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.
Whether you’re opening your own practice, or you’ve been investigating how software can make your day-to-day schedule smoother, one of the most important factors to keep top of mind is compliance. Typically under-advertised, a product’s ability to comply with provincial or federal law is what dictates your own office’s adherence to guidelines, and also your exposure to legal risk as a business owner. Understanding the ground rules for software that serves your patients can mean taking a lot of stress off your day-to-day routine.
In Canada, devices and software that serve any purpose to do with health or the body of a person are classified into four groups. Everything from a mouth mirror to digital patient records require strict regulatory conditions, regardless of which province you call home while providing oral healthcare. While compliance is frequently a moving target, organizations that understand the value of staying ahead of rapid change are most likely to welcome your questions and concerns.
Your Class 2 License
Depending on the level of integration that could most benefit your practice, there are a variety of key touchpoints that are inevitably stored on servers and hard drives. Patient records including dental x-rays and medical history represent a medium to high risk for exposing private information. The federal body, Health Canada, designates any device with medium or high risk to patient info as being Class II.
If you’re shopping around or are interested in practice management software, by law, every product that directly impacts patients must clearly state that it has been licensed in accordance with Health Canada. Keep an eye out for licenses when examining products, or ask how a company complies when speaking with a sales representative.
Updates to Compliance
The climate for regulation, whether provincial or federal, is an ever-changing current. As our laws and regulations update, offices are placed with the burden of adjusting to the shifting landscape. As many provinces and lawmakers look to their neighbors for inspiration, one change can quickly have ramifications for the other side of the country. For example, imagine even a small change to the requirements for record handling, how your provider reacts could leave you liable or on the hook for update costs.
While some software providers will charge for updates outside of their roadmap (and even updates within it), many will take the time to ensure their products remain compliant for free.
Staying Informed and Educated
When our smartphone apps update, developers will usually go between details to explain, in shorthand, their new offer or simply thank their customers for loyalty. As a business owner wrapped up in compliance, with an already packed schedule, you are required to understand the updates and changes, even if you’re not in control of them.
Compliance, regulations, and laws are frequently wrapped up in legalese or highly technical language. While you may hear about new requirements from a dental college or professional body, products that additionally explain how they meet legal standards in plain language ensure that everyone in the office understands compliance and their responsibilities.
The framework for how dentists operate across Canada is a constantly shifting set of necessary rules. Being caught off guard with new changes has very real impacts on the business you run, but compliance doesn’t need to be the thing that occupies your hours. Don’t be afraid to press your dental software provider on how they view compliance update and changes, so you can stay focused on providing your patients with great care.
Dental practices frequently hold special places in the community. Recommendations from friends and family may be the top decider when searching for a new doctor, but just about every other patient will choose their oral health provider based on proximity. Being able to show that you’re engaged with the neighbourhood elevates you past just being another dentist in the eyes of possible patients.
If you want a strong presence in your community, you could use pricey flyers and bus stop ads, but charity can be just as effective, and much more rewarding. Engaging directly with local groups and organizations yields benefits for both your business and those in need.
The Math Behind the Money
There are many ways that businesses can be encouraged to engage with non-profits and other support-providing services. If you’re in search of a silver lining for your office, then look no further than useful charitable deductions. When thinking about where your donation goes, it always pays to be mindful of how they’re spent. Many high-profile national or international charities frequently distribute your gift across a wider region, or in specialized places such as research hubs or urban centres.
While high overhead is becoming less of a concern about efficacy, you may be interested in organizations that see a larger portion of proceeds directly go to those who need them. When a charity has a narrow focus, dollars typically go much further. Consider local sports teams or clubs for kids, where even smaller donations can make a big splash.
Charity Without the Cheque
Running a business can be exhausting, and charity may be the last thing on your mind during a tight fiscal month or an overloaded schedule. Consider researching charitable organizations that you can instead partner with, so the work can be shared. Just by soliciting food donations in the office, or putting up advertisements in the waiting room, you can generate engagement with any cause near and dear to your heart. Of course, finding an organization that shares your approach to business is paramount.
If you’re the type of practice that puts out promotional material or has an active presence online, don’t forget to advertise, re-tweet, mention, and share your advocacy for more awareness.
