Many dentists, technicians, and office managers might recall the excitement as practices started to do away with walls of patient records kept in manilla folders. As on-prem servers and software replaced files loaded with mixed degrees of penmanship, patient information became more reliable and easier to update. The risk of records not being correctly updated practically evaporated as people used a clipboard to confirm the accuracy of existing information, not create copy after copy, running in parallel. This transition, while perhaps costly for smaller practices, clearly displayed value immediately. Today, the next evolution is cloud computing for multi-office practices, further enhancing the reliability, accessibility, and efficiency of patient information management across multiple locations.
Through the use of cloud technology, multi-office dental practices have the opportunity to take advantage of new ways to boost productivity than ever before.
The four advantages using cloud computing for a multi-office practice:
1. Access Anywhere
When all records are kept locally, it means all questions and curiosities about a patient can only be answered while on site. Consider the average steps to check in on a patient while on the other side of town: Calling the office in the hopes that staff aren’t busy with a patient, requesting the info, and waiting however long it takes to pull up. You’ll then likely need to scribble something down so you don’t forget it or ask that person to carefully edit a file. That’s all assuming you don’t have to make the trek yourself in search of one specific computer screen or log in. Using an accessible interface, whether that’s a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, you can log in and review or edit any records you need, at any time.
2. Ensuring Bills Get Paid
Considering any average dental office starts to thrive at around 1,800 patients, having multiple locations means tending to thousands of insurance claims each month, just to get paid. Thorough reporting typically comes at the end of a week, when you gain visibility into the outstanding payments owed to you by insurance organizations, as well as patients. Bringing reporting into the cloud means that updates are delivered personally and instantaneously. Depending on your role, you can check in on all invoices across all locations at any time during the day. Even if you’re out for a quick lunch, track whether claims in the morning were paid immediately or which outstanding invoices are creeping toward the 90-day mark. More robust services will support entering paper or EDI claims into your records, as well as clearly defining held payments, overpayments, and discounts. The flexibility of cloud services also means the introduction of self-serve capabilities whereby customers can book their appointments, file patient information, and even make payments!
3. A Shared History
For some dental organizations, the availability of locations is one of the biggest attractions for new patients. While a patient’s primary location may be close to their work or home, being able to access another office in case of an emergency will remind them why they chose you as their care provider. The ability for a dentist on call, handling a chipped tooth, to access dental records that might otherwise be unavailable translates to better care. A holistic approach to care that takes into account a patient’s history not just with their health, but with your business, is truly great care.
4. A Prescriptive Template
If you have multiple offices, then you’ve got multiple dentists or specialists providing care. An appointment for cleaning will have patients heading out the door with a bag of toothpaste and floss. On the other hand, dental surgeons covering repair or extraction are much more likely to be sending patients home with a prescription. If you or your staff are regularly focused on a specific course of treatment, being able to template, and even digitize prescriptions can mean less time scribbling, and also less risk of manual error. With cloud computing for multi-office practices, prescription templates can be made available, automatically assigning themselves to a patient’s file without the risk of anyone failing to enter the info by hand or attach it to patient records.
Operating an efficient multi-office dental practice is easier when cloud technology is on your side. Learn from four dentists on their journey to move from paper-based and/or legacy, on-premise practice software to CleaDent’s cloud-based platform.
To learn more about what cloud computing is and why it is right for your dental practice, download our free eBook.
You want to be a successful dental clinic, but how will you know if you’ve made it? And more importantly, once you’ve reached success, how do you stay there? Quantifying success can be done in a variety of ways: client satisfaction surveys, new patients, five-star reviews, and revenue. In business, the most common method of measuring success is through tracking Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. Sure, there are the standard corporate KPIs of Profit = Revenue – Costs. But how does that help you analyze the wealth of dental KPI and analytics data at your fingertips?
Choose KPIs that help you analyze the data collected from your practice management system. This will empower you to make the best decisions for your business. The following KPIs are tried-and-true measures of success in the dental industry.
