Running a dental practice isn’t all fun and games or tooth extractions. There is a lot that goes into managing a successful practice. You need to get to grips with it so you can avoid the common pitfalls of this industry. With more patients focusing on exceptional service, mediocre teamwork isn’t going to get new patients through the door and into the chair.  

If you want to survive, these tips can help you be the best you can be so your reputation precedes you for all the right reasons.

Set Goals

You need to have concrete goals that you can work towards to help you drive results and performance in key areas. The goals need to be solid and quantifiable, and you need to know how to get there from where you are right now. Then, you need to review them, monitor your progress, and ensure you are going in the right direction. Your goals can be anywhere from improving efficiency by reducing patient waiting times, increasing patient numbers by a certain percentage, increasing profitability by a specific amount, or anything else you want to work towards that indicates success for you.

Reduce Paperwork

No one enjoys filling in copious amounts of paperwork, and reading these from your day can free up so much time. From medical history to HIPAA forms and financial and cosmetic treatment forms, copious amounts of paperwork can be eating into your day. Moving to a paperless office can be a more efficient use of your resources, and it means that you can hand over a lot of the paperwork aspect of dental care to the patient to take care of prior to the appointment on their own time. This not only saves time but also improves patient engagement. Then, as you have effective records and up-to-date details, you can review this immediately and have it in the system when you need it.

Improve Payments

Whether your patients pay in full themselves, or you need to deal with any dental insurance claims they might be making, you need an effective way of managing and collecting payments. One way can be to do this digitally prior to the appointment via a client portal, or you can have payments made upfront to the appointment by requesting patients arrive earlier to complete this. Effective payment management is crucial for maintaining a healthy cash flow and ensuring you are compensated for the services you provide.

Making accurate, up-to-date payment records, checking on payment plans in the place to pay for treatments, and using tools specifically for tracking aged collections can help you improve your finances and the money you are owed for the work and treatment you have carried out.

Cultivate The Perfect Team

It’s not always about your team’s skills, although that needs to be the primary reason you hire them; it’s about how they all work together. Sometimes, you need to focus on what they can bring to the team outside of dental skills and qualifications to create a cohesive team that works well together. From your janitorial staff to receptionist hygienist nurses to your dentists and assisted teams that you might bring in for complex cases or refer out to, you all need to work well together for improved results. If anything isn’t working correctly or one aspect of what you do does not flow right, patients will notice, and it won’t feel great for them. So, as much as you can create a well-oiled team that works well and communicates with others, you can improve standards across the board.