Being Proud and Public to the Dental Community
The satisfaction of making a difference in someone’s life is just one of the many rewards that come with a philanthropic purpose. Local newspapers and media are often eager to celebrate businesses that make a difference in their neighbourhood. Proudly associating your name with charity contributions, or work in a not-for-profit practice, is a great way to let prospective patients know that you value their community as much as you value them. If you’re examining how to best spend a marketing budget, take a look at how far that money could go towards sponsoring a local event, public cause, or even parade float.
As a business owner and practicing dentist within the dental community, making time for, or contributing to, charities can be daunting. Smaller offices may feel like this can be a distraction from your patients, but raising the profile of your practice solidifies your role in the community, and helps to bring in new patients.
There’s no secret that the latest tech is bringing lots of change to just about every industry. Smartphones are making work possible from anywhere, and with the latest digital security, even medical documents are safe on your server. If you’ve been wondering about the benefits or risks of transitioning to a paperless practice, we’ve got answers to your top questions.
The Cost of Change
Dollars and cents are also not the only cost worth considering when looking into something new. Maintenance for dental software may feel like you’re shifting the burden from a strict filing regime to figuring out how to download updates, but many software providers offer their updates as automatic installations, provided free of charge.
Ability to Integrate
Each and every practice is its own unique business. Dentists and Office Manages alike have their own preferences and may build out solutions that range in purpose. Bringing your documents and records into the digital age doesn’t mean they need to sit alone. Any software worth the investment will provide you with built-in options or open integrations that will allow you to carry out all the functions and processes your practice needs. Many software solutions will work comprehensively, solving multiple needs in an office using a single product suite.
Even if you only need to move your documents to a server, make sure that your ultimate choice is compatible with the products that have kept your business operating up until now. Slowing your workflow by jumping between programs, and manually re-entering sensitive information is tedious experience and a waste of your time and money.
Keeping Secrets Safe
Providing health care is one of the most rewarding services that dentists can offer, but the care that is provided is intensely private. Laws like the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) are in place to protect not just the information of patients, but their rights to privacy. Privacy breaches against massive firms and organizations routinely make the news for their staggering volume, but you might be surprised to learn that the most common target for hackers is smaller businesses that are perceived to be easier targets due to their size, and lack of investment into cybersecurity.
When examining your options for software to transition to a paperless practice, secure providers will be more than happy to talk about their certifications and compliance. Completing certifications, like the ones set by Health Canada, means that your provider is paying close attention to security. Don’t be afraid to inquire about encryption, remote storage, and even access roles, to prevent any single compromised user from accessing every piece of info about your patients.
The landscape for dental software that replaces the paper in your practice is rich and can be overwhelming. Focusing on the cost, integration, and security of the software will help weed out the option that won’t quite fit and help to refine the search for your office’s ideal solution.
Want to learn more about what practice management software can do for your office?
The real art of dentistry comes from putting your patients first. If you’re bogged down by the tasks in your office, you likely find yourself distracted by how your practice is operating. Improving the way work is done during business hours has a massive impact on your bottom line. Keeping office productivity at its peak means a better use of your time, a steadier stream of revenue, and even happier patients.
Keeping with the themes of office productivity, let’s jump right into our tips for speeding up the processes of your practice!
1. Mind Your Schedule
Conventional wisdom says that a full schedule is good for the bottom line, but an overflowing schedule can also be hurting your office’s productivity. The average dental appointment takes just under an hour to wrap up, typically representing cleanings, fillings, and check-ups. Understanding how accurate your schedule is can lead you to discover unknowns for how you spend your day.
Over the span of a few weeks, track your appointments for how long you expect, and how long they actually take. You might find that you’re able to fit in extra appointments, or that removing one from an overbooked schedule gives you the time to review your notes that keep you well past closing time.
2. Declutter Your Space
When you consider what clutter is, a desk buried under paper might be the first thing to come to mind. In reality, clutter is everywhere, and it’s slowing down your office productivity. Take your waiting room, for example.
When your patients enter the office, is the reception desk near the front door? Is there enough open space to keep people moving? Making sure that it’s easy to get around means people are less likely to loiter while waiting, and your office can keep moving.