1. Production
Total Production
Treatment Acceptance
Doctor vs Hygiene
2. Profit
Profit
Collections
3. Patients
New Patient Intake
Active Patients
Cancellations & No-Shows
Production
Total Production. Many in the dental industry consider this to be the most important measure of success. You want to track your production values daily, monthly, quarterly, and annually. While growth may not happen day by day, it’s important to see that it’s trending positively on an annual basis. Increasing production equates to a practice that’s growing, which means your bottom line is too. If you need some help with increasing your practice’s production, check out these 9 tips on how to drive productivity.
Treatment Acceptance. You should be tracking how often patients accept treatment plans that the dentist proposes. Pinpoint trends in acceptance, or non-acceptance, to better understand your patient’s decisions. In turn, this can help you prepare your dentists for these presentations. A higher acceptance rate of treatments corresponds to higher production for your office. According to Dental Economics, a successful practice should have at least 70-80% acceptance. If your practice isn’t meeting acceptance goals, it’s important to analyze how your staff is presenting these cases. Dentalcare.com has excellent, curated research on case acceptance and boasts that it can drive your acceptance rate up to 90%.
Doctor Production vs Hygiene Production. Understanding the driving source of your revenue is key to helping you make informed decisions. This can also speak to the type of office that you’re running. Do you have a lot of low-cost hygiene appointments? Or, do you see fewer visits with a specialized dentist? Having a healthy balance between hygiene and specialist appointments keeps your office’s cash flow diverse.
Profit
Profit. Of course, the profit of the practice is one of the most valuable metrics for any provider. You can calculate profit through a basic calculation of Collections – Overhead. Your overhead costs should be less than 60% of your total revenue. Tracking these costs will keep you in tune with your practice’s spending habits. Once you have an understanding of your practice’s profit metrics, you can make informed decisions about how to invest money in the practice. Is one area of your practice driving most of your profit? For example, you can reinvest money from a thriving hygiene program into some of your dental specialties.
Collections. While projected numbers sound great, the success of your practice hinges on your ability to collect money owed. Some experts suggest that 98% of the money owed to your practice should be collected to keep on track with production goals. Many offices find it pays off to hire an Accounts Receivable individual or department to stay on top of bill collection. Your software can help if it has an easy-to-use ledger system that automatically inputs the EOBs that you receive from insurance carriers.
Patients
New Patient Intake. Bringing in new patients while maintaining your current patient bookings is what grows your practice. Aim to grow your client base by 1% each month. Another key aspect to track is where you’re sourcing new patients from. Are you covering all your bases with marketing opportunities? There are a variety of cutting-edge methods to grow your practice, which you can read about in our article about dental marketing.
Active Patients. The number of people that you have currently on your schedule are considered your active patients. Staff should be contacting patients who are in your system, but not on the schedule, to take advantage of all your business opportunities. For many offices, patients who are in the system but not scheduled are an untapped pool. Don’t be afraid to reach out and check on their dental health.
Cancellation & No-Show Rate. Track your cancellations and no-shows, because this affects many of the other metrics in the dental industry. A higher no-show rate means there’s a lower visit rate, which results in less production and revenue even though your costs and labour are the same. Strive for a no-show rate of less than 10% to maximize your production. If your practice is suffering from a high proportion of cancellations, no-shows, and last-minute changes, read up on some tips and tricks to reduce their occurrence.
Conclusion
If you’re new to the dental practice world, or even if you’ve been in business for years, use these metrics to step up your practice’s success. Understanding how to analyze the data you collect can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Download our eBook that goes into more depth on understanding your data and putting it to use.
Have you ever wondered what ‘Cloud computing’ is, where all the information is stored, what some concrete examples are, and most importantly, is it safe?
Simply put, much of what cloud technology consists of is largely based on the initial idea of the internet itself. The cloud allows you to establish a direct connection to a server, providing a single source of information, accessible wherever there is a reliable connection. Being able to quickly access entertainment, social networks, and even personal information on the go or your computer can be attributed to this.
As competitive cloud technology, like Microsoft’s Azure, came online in the 2010s, consumer companies began to exercise the potential of cloud technology with stable high-speed internet, and smartphones. Netflix was the most notable company to radically transform its movie mailing service, using single-access servers to deliver hundreds of television shows and movies instantaneously. Practically overnight, their business exploded as they took the information and services that people demanded, and made them available for instant access.
