This article uses information from the insightful book by the long-time dental consultant, Bianca Dornan at Practices Made Perfect about delegating tasks in a dental practice.
In your dental practice, there are hundreds of tasks that can be done at any given time to improve the business. Knowing how to use concentration tricks to uncover these tasks is the first step. Having the capacity to accomplish them is the next one.
Unfortunately, not one person can hope to have enough capacity to accomplish every business-boosting tactic on a regular basis. You’re going to need help! Delegating these activities to the people within your practice accomplishes a number of things on top of the actual jobs. Things like;
Uncovering the hidden talents of your employees
Increasing buy-in from your team around business growth
Adding accountability for task completion
Opportunity to learn and expand abilities
For many practice owners or office managers, the problem isn’t with the concept of delegating tasks, but rather the execution of it. Especially in cases where your practice has been operating in a certain way for a long while, people in the practice can often be, or appear to be, resistant when asked to take on more duties. To tackle this, Bianca Dornan has developed a 4 part strategy for asking for help.
Step 1: Begin the ask with an action statement and an objective. Make sure your action statement is specific enough that the direction of the task is clear.
“Can you please help me with marketing? I would like to use social media [action] in order to get our name out to the community [objective].”
Step 2: Include key factors in order to further specify exactly what you’re looking for with this task, and make the results measurable.
“I would like to make sure that our personality shows through in every post [key factor]. I can commit to a budget of $100 per month from now until September [key factor]. My end goal is to have 150 new followers by September 30th [measurable goal].”
Step 3: Ask for their opinion on this new task. Perhaps they will need further clarification, or training, or will have an objection. In any case, it’s important to get their feedback so that they feel included in the decision and buy-in to the results.
“What are your thoughts on this project?”
Step 4: Find out what they need in order to get started, and make a plan to provide them with it.
“What do you need from me in order to get going with this project?”
Every employee is different, and there may still be pushback. By using this guide to delegation, the stars in your office will become more obvious, and the weaker members that may require more management/training will too. In either case, this exercise provides you with an opportunity to get your whole team moving towards better business outcomes.
This article uses information from the insightful book by the long-time dental consultant, Bianca Dornan at Practices Made Perfect about identifying opportunities in your practice.
When in the daily grind of running your practice, figuring out all the possible ways to improve your practice can feel overwhelming or even unproductive. You have enough on your plate, how can you be expected to set aside time to think about ways to add more work? If, however, you aspire to make the most out of your practice and possibly even expand it, brainstorming about what the issues are and how to address them is a necessary investment for you to make.
Steps to find opportunities
Identifying opportunities in your practice is so difficult because you are concentrating on something that you spend all day working on, your dental practice. If there are glaring issues and inconveniences, you have probably made an effort to address them already. Here are four tried and true ways to unlock the type of thinking that you need to uncover hidden potential. (Hint: none of them involve concentrating harder)
Do something unrelated to your industry: You are consumed by the dental industry. And, within that industry, there may be people doing great things that you can apply to your practice as well. But, if you want to become truly inspired, it is useful to take a step outside dentistry and see the ways that other industries are dealing with issues and creating more possibilities; they may apply to you. Attend a lecture for an industry you’re not familiar with, visit and read about businesses in different industries, and talk to people who have had success in their careers! You never know what will spark an idea that you can use.
Find inspiration online: Inspiration doesn’t need to take a lot of your time. Identifying opportunities can be done by finding unlimited inspiration for any topic online. Create a repository of interesting or inspiring articles, websites, images, and videos that you find online. When you have that, you can revisit these things to get your mind out of its routine and see things from a different perspective.
Be creative: Working to find inspiration online, being creative on your own can also open up your thinking to new possibilities. It is said that problems often get solved only when you stop thinking about them. Doing something creative that is out of the ordinary will force your mind to concentrate on something new. Try something new, or revisit a hobby that you haven’t done in a while; anything that breaks the cycle that you may have fallen into.
Map out your thoughts: Sometimes what is stopping you from figuring out the solution is the sheer amount of information that the problem has. To combat that, there is a process called mind mapping. The idea is that you take a large issue and break it down into smaller, more manageable, chunks. Then, you take those chunks and break them down even further. With that completed, all the action items or individual issues can be identified and addressed easily. Give it a try. Canva has a really useful, free mind map creator.
Which of these ideas appeals most to you? Give it a try and see what kinds of amazing things you could be opening yourself up to.