3. Invest in Administration
Word of mouth is one of the best ways to drum up new business without spending your time on marketing to new patients. Positive word of mouth happens when you’re focused on your patients, and they’re getting 100% of your attention. When someone feels like they’re the most important person during their appointment, they let their friends and family know.
A one-man army might save on overhead, but being distracted by phone calls or scheduling appointments means a patient is not getting your full attention. Make sure that your office is properly staffed with people who can take the mundane work off your hands and make your minutes count.
4. Patient Questionnaires
Checking in with your patients directly after a visit while their experience is fresh in their minds can give you insight into how they interpret your process. If you haven’t taken the plunge into text messages yet, check in to see if your patients would prefer follow-up as a text. Texts are much faster and easier for reception, and more likely to get a response and appointment booking.
You can also take the time to learn if they’d be interested in online scheduling, or alternative ways of tackling treatment plans.
5. Go Paperless
If you’re leasing or renting the space for your business, think about how much real estate your papers and records are eating up. On top of that, maintenance always becomes a huge imperative, where extra effort must be paid to ensure that nothing is misfiled. By utilizing a digital library, you remove the risk of delaying appointments to search for something that wasn’t put away correctly.
With cloud or remote access, you’ll find yourself making every moment count by instantly accessing X-rays and patient records on a mobile device instead of getting up to run to your little library.
When a dentist makes a go of their practice, they face a lot of challenges that reflect the complexities of running a business. One of the biggest challenges in any business, regardless of industry, is personnel management. The lifeblood of day-to-day operations is the people you hire to help you focus on patients and the business—thinking about the HR strategies that will eventually lead to your practices’ long-term success.
Larger companies typically hire people or teams to resolve issues through human resources. Of course, creating more headcount is not the right fit for independent practices, but implementing HR doesn’t mean adding another person to the payroll, it’s an opportunity to show leadership.
Office headaches can be frequently misdiagnosed, but by taking a proactive approach that is thoughtful of common human resource issues, you’ll find a more positive atmosphere, happier colleagues, and even a better bottom line. Here are our top 3 HR strategies:
Always be knowing
When your employees start their first day, they have clearly defined expectations for their job. Those expectations should be as clear and accessible on the anniversary of their first year. While roles may be universal across practices, the demands and day-to-day work in your office should be well-documented and always available.
By creating an employee handbook, you contextualize a new hire’s expectations with your outlook. Incorporating HR strategies, such as outlining rules around the atmosphere, can remove confusion or awkward conversations about clothing, language, and smartphone use. Like a patient’s treatment plan, your employee handbook is a guide to maintaining stability and getting the outcome you expect.
Taking the time to produce a comprehensive guide means you’ve also clearly defined what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour. In the unlikely event that a termination results in a legal threat, you have a document that explicitly says how being late, rude, or negligent, would lead to a loss of employment.
Privacy in the practice
We all have high hopes when a new person is brought into practice. Over time, you might discover a clash of personalities, they struggle with certain work, or they no longer meet expectations.
Frustration and anger may make you want to point out every infraction when they occur, but rather than raising your voice, consider taking them aside for a quieter conversation. Getting in the habit of regular private conversations about performance opens up a chance to talk about your working relationship. Meeting at least once a month provides a chance to dig into deeper issues or causes, without anyone feeling like they’re being attacked.
Of course, the other side can be equally true. A new hire – or an old one – might be seeing real success or progress. Taking them aside to let them know you see their hard work signals that you appreciate them, and you’re not afraid to let it be known.
Always be including
Inclusion is a powerful and important tool that you have as either owner or manager of an office – and we’re not just talking about diversity. People don’t exclusively think about their jobs in a bubble. They have opinions on where they work, who they work for, and how that work is done. Sticking people on the sidelines while decisions big and small are made is a recipe for alienation and a lack of interest in maintaining your thriving office.
Regardless of which role an employee has, they will have ideas based on their background about the way things are run. Not to say receptionists should be consulted during extraction, but gathering opinions or hearing people’s experiences before a decision says that you value them and their knowledge—which could also strengthen your overarching HR strategies.