If there is one thing that cloud computing technology can do, the keywords have always been tied back to ‘instant access.’
With an exponential increase in demand for cloud services, the technology quickly evolved. Security systems and protocols have been implemented with encrypted information just as secure as on-prem servers, without sacrificing agility or accessibility. Resources are more reliably available as our cellular and data networks upgraded from 3G to LTE, 4G, and soon enough, 5G.Maintenance and update costs have plummeted as fewer devices and much less hardware are required to install and maintain records, data, or content.
How Cloud services are best used by businesses, small and large, are typically one of two models:
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
The ability for a consumer to access servers and deploy applications or software on cloud-based infrastructure.
Customers: GE Healthcare, Airbnb, American and Canadian governments
Software as a Service (SaaS)
When a business develops a piece of software or application that is accessible to various clients through an interface like a web browser.
Customers: Netflix, Square, ClearDent
Truth be told, there has never been a better time to adopt cloud technology and reap the benefits for your business.
Want to learn more about Cloud Technology and why it belongs in your dental practice?
When patients don’t show, up or cancel at the last minute, it can harm your dental clinic’s bottom line. No-show appointments equate to lost time, productivity, and profit for your practice. Patients also suffer from missed appointments due to delayed care as well as reduced available appointment times. You may be thinking, I can’t control my patients… what can I do to avoid last-minute cancellations?
Although these instances may feel out of your power, there are actions you can take to decrease last-minute cancellations and changes. Here are some suggestions on how to keep your practice operating at maximum capacity so that your patients can have the best experience possible.
Send multiple reminders
Adopt a no-show policy
Schedule convenient appointments
Pre-book appointments
Demonstrate gratitude
Make your office fun
Keep a waitlist
Send multiple reminders
When booking an appointment, ask your patient how they prefer to be contacted–keeping in mind all of the different mediums such as phone, email and text messaging.
Maintain accurate and up-to-date contact information, including cell phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses. Utilize multiple reminder methods with automated text messages and emails. SMS Text Messaging in particular has been shown to result in fewer no-show appointments, as it gives patients the date and time in an easily accessible place. However, it’s important to find software that can automate these tasks for you, and give your front desk staff more time to build relationships with your patients.
Then, develop a cadence for your reminder messages that prove to be most effective in reducing no-shows while also allowing your patients to identify unforeseen appointment conflicts with enough time for you to be able to re-book that appointment time.
This is the reminder cadence that we have found to be most effective:
Adopt a no-show policy
Setting a policy for no-shows, last-minute cancellations or late changes demonstrates that your clinic knows its value. There are many different types of no-show policies to consider. Not every policy has to include a monetary penalty, and in fact, many practices find these to be off-putting. However, adopting a no-show policy doesn’t mean that you don’t care about your patients. If someone doesn’t show up for an appointment, don’t alienate them–follow up with a caring message to see if everything is okay. When someone calls last minute to change their appointment time, offer alternative options to retain their business. Above all, demonstrate compassion towards your clientele to find the policy that feels best for both them and your business.
Schedule convenient appointments
How can you schedule appointments to avoid cancellations and no-shows? Keep a patient’s unique situation in mind when you’re booking their appointments to set them up for success.
Do they have kids in school and only have availability in the afternoon?
Is there a holiday coming up where schools will be closed but your practice will be open?
Are they constantly travelling and prefer to be called for a last-minute opening?
Does your clinic offer extended weekend, morning, or evening hours?
If you operate out of multiple clinics, is there a location that would suit their schedule better?
Accommodate their needs to ensure they can make the appointment. If your clinic doesn’t already offer extended hours, consider if that would enable you to extend your client base. Taking a moment to understand your patient’s scheduling needs makes a big impact on their view of your practice.