Trainers spend their days navigating systems for different practices and advising them on how to best use their practice management software. Not an easy job. Every practice has its way of doing things for its own specific reasons, and it’s the trainer’s job to implement, teach, and sometimes create best practices that will fit with each specific set of needs. Because of this, when you ask a trainer for a great power tip, they often can’t give you a simple answer. Frustrating. However, our amazing senior trainers pinpointed a tip that they like to give to every single office: “Change your treatment plan status”
By that, she means that it’s not good enough to simply label your treatment plans as planned or pending. You can do your practice a world of good by adopting AFRX method.
A – Accepted: Schedule the patient immediately.
F – Future: The patient wants the treatment, but something is preventing them from being able to move forward immediately, so put a task in your to-do list to follow up with them on a specific date.
X – Rejected by patient: The patient doesn’t want the proposed treatment. If the treatment is important, gently follow up with them to encourage them to approve it before the issue gets worse.
R – Rejected by insurance: Follow up with the patient only if their insurance status changes.
Label your treatment plan status with these and you can save your treatment coordinator a huge amount of time since they will now automatically know which patients to follow up with first (accepted), and how to approach patients that fall into one of the other categories.
This small change can make a big difference, and those are the best changes to make! Try implementing this at your practice and let us know what you think!
Imagine a world where each patient’s insurance coverage appears before you like magic. Imagine having the correct invoice amount for every patient through automated EOB, every time. Imagine having everything ready for you in an instant!
You don’t have to imagine it… it can be yours! But first, a couple of definitions:
Explanation of Benefits (EOB) is the statement that is received from the insurance carrier with the correct amount of coverage for the patient
Coordination of Benefits (COB) is the ability to prioritize multiple insurance carriers for a patient calculate the amount of coverage from each carrier in sequence and find the total covered amount.
ClearDent has fully integrated EOB and COB into our software so that everything is completed for you in the background. ClearDent’s electronic claim feature will automatically implement the Explanation of Benefits so the correct percentage of coverage is reflected on each patient’s invoice without any need for manual recording, hence automated EOB. If the patient has coverage from multiple insurance carriers, ClearDent’s electronic Coordination of Benefits (COB) will automatically forward the EOB from the primary insurance to the secondary insurance for completely accurate coverage information, and then implement that information into the patient’s invoice. Everything happens automatically, instantly*, and correctly.
Why is this so important? By automating this process, your front desk and patients will enjoy big benefits. First, the time needed to prepare an invoice will be drastically reduced. Accordingly, this will allow you to process more patients and greatly reduce wait times. Second, the accuracy of the statement will be vastly improved. With no human interaction or estimation, the invoice will be filled in with correct information without any risk of typos, or missteps. You will never have to attempt to collect more money from an incorrectly billed patient again!
* Performance based on support of real-time adjudication by insurance carriers
These days, the amount of dental paperwork needed to successfully run a practice is astounding. For decades, dental offices have been collecting information on every patient, printing it, filing it, and storing it in massive filing cabinets. It’s time to put your practice on a diet. Stop feeding it all these papers, and put it on a strict diet of technology. You’ll be amazed how much faster you can perform.
You can slim down your practice. You have options!
How to eliminate dental paperwork by feeding your filing cabinets
Kiosk, by ClearDent, is a mobile web app for iPad, Android, and Windows that allows you to complete your check-in procedures, update medical information, sign documents, and inform you of insurance coverage changes via notifications in ClearDent, all using tablets. From there, new and updated data provided by the patient, including his/her family, is automatically updated in your ClearDent system, and available to you immediately, skipping any dental paperwork. Neat, huh?
Hey everyone. Come see how good I look.
Once you’ve shed the weight of filing cabinets, your practice will have new options – so much extra room. Clean and modern looking. On top of a little interior design, outfitting your practice with some technology will go a long way! After all, patients want to know that they are receiving the best possible treatments. And often, the clean look made possible by modern tech throughout the practice will give them that perception and confidence. At the end of the day, everyone knows the right technology streamlines the workflow and will help deliver better services and experience.
Be more efficient. Look more stylish. Give you and your patients a new and amazing experience.
For decades, the norm in dentistry has been calling patients with appointments and recall reminders. But is that the most efficient way of doing things?
No, it isn’t.
Communication has become faster and more personal with the advent of smartphones. As such, the way businesses need to communicate must adapt as well.
Where newspapers, mail and phone calls used to be the norm for communication, Twitter, email and text messaging have now all but taken their place. For many, the phone app is becoming the least important app on their device. Instead, a click-to-confirm message from your dental practice via email or text message allows your patients to communicate with you using the medium that they are most comfortable with, as compared to calling patients.
