This article uses information from the insightful book by the long-time dental consultant, Bianca Dornan at Practices Made Perfect about identifying opportunities in your practice.
When in the daily grind of running your practice, figuring out all the possible ways to improve your practice can feel overwhelming or even unproductive. You have enough on your plate, how can you be expected to set aside time to think about ways to add more work? If, however, you aspire to make the most out of your practice and possibly even expand it, brainstorming about what the issues are and how to address them is a necessary investment for you to make.
Steps to find opportunities
Identifying opportunities in your practice is so difficult because you are concentrating on something that you spend all day working on, your dental practice. If there are glaring issues and inconveniences, you have probably made an effort to address them already. Here are four tried and true ways to unlock the type of thinking that you need to uncover hidden potential. (Hint: none of them involve concentrating harder)
Do something unrelated to your industry: You are consumed by the dental industry. And, within that industry, there may be people doing great things that you can apply to your practice as well. But, if you want to become truly inspired, it is useful to take a step outside dentistry and see the ways that other industries are dealing with issues and creating more possibilities; they may apply to you. Attend a lecture for an industry you’re not familiar with, visit and read about businesses in different industries, and talk to people who have had success in their careers! You never know what will spark an idea that you can use.
Find inspiration online: Inspiration doesn’t need to take a lot of your time. Identifying opportunities can be done by finding unlimited inspiration for any topic online. Create a repository of interesting or inspiring articles, websites, images, and videos that you find online. When you have that, you can revisit these things to get your mind out of its routine and see things from a different perspective.
Be creative: Working to find inspiration online, being creative on your own can also open up your thinking to new possibilities. It is said that problems often get solved only when you stop thinking about them. Doing something creative that is out of the ordinary will force your mind to concentrate on something new. Try something new, or revisit a hobby that you haven’t done in a while; anything that breaks the cycle that you may have fallen into.
Map out your thoughts: Sometimes what is stopping you from figuring out the solution is the sheer amount of information that the problem has. To combat that, there is a process called mind mapping. The idea is that you take a large issue and break it down into smaller, more manageable, chunks. Then, you take those chunks and break them down even further. With that completed, all the action items or individual issues can be identified and addressed easily. Give it a try. Canva has a really useful, free mind map creator.
Which of these ideas appeals most to you? Give it a try and see what kinds of amazing things you could be opening yourself up to.
These days, the amount of dental paperwork needed to successfully run a practice is astounding. For decades, dental offices have been collecting information on every patient, printing it, filing it, and storing it in massive filing cabinets. It’s time to put your practice on a diet. Stop feeding it all these papers, and put it on a strict diet of technology. You’ll be amazed how much faster you can perform.
You can slim down your practice. You have options!
How to eliminate dental paperwork by feeding your filing cabinets
Kiosk, by ClearDent, is a mobile web app for iPad, Android, and Windows that allows you to complete your check-in procedures, update medical information, sign documents, and inform you of insurance coverage changes via notifications in ClearDent, all using tablets. From there, new and updated data provided by the patient, including his/her family, is automatically updated in your ClearDent system, and available to you immediately, skipping any dental paperwork. Neat, huh?
Hey everyone. Come see how good I look.
Once you’ve shed the weight of filing cabinets, your practice will have new options – so much extra room. Clean and modern looking. On top of a little interior design, outfitting your practice with some technology will go a long way! After all, patients want to know that they are receiving the best possible treatments. And often, the clean look made possible by modern tech throughout the practice will give them that perception and confidence. At the end of the day, everyone knows the right technology streamlines the workflow and will help deliver better services and experience.
Be more efficient. Look more stylish. Give you and your patients a new and amazing experience.
Being a dentist is about providing high quality service to your patients. But that doesn’t exclude you from maximizing what your practice is able to provide, and as a result, maximizing the profits that your practice can enjoy. Your dental practice can make more money. Bring in more patients, and provide higher value services on a more consistent basis.
Make Money Through Eliminating Schedule Gap
No matter what systems are in place, every dental practice is going to receive patient cancellations. Although there are several ways to minimize the number of cancellations you receive, there are also ways to effectively fill gaps in your schedule, even last minute.