Pre-book appointments
How can you increase patients pre-booking their procedures? This increases their investment in the appointment and sets a standard for your clinic’s post-procedural operations. After all, people are more likely to be thinking about their follow-up visit while they’re still in your office. Create a routine with your practitioners and front desk staff that includes having all patients speak to the front desk before them leaving. Even if no payment needs to be tendered, it allows your staff to ask the patient how their appointment went and allows the scheduling process to be more personal.
Keep a waitlist
If you have patients with unpredictable schedules, offer to put them on a wait list. As no-shows or last-minute cancellations occur, they can be contacted to fill in these otherwise vacant spots in your schedule. If patients do end up missing an appointment or need to change last minute, offer to add them to the wait list so that they can still get their appointment completed without you having to risk another no-show.
Demonstrate gratitude
How can you show your patients that you appreciate them and their loyalty to your practice? Keep a calendar of birthdays and other milestones, and send notes through personalized emails, postcards, and text messages. Ensure that the time they spend in your office is centred around their needs. Practice active listening, and promptly follow up on any questions or requests. Special touches paired with consistent communication and reliable follow-ups create a unique and memorable relationship between your practice and patients.
Make your office fun✌️
Keep your customer base, and your staff, enthusiastic with holiday-centered giveaways and prizes. Set up a raffle that patients can enter every time they show up for an appointment on time. Allow existing clientele to receive a referral perk if they bring in new patients. Make sure your staff has input and responsibility for the events taking place around the practice. Not only will you be creating a fun working environment for your employees, but at the same time, you will be maintaining a warm and delightful experience for your patients.
Conclusion
While no-shows and last-minute cancellations are part of running a dental clinic, you and your staff can minimize their occurrence. In turn, this will boost your clinic’s bottom line and allow your office to operate at top efficiency, since no shows result in wasted preparation time in addition to the missed chair time. If you haven’t already analyzed whether automated software could boost your business, take a couple of minutes to chat with a ClearDent Solutions Expert or download our eBook: Your Guide to Choosing Dental Software.
There are many types of patients in the world. They range from enthusiastic go-getters that are eagerly awaiting your confirmation that they are cavity-free, to the slightly more apprehensive. Regardless of their disposition, understanding what your patients think of you and your team’s work is incredibly important. Understanding if someone enjoys, or even loves the work you do can give you insight into the likelihood that they’ll recommend your services. When it comes to word of mouth as a way to sell your business, there are few tools more powerful.
Beyond the value of knowing who is likely to spread your gospel, gathering feedback in a constructive or meaningful way will also give you insight into where you can improve across the care experience. People in general can be a little reluctant to provide feedback face-to-face, but when asked to do so, most people are happy to talk about their experience.
Let’s take a moment to talk about the ways feedback could help your business!
Take It Online
There was a time when many companies would reliably keep a pad of paper in front of a suggestion box. Now, reviews and feedback online make and break businesses. As more resources and integrations make their way onto practice management software platforms, feedback services are being made available through automated email. Heart to heart conversations with patients about their experience is always a wonderful way to connect, but if you’re looking for honesty, requesting feedback in an email after their appointment is the way to go.
This route is especially pragmatic because of the variability you can offer. If you believe in a 5-star rating over an in-depth survey, many tools can be customized to accommodate. If you receive a glowing online review, you can just as easily celebrate by asking them to post it themselves. As humans search for social proof online, more and more potential patients are looking for reviews that can paint a picture of what’s in store while in the market for a new dentist.
Getting to the Heart of Your Questions
When it comes time to establish surveys or feedback, there are several ways to solicit a response. Whether it’s asking questions about how they were treated or a simple yes/no to meeting their expectations, the complexity of your questionnaire can have a deep impact on the quality, and quantity, of your results. There are two schools of thought on the matter: While open-ended questions often feel like the best way to bring out people’s opinions, shorter surveys get you more responses, especially when you advertise them.
Simply asking if a patient would recommend you to a friend or family member is often all you need, with the option to explain the answer. This is commonly referred to as NPS, or Net Promoter Score. The other approach is to ask for specific feedback based on how they enjoyed their experience with their hygienist or other care provider. Although this can provide more insight into how your patients perceive the process, these surveys require significantly more tailoring and customization based on services provided. Either way, there is no wrong answer, just what you’re looking to learn about your own practice.
