Our Tips For Successful Dental Practice Management
& a Great Patient Experience
Dental practice management isn’t easy, these suggestions of practice management advice will assist you in improving the bond between your team, keep patients, and increasing the revenue you earn.
There’s more involved in managing a dental practice than it first appears. From a distance, it may seem like all you have to do is oversee the dental team members ensuring they’re performing their job well and follow up with your patients to ensure that they’re pleased with their services. However, if you’ve been an office manager at a dental clinic, even for a brief period, you’ll know that it’s not the case for the most part.
If you’re new at leading a team and managing your dental practice or looking to do the best job possible, here are 13 techniques to aid you in operating and creating an effective practice for the patients, your team, and yourself.
Table of Contents
1. Train Your Dental Assistants In-House
Starting a dental assisting school within your practice allows you to train high-quality staff and earn extra money for the practice. At MCP Schools, we take care of the online learning and courses. Your current staff will be trained to teach what is needed to the students. You can offer classes when the practice is closed to the public, and the practice’s income can be up to $180,000 per year. Running a dental assisting school can be an excellent way to ensure you have a successful, viable, and profitable dental practice.
2. Dental Office Management Training & Classes for Managers
Attending dental management classes is a straightforward method of becoming a more effective manager. Suppose you’re brand new to the position or have been in the business for a long time. In that case, the dental office manager training courses ensure that you comply with the latest requirements of dental regulatory bodies, learn to recruit the best employees, and master office budgeting. Staying on top of your game and finding the most recent ways to promote the dental office will help ensure your patients and staff remain happy and motivated.
3. Investing in Your Team
Running a successful dental practice is not easy, but with the right team behind you by hiring the best staff, it becomes easier and will help your practice performance. You can either hire the staff from outside or train them in-house and develop them as needed to fit perfectly into your team. You can help your team keep up-to-date with the latest practices and best practices by ensuring they attend workshops, conferences, online courses, newsletters, and read relevant books and magazines…the possibilities are virtually limitless. When you invest in your staff, you’re investing in your dental practice, you improve the patient experience, and prepare it for success in the future.
4. Share & Delegate the Responsibilities
As a dental office manager, it’s not uncommon to get overwhelmed and feel like there’s not enough time during the day to get through your list of tasks. If you’re feeling overwhelmed you are not going to offer the best dental experience to your customers or be supportive to your staff.
The first step is to list all the things you must do and assign any tasks you can delegate to other staff members. Even if you only give a task to someone else as a one-off so that you can focus on something else, each small thing helps. Remember that you’re a part of a group, and if you’re honest and fair, employees will be happy to help you whenever you require it. Dental practice owners and managers can often feel separated from the team, but the success of your dental practice revolves around you (a lot of pressure!), and making sure you are level-headed, composed, and able to deal with any issues that arise will also help your entire team.
5. Embrace Modern Technology & Management Systems
It takes a lot to run a world-class dental practice, and to be competitive against other dental practices within your area, staying current and adopting the latest technology and practice management software in all aspects of your business is essential. From ensuring that your personnel has the latest tools and equipment available to securing high levels of dental staff skills by training your dental assistants in partnership with MCP Schools, by keeping current with the most recent advances and developments in the field of dentistry, you’ll be just one step ahead your competitors. By embracing modern technology such as efficient scheduling software, you can also ease the workload on your staff and make the overall atmosphere and client experience greater.
6. Staff Should Be Aware of What to Do They Can “Sell” Treatment
Showing patients the value of the recommended treatment can increase the chances they will accept it and allow you and your team to provide quality dental care. Patients aren’t willing to accept treatment they don’t understand or believe they require, regardless of how much dentists insist on its importance. This is important as a patient should not accept unnecessary and irrelevant treatment, but if it is, it needs to be carefully explained, this will help accept treatment recommendations and return. To offer patients high-quality treatment, dental professionals should be aware of the benefits of the recommended procedure in terms of the patient’s quality of life. If patients see how dental treatment can enhance their lives, they are far more likely to vote in favor of the procedure.