Is phoning still effective? Not really…
The caveat here is that if you manage to get someone on the phone, at a time that is convenient for them, when they have the ability to take note of what you’re saying, yes… phoning can be effective. However, the vast majority of calls don’t manage to meet those criteria. In fact, most will go unanswered.
Using an email or text messaging system of communication allows your patients to check and record the reminder at the best time for them, whether that’s immediately, or later that day. On top of that, phone confirmations can not be scaled unless you commit more time and more people. Email and text communications, on the other hand, are instant and completely scalable.
This is how ClearConnect can greatly benefit your practice immediately. With a few clicks of a button, you can quickly see a list of patients with unscheduled recalls or treatments, and send a message to them to get an affirmative response to fill vacancies much more effectively.
Combine this powerful ability with a revolutionary system like ClearMessaging, which has the ability to chat with single patients or groups of patients via text messages from within ClearDent, and your communication efficiency and effectiveness will skyrocket.
Being a dentist is about providing high quality service to your patients. But that doesn’t exclude you from maximizing what your practice is able to provide, and as a result, maximizing the profits that your practice can enjoy. Your dental practice can make more money. Bring in more patients, and provide higher value services on a more consistent basis.
Make Money Through Eliminating Schedule Gap
No matter what systems are in place, every dental practice is going to receive patient cancellations. Although there are several ways to minimize the number of cancellations you receive, there are also ways to effectively fill gaps in your schedule, even last minute.
Contact Assistant – Knowing which patients are most in need of an appointment is a huge asset. However, figuring out patient priority when having to weigh overdue recalls, and overdue and in progress treatment plans can be very difficult. With Contact Assistant from ClearDent, patient contact priority is laid out for you so you know exactly who to contact first. It can even be organized by criteria for situations that require a specific type of treatment, unit of time, or even chair to fill.
Two-way texting – When you have identified the top priority patients to contact, having an effective way to contact them can save you precious minutes or even hours. Two-way texting allows you to send text messages directly to a single patient, or group of patients in seconds. When those patients respond, the message will appear in your ClearDent software and be stored directly on the patient’s file.
Having the ability to find the right patients and contact them in seconds will give your practice every possible advantage when dealing with last minute cancellations.
Know Your Numbers
Every good business needs to know their numbers. In a dental practice, that goes beyond just knowing what your revenues are. When you can identify the areas of your practice that are driving the most profit, and the areas that have the most potential to improve, you have the ability to control your own profitability, therefore, allowing your practice to make money.
Staff Production – Learn how much of you profit is coming from your hygienists vs your dentists. Additionally, you can easily see which hygienist, or which dentist is the most profitable and why. With this information, take your findings to your whole staff and implement best practices to get everyone’s production up to the best possible level.
Profitable Procedures – Your most expensive procedures are not always your most profitable. Knowing which procedures are bringing in the most profit allow you to emphasize acquiring patients that require those procedures. It may also allow you to bring in more staff that are able to carry out those procedures and add to the profits of the whole practice.
Starting with your software, maximize the profits that you are bringing into your practice this year.
When so much of your dental practice is influenced, or controlled, by your choice of software, it’s important to know the ways in which your choice of software can benefit you. With rapidly advancing technology in dental software, knowing what to expect out and getting on board with your most progressive software option can mean a difference of many thousands of dollars each year. This article is going to illustrate 3 ways that ClearDent dental software is designed to make your practice more efficient, and thereby save you money.
Save Money Through Automation
The largest expense of your dental office is payroll. Software is not something that is going to replace your staff, but it can allow the staff you have to accomplish a great deal more in the time they spend working. For example, saving time on some of the more tedious tasks that your front office staff needs to complete on a daily basis will free them to excel in other areas that can be a genuine differentiator for your practice, like customer service. Automation allows processes to run in the background to ensure that your customers are receiving a consistent experience every time. So, what processes can be automated?
Patient Communication – Set up an automated series of communications with your patients. For example, you can have your software send your patients a reminder by email, text message or phone message when they have an appointment coming up. You could also help build a stronger relationship with your patients by allowing your software to send a birthday and/or holiday message to your patients from your dental office.
EOB Auto Adjust – When you submit an estimation of benefits (EOB) to ITRANS, you are then required to re-enter the information you receive into your software. This is the kind of manual, tedious task that ClearDent is always working to eliminate. With ClearDent, that information is automatically transferred directly into your patients’ ledger, saving you time and the potential for mistakes.