When Every Time Is Not the Right Every Time
It is obvious that every patient is different, but what is worth remembering is that every patient’s schedule is different, too. If you’re ready to gather feedback and hear what people think, asking them after every appointment can become bothersome. When courting feedback from your loyal clientele, think about how often you’re asking for their opinion, especially if they’re trying to get the most out of their insurance or coverage the week before a new year.
Finding a way to randomize, or at the very least set maximum survey frequencies, will keep people feeling like you value their opinion and that they’re not just on the receiving end of a mailing list.
Feedback won’t always be what you want to hear, but receiving it is a great way to find areas of improvement and build on an already successful office. When you solicit people’s experience directly they’re often happy to provide it. And, if you can get that glowing review online, your business is all the better for it!
How many patients can I squeeze into the day? The most common refrain among dentists and office managers alike. The business of a dental practice is built on providing quality oral health care to as many people as the day can hold. Patient care will always be the bread and butter of the industry, but as your practice grows, finding opportunities to increase productivity in your dental clinic can mean saving the business money, or even freeing up plenty of time. Regardless of your practice size, we have recommendations for finding savings in your office.
Trusting Your Specialists
Whether hygienist, technician, or other, your specialists have insight into how your office is being run. Each of these jobs represents an important part of your finely tuned practice machine. The ability of any dentist and specialist in an office to wrap up their appointments on time has a tremendous impact on your bottom line.
Finding the time to review a process or even frustrations in a process, can net you valuable minutes every day. These grievances can often be based on having to chase down misplaced charts or incorrect X-rays. Those delays lead to frustrations for staff and patients alike, never mind realizing you don’t have a periodontal probe ready when you need it.
When tools are easily accessible, and there is a single source of information like digital records, no one is scrambling to find allergy lists or up-to-date X-rays, your office starts to run like an expert orchestra.
Patients per Hour
For most offices and clinics, this question is about who is being served. For practices focused on productivity, this is about patients overall. You can only care for so many patients in an average 9-5 days, and capitalizing on this means your front desk staff need to fill as many units of productive time as possible while fighting cancellations and hard-to-reach patients.
While receptionists are busy on the phone confirming patients for their cleaning, they may be spending upwards of five minutes between scheduling and leaving voicemails. Texting is already proving to be more reliable for engaging customers, but with a system that supports automated reminders, you’ve freed up an hour or two each day to focus on the patients in the office. Restructuring the workload also frees time to focus on problem patients who might be most reluctant to step foot in your office.
The Express Intake Lane
Do you know how long it takes for your patients to check in? What about updating their insurance info, or changing their address? Keeping and maintaining an in-depth set of records for your patients is everything, including being able to reliably bill and charge. Checking or updating records isn’t just a minute or two delay before an appointment starts, it can be a delay of hours or even days when you realize that the wrong paper record was filed and the patient hasn’t answered the last two calls your receptionist made.
With electronic records, you never run the risk of filing the wrong record since there is only one record. If your entire office supports easy access to information, with tablets or small screens next to where you treat patients, you can confirm information at multiple points, rather than risk it not coming up in conversation with the front desk. Embracing electronic records can significantly boost productivity in your dental clinic, ensuring smoother operations and better patient care.
Primum non nocere, or, do no harm, is perhaps the most important value that a doctor holds. It guides the methodology and informs the course of a patient’s treatment and care. While care providers are passionate about improving lives during every appointment, patients can experience, or believe, harm has been done to them. With dental clinics across Canada structured like businesses, online complaints or grievances against a practice can run the gamut from poor customer experience, all the way up to serious health issues or outcomes. They are usually aired through social media or review sites, sometimes in the pursuit of free goods or services, and it’s been happening for as long as people have been able to comment online.
The timeless question since society was first confronted by the online troll, do you engage to protect your reputation, or simply ignore those with an axe to grind? The answer is frequently hard to put your finger on. An easy yes or no ignores the nuance in people’s grievances, and more importantly, the potential for existing patients who might read your response. If a patient feels as though they were treated poorly, but can easily be identified as disappointed instead of angry, they are worth your time to reach out.