Contact Assistant – Knowing which patients are most in need of an appointment is a huge asset. However, figuring out patient priority when having to weigh overdue recalls, and overdue and in progress treatment plans can be very difficult. With Contact Assistant from ClearDent, patient contact priority is laid out for you so you know exactly who to contact first. It can even be organized by criteria for situations that require a specific type of treatment, unit of time, or even chair to fill.
Two-way texting – When you have identified the top priority patients to contact, having an effective way to contact them can save you precious minutes or even hours. Two-way texting allows you to send text messages directly to a single patient, or group of patients in seconds. When those patients respond, the message will appear in your ClearDent software and be stored directly on the patient’s file.
Having the ability to find the right patients and contact them in seconds will give your practice every possible advantage when dealing with last minute cancellations.
Know Your Numbers
Every good business needs to know their numbers. In a dental practice, that goes beyond just knowing what your revenues are. When you can identify the areas of your practice that are driving the most profit, and the areas that have the most potential to improve, you have the ability to control your own profitability, therefore, allowing your practice to make money.
Staff Production – Learn how much of you profit is coming from your hygienists vs your dentists. Additionally, you can easily see which hygienist, or which dentist is the most profitable and why. With this information, take your findings to your whole staff and implement best practices to get everyone’s production up to the best possible level.
Profitable Procedures – Your most expensive procedures are not always your most profitable. Knowing which procedures are bringing in the most profit allow you to emphasize acquiring patients that require those procedures. It may also allow you to bring in more staff that are able to carry out those procedures and add to the profits of the whole practice.
Starting with your software, maximize the profits that you are bringing into your practice this year.
When so much of your dental practice is influenced, or controlled, by your choice of software, it’s important to know the ways in which your choice of software can benefit you. With rapidly advancing technology in dental software, knowing what to expect out and getting on board with your most progressive software option can mean a difference of many thousands of dollars each year. This article is going to illustrate 3 ways that ClearDent dental software is designed to make your practice more efficient, and thereby save you money.
Save Money Through Automation
The largest expense of your dental office is payroll. Software is not something that is going to replace your staff, but it can allow the staff you have to accomplish a great deal more in the time they spend working. For example, saving time on some of the more tedious tasks that your front office staff needs to complete on a daily basis will free them to excel in other areas that can be a genuine differentiator for your practice, like customer service. Automation allows processes to run in the background to ensure that your customers are receiving a consistent experience every time. So, what processes can be automated?
Patient Communication – Set up an automated series of communications with your patients. For example, you can have your software send your patients a reminder by email, text message or phone message when they have an appointment coming up. You could also help build a stronger relationship with your patients by allowing your software to send a birthday and/or holiday message to your patients from your dental office.
EOB Auto Adjust – When you submit an estimation of benefits (EOB) to ITRANS, you are then required to re-enter the information you receive into your software. This is the kind of manual, tedious task that ClearDent is always working to eliminate. With ClearDent, that information is automatically transferred directly into your patients’ ledger, saving you time and the potential for mistakes.
Single Software Provider
With so many dental software options and combinations to choose from, it can be tempting to mix and match software in an attempt to find a combination that will provide an extra little beneficial to your specific practice. Doing this, you can fall into the trap of having to coordinate multiple software packages from different companies, paying separate monthly fees, and struggling to get the software to work together the way you had envisioned.
Example – You purchase a practice management software, a patient communication software, financial analysis software and a cloud backup plan. Each of these elements comes with a price tag that is reasonable. However, when added all together, you can often end up paying over $500/month. And with that high monthly cost, you will be stuck trying to get multiple programs to work together nicely. And, if/when an issue arises, you will be forced into a mediation role between the support departments of 2 or more different companies.
Finding practice management software that also provides the additional services you desire, like ClearDent does, means reducing your total monthly payments. And, with software designed specifically to include all these features in one product, the chance of having issues with it is greatly reduced. Even if you do encounter a complication within your system, there is only one number that you will need to call. The time and frustration of figuring out issues is eliminated, therefore, allowing your practice to save money.
Software Updates
When your practice is using ClearDent, we want you have the best possible experience. In order to do that, we need to make sure that you always have the latest version of ClearDent available to you. Because of this, ClearDent has included all software updates into our monthly money cost.
Not only will you never have to worry about paying to upgrade, update, or add a feature enhancement again, but you’ll also have the all of the latest features available to you as soon as they are released. And, when you’re working with the most progressive software in Canada, that can be a game changer!