7. Keep In Contact With Your Existing Patients
New patients are fantastic, and keeping the others you already have is vital to the long-term profitability of the practice! It is more challenging to convince patients to visit the clinic for the first time rather than convincing former patients to return for further procedures; therefore, creating an excellent patient experience is key.
Be sure to follow up with existing patients through texts, phone calls, emails, or even written mail to remind them of appointments and offers. It’s worth going the extra mile to contact patients using their preferred method to increase your odds of getting the best response possible. When onboarding a patient, perhaps request the way they prefer to be contacted so you can make sure to use that to increase your chances. Improving your patient satisfaction through excellent patient care will help your patients and enhance the patient experience.
8. Regularly Hold Team Meetings
If they are correctly conducted, meetings can be a valuable and efficient utilization of time that could aid your dental business’s growth and aid with issue resolution and idea generation from all members of staff. As dental practice management meeting all employees in a room and talking about the daily operations of a dental practice makes everyone feel comfortable. It allows talking about essential things that could go unnoticed and makes all the team feel involved in the practice and the decisions.
9. Update Job Descriptions & Keep Them Current
A clear list of the responsibilities for each employee at the office can be extremely helpful in resolving disagreements to work outside of what is expected or ensuring the work that is expected of them is carried out. It also makes it easier for you to locate new staff when a person leaves as you are aware of what the new employee needs to complete. It is common for responsibilities to change over time; therefore, ensure to include and remove duties as required. If you’re just starting, you will find our list of dental office jobs particularly useful.
10. Create an Instruction Manual for Policies
Create an oral practice policy manual covering the most critical aspects of the office, including the payment of vacation and maternity or paternity leave; lunch breaks overtime, dress code, cell phone use, etc. If these details are physically (or electronically – Google Docs, for example) recorded and available to all, you’ll be able to avoid many conflicts. Like job descriptions that continuously change with time, your workplace policies will also evolve. Therefore, update them regularly to avoid unnecessary disputes or confusion.
11. Monitor Important Performance Indicators & Best Practices
It’s impossible to make changes to the things you don’t recognize. Create a list of the key performance indicators (KPIs) and track them monthly this will help make your dental practice stand out in the long term. Suppose you’re not familiar with KPIs within the realm of dentistry. In that case, it could include how many new patients you see and the number of procedures performed, the cancellations of appointments -everything that can indicate the effectiveness or failure of a dental practice. In this way, you’ll be able to determine the things that are working and not, and help you determine how you can enhance your practice to make it more profitable.
12. Profit From Positive Reviews & Deal with Negative Reviews
One of the simplest and most effective methods of advertising your existing or new practice is to get patients to leave and utilize reviews as often as possible. Patients can either verbally refer their family and friends to your excellent services or leave their reviews online on your Google my Business. You can then publish their thoughts on your dental practice’s social media and website. There are various ways to utilize positive reviews to promote your dental practice, which we discuss in our article on advertising dental practices.
If you end up with a negative review online, you need to embrace it calmly and address the issues mentioned. You can often do well by addressing the negative reviews and showing the people reading them that you are professional and address any issues that arise. People are often skeptical of consistent 5-star reviews, so being efficient and effective in dealing with negative reviews can help make your business seem more authentic.
13. Implement Your Plan as a Dental Office Manager
Although many dental office administrators have unique and amazing strategies for their practice in their minds or on paper, the majority of them do little more than dream about their plans. This is a loss of time, potential, and money. Create your goals, develop strategies to reach them, break your plan into steps, establish an appropriate deadline, and hold everyone accountable for their contribution to the process. In this way, your visions for your work are transformed into reality.
Conclusion
From managing staff and dealing with insurance companies to giving patients the best services and staying in compliance with the most current regulations, Running a top-quality dental practice takes a lot of time, energy and focus. Utilize these 13 suggestions and provide your dental office you run with the best opportunity to assist in helping your business flourish and increase its growth.