Patients and customers who make valid online complaints require a prompt response. Many businesses see success by responding within an hour to formal complaints or within 24 hours to social media posts. While it can be pretty easy to spot a canned response, preparing a few messages ahead of time can save you plenty of headaches and that ticking clock feeling down the road.
One golden rule, regardless of what you read, is to never delete a comment, and never argue with the person posting.
The Difference Between Fact and Opinion
The Internet has done wonders for spreading information about small businesses, creating marketing opportunities that would usually require an expensive team of creative talent. The downside of democratic equality is that personal opinion can be shouted from the rooftops while being treated as fact. RateMDs.com, Google Reviews, and a variety of other rating-based sites offer first-hand experiences that influence curious prospects. These reviews, whether positive or not, are some of the first things that are likely to be searched by prospective patients when choosing a new clinic. Checking up on your online reputation is a healthy habit that businesses of all shapes and sizes must undertake.
When addressing negative comments, it’s worth considering the fine line between fact and fiction. It can be hard to believe, but a post that’s easily debunked as false isn’t worth much of your time. Remember to never argue online. On the other hand, if a patient feels as though they were not treated the way they deserved, through a cancelled appointment or spending too long in your waiting room, responding thoughtfully while outlining ways your practice intends to change sends the signal that your patients and their experiences are being listened to.
Handling online complaints professionally can help maintain your reputation and show prospective patients that you care about their feedback and are committed to continuous improvement.
A Proactive Practice
There is no doubt that you’re putting in hard work. Whether running a business or treating patients, people rely on you. The work that goes into maintaining the many relationships that keep your office afloat can be exhausting. So, why wait for people to create a deficit that you need to work your way out of? Offering discounts, promotions, contests, or just asking politely for satisfied patients to leave a rating online goes a long way. Building up a strong base of four and five-star ratings from customers who find you calm, supportive, and caring will make a handful of complaints, fact or fiction, seem trivial.
Just so long as you’re asking for open and honest feedback on your site or service of choice, people will speak from the heart and create plenty of recognition for your hard work. You’ll have a counterbalance for negativity, and a fantastic resource of quotes and testimonials to re-enforce how great your practice is.
Managing an online profile for your business means tending to both good and bad feedback that comes your way. Handling online complaints with the right tools and approach can soften blows, bring dissatisfied customers back to the table, and provide a large pool of encouragement for patients you haven’t met yet.
Let’s take a moment to talk about how busy life gets inside your dental office. Between sealants and whitenings, there’s managing schedules, sterilizing tools, and serving patients as just a taste of the tasks that fill every day. Finding the right people to assist in your practice when it comes to performing these procedures is often the difference between peace of mind, and feeling like you were better off having done it yourself, but that is only half of it. Implementing effective hiring tips can ensure you select candidates who not only meet the skill requirements but also fit well with your practice’s culture and values.
Finding the right hire will feel like the best money ever spent, but a hire that quickly turns over can come with great costs, usually into the tens of thousands of dollars. We’ve got important details on making sure that your hiring process reduces your employee’s flight risk.
The Art of Detailed Explanations
In an ideal world, a job posting goes out, the dream hire is the first to apply, and the entire process is wrapped in under a week. In reality, you can expect up to 200 resumes, depending on your office location. Creating a job description that isn’t just accurate to the role, but paints a picture of expectations in your office helps you to quickly weed out many of the applications you’ll receive. Branch out beyond the minimum experience for a dental assistant to outline the values, culture, and expectations of your business by speaking to the type of person who will not simply do a good job, but will be a great fit.
The top talent that will help grow your practice is looking for purpose and asking big questions about the priorities of where they work. Providing big answers about what it means to hold a valued role in your office is a signal that you’re looking for the best. With most workers preferring a shared sense of responsibility over higher pay, you’ll be able to quickly weed out those copy-and-pasted CVs that ignore your values and are just looking for a paycheque.
