OMS Administrators.

[energetic break music]

[AL] Welcome! We hope you are having an excellent day and we are glad you have joined us for one of our FIRST podcasts for our Society of OMS Administrators or SOMSA for short. It is only fitting that we take our first time-out on this podcast journey with a little background and details on how SOMSA came to be and where we hope to take our organization.

[energetic break music]

[AL] Let’s start with introductions for all of our listeners. My name is Audra Lansdown and I’m from College Station, Texas. I’ve been with Brazos Valley Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery for over 15 years and joined SOMSA in 2015. Currently, I serve as the Vice-President for SOMSA and I also serve on our education committee! I have the pleasure to host with us today, Linden Mueller, our executive director. Linden, can you please tell us a little about yourself.

[Co-host Linden Mueller] Sure! I’ve been in association management for over 7 years now, and about 6 and half of those have been with SOMSA. Before finding this career, which I really enjoy, I taught university composition and English as a Second Language composition courses to non-native speakers at my alma mater here in Springfield, Missouri, and English as a Foreign Language, grammar and other language acquisition courses at University of Giessen in Germany.

[AL]I guess we want to pull all of our listeners in today and kind of explain a little bit that we’ve recently we have gone through a re-branding campaign. Formerly known as JAWS, SOMSA was created to reach more Oral & Maxillofacial administrators. This was a difficult decision but ultimately we had exhausted all of our organic resources to expand our membership. The board felt it was necessary to join with a marketing company to help soar to the next level with our membership and our resources. Linden, you were involved in that process. Can you kind of explain a little bit on why we chose to rebrand?

[LM] Yeah, the JAWS name is really meaningful. It’s an acronym for “Joining Administrators With Support,” and it relates directly to the field of work our members are in, which is really great. Our early logo even stylized the J in JAWS to look like the mandible bones.

But it’s too opaque. Potential members and their doctors couldn’t tell exactly what our organization was about from our name, and that really became an obstacle for growth. And we were often confused with that shark movie! [both laugh]

[AL] Good reminder! Linden, I know we went through a campaign to choose, and we ultimately went with a company to choose GPM to become our partner. Can you explain that process and how we became connected with them?

[LM] Yeah, of course, this is such a great story. The Marketing Committee, led by Chair Courtney Schneider of Amarillo Oral Surgery, solicited requests for proposal from several marketing companies, and we heard four pitches last year. It was a difficult decision, but the Marketing Committee recommended Golden Proportions Marketing to the board, and the board accepted the committee’s recommendation. GPM is a full-service marketing company specializing in dental practices, so they are familiar with our industry, and they’ve worked with organizations like ours before. They did some market research for the pitch, and that really impressed the committee and that really made them stand ahead of the other three pitches that we heard.

[AL] I agree, I agree. It was one very nice proposal that the put in front of us. Can you go into how you all went through and chose the logo?

[LM] Well It all started with Courtney and me running a speed-dating style slide show for the Marketing Committee members with logos that GPM had created in the past to help the committee figure out what direction we wanted to go in. The styles and things like that. Then, GPM’s design team presented 8 concepts from our feedback, and from that first round, the committee had narrowed it down to 2 basic designs, the rope design and the honeycomb design is kind of how we talked about it.

From there, we went through weekly reviews and we were presented with 8 concepts each time, and we quickly narrowed down from those two main icons, we really focused in on that hone...

Join Melissa Hathcock (Fort Worth Oral Surgery) and Joshua DeVries (Intiveo) as they discuss the importance of effective and efficient patient communication in guiding patients through the complex procedures your OMS practice performs, what features an OMS practice administrator looks for in a reminder service, and how examining your patient communication process and help you save time and remain adaptable. For resources and transcript, visit https://bit.ly/somsa-ep-105

Join host Jill Dunnam and co-host Gary Salman (Black Talon) as they talk all things cybersecurity. They cover the latest trends in cybersecurity; how long hackers scan networks and steal data before encryption and ransoming for it; what they’re doing with your patient data on the dark web, why a cybersecurity is best equipped to fully protect your practice; and practical, proactive steps you can take today to defend your network. For resources and transcript, visit https://bit.ly/somsa-106