How to Improve your Dental Practice
If your dental practice hasn’t yet embraced the recent technological impact of digital communications and laboratories, your employees and your patients will soon find other practices better equipped for their needs.
It can be difficult as a dentist, or someone else working at a dental practice to see your service from a business perspective. Your office to you is more than a business and most dentists don’t come into the industry simply for the money incentives. Unfortunately, this business mentality i needed in all practices to provide superior service that your patients are expecting.
What kind of inventory does your dental practice need?
Any type of dental practice knows inventory management is an essential skill to possess. For dentists particularly, ordering the proper amount of equipment and supplies ensures you’ll always have the right products when you need them to treat your patients. On the other hand, this process also ensures you aren’t wasting money with closets full of unneeded toothbrushes and floss.
Offices can minimize this risk by creating an inventory software system that works for the entire office. By keeping all of the necessary office supplies in one specified location and extra medical supplies in a separate location you have better organizational consistency. Also, ensure you assign just one person to the ordering tasks that way you avoid over-ordering or double placing orders.
Has your practice gone digital?
Retaining patients is just as important in your practice as the acquisition process. What’s holding your patients at your practice instead of going to the other dentist down the street? If you don’t have an affirmative answer, perhaps adapting digital solutions will change their minds.
Digital scheduling solutions avoid the hassle for both team members and your patients. The software program is able to use company data to simplify the scheduling process. This in turn improves office morale by giving all employees easy and equal access to all of their scheduling whereabouts. The same software, or a different system communicates with your patients to alert them of their upcoming appointment or follow up with those that still need to make appointments. Patients prefer this method to traditional direct mail approaches because it catches them on their cell phone where they can easily update the appointment into their calendar.
Are you aware what’s going on with your finances?
One part of having your own practice that no one ever wants to deal with this the financial dealings. If you haven’t begun to automate your billing, then say good bye to the headache that’s been consuming your life because there’s many software solutions that can deal with this for you in a fraction of the time, even further streamlining this process. Cutting down on this time will allow these employees more time to focus on their productivity in other realms.
Another way you can set yourself a part from the other dental practices is by offering help with these finances for your patients. According to the American Dental Association, one of the main reasons people fail to seek necessary dental treatment is because of the money. Unfortunately dental treatment is expensive and proportionately to how many people need dental treatment not enough people have the proper insurance. While you might not have the finances to assist these patients yourselves, you do have the resources to educate such clients about the financial options that are available to them.
Do you make use of cloud-based technologies?
Cloud based systems are super important when trying to improve your dental practice. Essentially when your practice is in the cloud it allows all of your data to be stored conveniently. No matter where you are everyone in the practice has access to images taken. CephX is a great place to start when you’re looking to improve your dental practice. All of your photos, x-rays, and worksheets will be made available 24/7 in real time ensuring security and the most up to date results for your patients and maximized efficiency for your employees.