Single Software Provider
With so many dental software options and combinations to choose from, it can be tempting to mix and match software in an attempt to find a combination that will provide an extra little beneficial to your specific practice. Doing this, you can fall into the trap of having to coordinate multiple software packages from different companies, paying separate monthly fees, and struggling to get the software to work together the way you had envisioned.
Example – You purchase a practice management software, a patient communication software, financial analysis software and a cloud backup plan. Each of these elements comes with a price tag that is reasonable. However, when added all together, you can often end up paying over $500/month. And with that high monthly cost, you will be stuck trying to get multiple programs to work together nicely. And, if/when an issue arises, you will be forced into a mediation role between the support departments of 2 or more different companies.
Finding practice management software that also provides the additional services you desire, like ClearDent does, means reducing your total monthly payments. And, with software designed specifically to include all these features in one product, the chance of having issues with it is greatly reduced. Even if you do encounter a complication within your system, there is only one number that you will need to call. The time and frustration of figuring out issues is eliminated, therefore, allowing your practice to save money.
Software Updates
When your practice is using ClearDent, we want you have the best possible experience. In order to do that, we need to make sure that you always have the latest version of ClearDent available to you. Because of this, ClearDent has included all software updates into our monthly money cost.
Not only will you never have to worry about paying to upgrade, update, or add a feature enhancement again, but you’ll also have the all of the latest features available to you as soon as they are released. And, when you’re working with the most progressive software in Canada, that can be a game changer!
All dental offices have a way of finding patients to fill available slots. ClearDent has a feature that facilitates this time-consuming process. And this is how it works: The Appointment Manager allows the receptionist to quickly fill slots in the day that have become available.
How does it work?
When a patient cancels their appointment, a pop up box appears and asks if the appointment should be added to the waiting list. If ‘yes’ is selected, the appointment is added to the pending waiting appointment list.
This particular list is a great resource to pull names from when you have a cancellation on the schedule. You can pull up the appointment manager waiting list and call the patients listed to fill the available open spot on the schedule. If the patient has more than one appointment pending you can select all appointments for that patient (by checking the box to the left) and select schedule. This will move all of the patient’s appointments into the drop box allowing you to book.
When a patient has additional appointments that need to be booked, you can also open up the appointment manager. “Add” their name to the wait list so that you do not lose track of the patient and remember to follow up in a few days to book their treatment.
Booked and Waiting & Short Notice List
Booked & Waiting allows you to book patients in the future, but by choosing the Booked & Waiting option when scheduling the appointment it adds this appointment to the Booked & Waiting list. Therefore, if you have an opening in the schedule, you can pull patients off the Booked and Waiting list to get them in sooner.
Short Notice list is also a very tool to use when you have a last minute cancellation and need someone to fill the spot quickly.
All the above functions can be sorted by specific provider as well.
ClearDent makes it easy!
Looking for more guidance? Visit ClearDent’s new online Help Centre for on-demand training videos, detailed user guides, and FAQs. Whether you’re new or experienced, our Help Centre has everything you need to enhance your product knowledge and troubleshoot issues effortlessly. Click here to learn more →
Technology is allowing industries of all types to increase efficiency. In the dental industry, the list of technological advancements that allow dentists to gain more information to diagnose issues and complete procedures more efficiently is very long. What isn’t as evident, however, is how greatly technological advancements can increase the capabilities of a dental practice’s front desk. Specifically, I’m referring to automation. More and more dental practice’s are automating their processes every year. So, what can be automated?
Automating Appointment Confirmations
The biggest offender of time wasting for front desk staff is the age old practice of manually calling each patient to confirm their appointment. ClearDent can automate this for you easily by setting up a system where patients will automatically receive an email, recorded phone message, or text message (based on their preference) where they can quickly confirm their appointment.
Automating Appointment Status
When a patient has received their appointment confirmation message, it is a very simple process to confirm their appointment. When they do this, ClearDent will automatically update the patient’s status in the system.
Recall Reminders
No more letting patient’s slip through the cracks. ClearDent will automatically reach out to patient’s who still need to book their next recall. Because of tight integration, ClearDent can see who needs to book, check their contact preferences, and send them a message to book.
New Patient Welcome Package
Make a good first impression with your new patients. Have ClearDent automatically send them a welcome package.
Happy Birthday Messages
Show your patients that you care, and further build a strong bond to increase retention. Have ClearDent send every patient a happy birthday message.
And, because this is the way of the future, ClearDent is working hard to take advantage of our dental software ecosystem to bring even more time and money saving automations to our customers. Check out our new and improved website for even more information.