To set yourself out as a leader in the office, consider taking the time to seek coworker’s thoughts even before there’s a decision to make. Friction can occur in your practice without you knowing — maybe patients aren’t in love with the music, or your hygienist has an idea about recording patient care. Giving people a chance to speak their minds can make for some quick and easy wins that help build a better business and save a few dollars.
Evolution of the Dentist’s Office
The world of dentistry has made leaps and bounds since the profession was first recognized in the early 1700s. While Fauchard’s The Surgeon Dentist, A Treatise on Teeth may have provided a blueprint for oral care, those fledgling dentists could never have guessed the dental industry evolution and advancements their practices would see.
Fast forward to today, dental offices are seeing a renaissance in the way they care for patients and run their business. If you haven’t yet taken the step to go fully digital, taking a moment to think about how far we’ve come will give you the chance to reconsider what technology can do for you and your employees.
It can be tough translating the cloud, platforms, and AI into your day-to-day business, but we’re here to explain how welcoming the latest technology is just as important as collecting your patient’s name and number.
Let’s take some time to examine three ways in which the business of dentistry has changed, and appreciate how far we’ve come.
Informal Itineraries
Dentistry has spent decades sending assistants and receptionists to the Rolodex so they can spend the afternoon on the phone, drumming up business. This expensive, weekly-if-not-daily, routine relied on costly human capital neglecting other duties for the sake of filling a schedule.
Thankfully, technology has removed spending all Tuesday morning filling your Thursday afternoon. With an integrated solution through the dental industry evolution, reaching out to patients is now a simple SMS, sent on command. More and more people prefer texting over taking calls, so a casual reminder with the option to schedule an appointment is instantaneous, and it frees your people to focus on the office around them, and the patients in front of them.
For bonus points, an all-in-one solution will be able to automatically email or text a simple thank you following an appointment, and it’ll be appreciated.
A Flexible Connection
When dentists ventured into multiple locations to expand, there weren’t enough hours in the day to catch up. Whether you were driving across town for charts or dialling up every few minutes until you skipped the busy signal, it was exhausting – if not impossible – to stay on top of things.
Practices are very busy places and are forecasted to grow up to 19% by 2026. With the advent of the cloud, staying on top of multiple offices is now effortless, as opposed to impossible. Charts and treatment plans are available on your phone or tablet. Stay on top of your practices while on the train in the morning or from the comfort of home at night, with total security. Using a mobile-friendly app, you’ll even have time to check in with other offices while waiting for a curing light to beep.
Deliver In, Digitize Out
There was once a time-honoured tradition of writing up inventory sheets while waiting patiently for deliveries that showed up when they showed up. Tracking shelf-life, quantities, and replacements were a daily and weekly sit-down that needed double and triple checking before you could call up your provider.
It may not be the biggest bill, but your inventory takes up a lot of space and time. If your drug doses, disposable tools, even toys of tots run dry, you run the risk of downstream expenses for your practice. Rather than having someone count latex gloves and suction attachments, immediately enter invoices into a digital inventory. When you take an item out, use a simple barcode scanner to track stock.
After your inventory runs low, you can be instantly notified of an item that needs reordering, or with an integrated all-in-one, your system can send out an order on your behalf. Don’t forget to enjoy all the hours each week you’ll suddenly find free.
The Future, and Beyond
AI gets tossed around as potentially solving our future problems, but it offers a promise for positive change in our lives beyond how we get around, especially in the dental industry evolution. Looking into the future of dentistry, AI won’t mean that a robot will be responsible for bonding and extracting, but more of an assistant in a busy practice.
Imagine a future where recording an irregularity creates an instant notification from software that knows exactly how likely a diagnosis is. Immediately, you are aware of a trend over your patient’s past few visits, and you’ll screen them for disease before they leave the chair. This process won’t be days or weeks after the fact once you’ve scheduled a time to return.
Alternatively, think of AI integrated with your schedule. A last-minute cancellation for a longer-than-usual appointment might leave you with a two-hour gap, except that your system has automatically messaged the three patients who previously inquired about that same time. Now you’re back to a full schedule without lifting a finger.
If you’re interested in using software to streamline your office, learn how ClearDent solutions can help grow your practice.
