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.
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?