Questioning Interview Questions
Just about every job on Earth starts with an interview. We’re all familiar with the operational standards: What interests you about this job? Where do you see yourself in five years? What is your biggest strength? These are relevant pieces of information but are so commonplace that many applicants can answer without thinking about the question. Implementing effective hiring tips, such as drawing on unique experiences when crafting questions like “How would you handle a rude patient?” or “What is the most valuable thing you learned in school?” can help gauge an applicant’s strategic thinking.
Giving your interviewee a chance to ask any question about the everyday work they’ll encounter, and more importantly, the types of expectations or values that are in place, ensures that employment excitement is mutual. Remember that the interview works both ways. Just as you are evaluating the candidates to see if they are a good fit for your office, they are evaluating you to see if your office will be a good fit for them.
Meeting the Family Before Joining
If you’re setting up your office for the first time, hiring a receptionist or assistant is a one-to-one relationship that relies on dozens of hours every week for collaboration. That means you need someone who can complete the job capably as well as be a good fit with your personality. If you’re on the other side of the coin, filling a role in a second or third office, that great personality may seem less important because you’re less likely to interact with them frequently. In that case, look to the office managers, doctors, and technicians that will rely on their work, and get their feedback.
By including coworkers and colleagues in the interview process, you can gain valuable insight that picks up on questions or experiences that may not be your top priority. Furthermore, by getting first impressions from those who will spend their weeks working with a new hire, you don’t run the risk of a new hire making your current team unhappy, or worse, convincing them it’s time to look elsewhere.
Implementing effective hiring tips can make the process smoother and more successful. Hiring is a daunting and time-consuming task, but it generally speaks to your practice being in a position of growth or being ready to take on challenges new and old. The hiring process is a tedious task that can be tempting to rush through, but taking the time to prep, ask the right questions, and check in with your people can save you thousands while finding a great fit, maybe for life.
There’s much to be said for going digital and ditching the burden of paperwork, but not all benefits of a paper-free office are instantly obvious. To address the most compelling arguments for digitizing the dentist’s office, here are three big benefits you can expect. When you incorporate practice management software into your business, you’ll start seeing game changers in your work that go beyond throwing out your filing cabinets and collapsible bookcases.
1. A Helping Hand for Your Business
Even if your day-to-day is spent focused on your patients, it’s likely that the business side of running a practice occupies most of your thoughts. DIAC’s 2018 Future of Dentistry Survey Report says that 78% of dentists are focused on billing and overhead more than anything else, with patient growth and retention a close second for 75% of doctors. These two topics clearly represent key indicators for an independent dentist.
Billing before the Internet was typically an in/out tray of inventory management, insurance numbers scribbled on a patient’s file, and a constant set of reminders left for the end of the day or week. Software can not only replace the hand-written submissions for payment, but in many cases, automate them. Rather than manually keying in insurance claims, practice management software can turn a completed treatment into a claim and submit it to the insurance in just a few clicks. Inventory that watches its own capacity can automatically generate its own reports, bills, and even offer vendor price comparisons when stock is detected as being low.
For those that are concerned about cancelled appointments and unexpected openings in their schedule, there are currently many studies that show calling them directly won’t get the response you expect. As people move away from their phone and closer towards email and text as their preferred communication channel, the ability to send out SMS or email updates is the perfect means to communicating with your patients where they are.
2. Streamlining Everyone’s Workflow
If you’ve yet to consider how much time you spend retrieving information, imagine instantly opening up records, x-rays, or reference material without leaving your patient’s side. While about one-third of dentists today still rely on paper in their approach to health care, many are starting to see the time-savers involved in reliably accessing the information right when they need it.
This benefit doesn’t start and stop with patient profile review. Reception benefits from an integrated system by receiving changes to a patient’s treatment as they’re entered into a file. Changes to their follow-up appointments are made by clicking and dragging schedules that also send out those helpful SMS updates for appointments. The reality is that a single system that’s integrated into all of your necessary services increases your office’s ability to respond and multi-task while cutting down on the risk of error or miscommunication.