The start of the year is the perfect time to reflect on the previous 12 months – see what worked and more importantly, what didn’t and assess how to improve your dental practice. To help you start the new year off on the right foot and set your practice up for success in 2019, we’ve rounded up five key ideas to improve your dental practice.
1. Set SMART goals
It’s important to set goals so you have a clear direction and milestones to work towards for the upcoming year. First, you have to look back on the previous year and review the progress you’ve made. Did you achieve your production goal? Did you improve patient satisfaction? Did you increase new patient acquisition?
From there you can identify areas of improvement or growth. If you were off of your previous year’s goals by a significant amount, aim for a number that is more realistic and attainable. If you achieved them all, consider increasing your goals for the new year.
Some common goals to consider:
Increasing the number of high production treatments
Increasing practice revenue
Decreasing patient churn
Decreasing no-show appointments
An important thing to remember when you’re setting goals for 2019 is to make SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals. This means instead of a generic “increase practice revenue”, a SMART goal would be “increase production amount by 15% from the previous month”.
2. Go paperless
More and more practices have been making the switch and operating completely paperlessly. If your dental practice hasn’t gone paperless yet, it’s something to consider for your 2019 planning.
Not only is a paperless dental practice good for the environment, but dentists have also come to realize that with new technology, they can run a more efficient practice at a lower cost.
Going paperless will help you:
Future proof your practice: As paper-based management methods are phased out, digitizing your data will help you integrate with the latest technology and keep up with the industry.
Protect your data: Keeping electronic records allows you to use cloud backup and ensures your data is not completely lost in the event of a natural disaster or cybercrime.
Increase your productivity: A paperless dental clinic helps you increase your productivity and streamline day-to-day tasks such as writing file notes, communicating with patients, and tracking outstanding payments.
Increase the value of your practice: Going paperless will help you increase your practice value in the long run as a software upgrade is an investment that won’t depreciate over time.
If you’re starting a new dental practice, going paperless from the very beginning will set your practice up for success. For existing dental practices, the benefits such as time and money saved in the long will offset the slight effort needed up front to convert your patient files from paper to an electronic form. A good dental software provider can help make the transition as smooth and headache-free as possible.
3. Invest in dental marketing
If you haven’t invested in dental marketing efforts, 2019 is the time to start. Dental marketing is crucial to practice growth because even if your retention rates are good, you won’t grow unless you can bring in new patients.
The good news is there are a few fairly simple and easy dental marketing tactics that you can do to get started. To start, consider:
Advertising: Try Google AdWords or Facebook ads.
SEO: Set up a Google My Business profile.
A social media strategy: Consistently post on social media platforms like Twitter.
Email marketing: Start a newsletter that shares practice updates, promotions, and dental tips.
If you already have some dental marketing in place, your goal may be to optimize your efforts. Think about implementing a dental marketing calendar for 2019. There will always be certain times of the year when you can push promotional campaigns to draw in more business such as an end-of-year reminder to patients to use their health benefits.
4. Protect patient information
Running a modern, paperless dental practice can be convenient and simple, but you also have to be aware of the security risks.
Electronically stored patient information is subject to cyber theft, and patients are more vigilant than ever about how their information is handled. In addition to giving your patients peace of mind, there are requirements for your dental practice to be compliant with both provincial and national privacy laws.
All of this means that you have to take the proper precautions to safeguard your practice, such as using appropriate hardware to enable data encryption and train staff to avoid sending sensitive information via unencrypted email. If not, the damage to your practice could result in lost customers, revenue, and brand reputation.
5. Improve customer satisfaction
Are your patients happy? As you work on bringing new patients in, don’t forget about your existing ones. In 2019, implement a plan to improve customer satisfaction. Happy patients are loyal patients, and loyal patients are invaluable to your business as they are essentially free advertising through reviews and word of mouth. Patients who are satisfied and loyal to your practice will refer their family and friends and write reviews.
Referrals are important because patients are more likely to give their business to a dental clinic if the recommendation came from somebody they know. Reviews are crucial because potential patients these days conduct research first and are swayed heavily by online reviews. Plus, loyal patients will continue to visit you, bringing you consistent business.
These 5 tips will help steer you in the right direction when planning for the year ahead. For more information, ClearDent’s dental software can help set you up for success in the new year.
