Every dental practice strives to achieve higher levels of productivity. Successful dental practices are built on efficiency, improved workflow management, and coordinated service integration. In addition, they recognize the importance of productivity in ensuring constant income and growth.
Of course, you’ll need strategies to boost productivity at your dental practice. With well-defined and attainable objectives in place, a dental office may increase its output, cease inefficiencies and raise earnings. To help you grow your clinic, let’s learn tried-and-true strategies for increasing productivity in today’s challenging economy.
Use Dental Analytics Platform
Staff scheduling that is written down on a paper calendar is a tedious, error-prone process. Yet, it’s been the standard time management method for a long time. In this respect, using a dental analytics platform is an essential step for your dental clinic. On top of that, it can be more streamlined and effective, freeing time for employees to focus on other priorities.
Moreover, with a dental analytics platform, staff members can schedule follow-up appointments while patients are still in the room using good scheduling software. If the patient doesn’t remember to make an appointment for their next checkup, you can also use a reminder service that sends them a text message.
A website can be linked to the internal software you use. For example, responsive dental websites will automatically recognize the user’s device type and provide an optimized site version.
Go Paperless
The paperless office is proving to have many advantages, and more and more dental practices are adopting it. The most obvious benefit is a more productive workplace. Employees at the front desk won’t have to waste time reading illegible handwriting, preparing copies, or keying in patient information by hand.
For instance, automated patient forms shorten the time it takes to check in a patient by letting them fill out their information remotely before their appointment. When a patient fills out a form, the information goes straight into your electronic medical record (EMR) software, where your team can access it. This will save much of your time, which can be spent directly caring for patients.
The American Dental Association (ADA) also notes that going paperless with electronic medical records has “the potential to improve care quality and patient safety by enhancing both the quantity and quality of information available to providers for decision-making.”
Use Automated Billing
Paper billing methods can cause payment delays of many days to weeks. In addition, considering that many insurers are gradually eliminating their paper billing systems, paper claims may take far longer to process than electronic ones. By switching to a paperless, digital billing system, your business can get paid more promptly and securely.
Moreover, billing automation frees your time and widens your selection of accepted insurance policies and payment options. To get the job done the first time perfectly, you must buy the best billing software you can afford. It’s essential to consider your selections carefully and, if possible, try out software demos from several vendors. Also, it’s a good idea to consult with insurance companies about your best options, as they may have specific requirements that must be followed.
Adopt Online Time and Attendance Tracking Systems
Effective scheduling and time management are crucial to the smooth operation of any business, and a dental office is no exception. If you’re still using a paper calendar to schedule employees, you may want to switch to an electronic system.
This makes it easier to monitor shifts and gives multiple workers an extensive view of work opportunities in the organization. In addition to paying workers and keeping tabs on their payroll and tax deductions, many of these systems also help schedule workers into specific shifts.
To submit requests for time off, leave, vacation, sick leave, and other absences, workers need to log into the system using their login credentials. This means that all data is centrally stored, and you can quickly assess the staffing levels in your business.
Improve Phone Interactions
Dentist offices still rely heavily on telephone contact. When it comes to patient care, the phone is frequently the initial point of contact. From a business perspective, this means that the people answering your phones can impact the production rate and recruit new clients instantly. It’s also a way to get feedback from people about their dental care experiences and find out how you can better serve them.
The best way to ensure that your staff has the telephone etiquette and knowledge to turn a caller into a patient is to provide them with training. Staff workers should also be prepared for difficult telephone conversations through training.
To guarantee that the front desk staff handles each patient interaction in the best possible way, they should be taught basic sales principles. This way, a dental office can expand its clientele by taking advantage of every incoming call.
Final Thoughts
Finding strategies to increase productivity in a dental office can help improve employee responsiveness, patient care quality, and the clinic’s capacity to attract new clients. So, if you can improve in even one of the areas listed here, you can guarantee an increase in revenue in the long run.