3. Cost Savings and Planning
IT infrastructure can be perceived as an arduous upfront cost and a reason to stick with print, but maintenance and often forgotten charges are where you’ll find immediate results. If you suppose that a patient record is about $5 in materials alone, a healthy office is spending $6000 just to keep patient records on their books. Without including the cost of staff searching for records, updates or error correction in paperwork, you’ve got a massive amount of overhead that you might think insignificant at face value. Of course, this doesn’t even include printer ink or physical security mechanisms to protect the documents that are so important.
Savings don’t exclusively come from consolidation or electronic record keeping, but also monitoring costs. Being able to generate cost reports or statements on a daily or weekly basis lets you track your costs moment-to-moment. Complete integrations that incorporate expected income from scheduling, inventory costs, and payroll hours paint an exact portrait of your business’s performance, right down to the last cent.
Cancellations, no-shows, and missed appointments are a constant frustration with anyone running their own dental practice. Making sure patients arrive on time can feel like a gamble with busy schedules, but it’s not necessarily life that’s getting in the way of some patients making their appointments. Quite often, reasons to cancel appointments stem from anxieties with dentists in general.
Engaging with patients can sometimes be a difficult process if they’ve had poor experiences with a previous dentist. Some studies through Statistics Canada suggest up to 40% of Canadians have some level of anxiety towards their dental visits. Deep anxiety was reported as a substantial driver for early and last-minute cancellations and no-shows alike. If you’re ready and willing, providing a caring experience will reward you with a patient that’s calmer and more at ease, but also indebted to you. The patient that you go the extra mile for will deeply appreciate your hard work. So what can you do to calm the nerves of someone with post-traumatic dental stress?
Offer Up an Ear
If a patient is brand new to your practice, it may be worthwhile to expand on their medical history. Taking time to establish their previous experiences with dentists gives you an idea about how much care or attention they may need. Asking about their previous dental experiences to learn about possible sore spots is a great way to actively listen, but there’s no need to simply dwell on the negatives.
If there were positive memories, beyond the toy reward during a childhood visit, bringing them to the surface can help to identify paths forward and even persuade them that their dental experience can turn into a good memory. Some dentists also find success by adding certain questions to their intake forms so that the information can be kept as part of the patient’s file.
A Calming Welcome
Sensory input is a big cause of anxiety. Smells, colours, and surroundings are the first things that set off our nervousness, and all those things are staples of dental offices. Depending on the size of your office, you might be able to curb that sterile chemical smell with a hypoallergenic air freshener, so when a nervous nelly enters for the first time, they don’t immediately feel as though they’re on the defensive.
While we’re on the topic of your reception area, are your walls a clinical off-eggshell, or have you added a splash of paint or an accent wall to spice things up?
A soft blue or green are both shades that naturally put people at ease. If you prefer neutral colours, then consider filling your walls with unique art centred on nature or historical sites, both of which can calm our brains. Other options include adding a TV that can distract, or cover up a particularly loud drill. Creating a welcoming and calming environment can help reduce patient anxiety and minimize no-shows, ensuring a more efficient and pleasant experience for everyone.
Focus on Distractions
When it comes time to take a seat in the dentist’s chair, that same sensory input we talked about before is now in full swing, and there’s not much you can do to limit the sounds, smell, or feel of the room. Presenting distractions for your patient to focus on can relieve a lot of their tension.
Start by reserving any spaces with natural light, windows, or a more spacious layout to allay any feels of claustrophobia. If you’re lucky with the layout of your office, you may have a secure enough ceiling to position a TV or screen that’s aimed at any reclining individual. The combination of sound, images, and stories is a surefire way to distract from discomfort and pain. If you’re concerned that the sound may distract from conversations between you and your assistant, let your patient know they’re free to wear headphones while they get lost in a podcast, audiobook, or music.
The stresses that compile into a bad dental experience may not always be under your control, but how that anxiety and nervousness is handled in patients of all ages is yours to command. When a patient goes from fearful to optimistic about their impending cleaning or cavity filling, they know exactly who to thank, and they thank that dentist or practice with a loyalty that can last for a lifetime. Reducing patient anxiety can also help minimize no-shows and cancellations, ensuring a smoother schedule for your practice.
