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What we’ll discuss
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Prioritize Patient Experience: on empathy, education and building loyalty.
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Critical Technology to Maximize Efficiency: on inventory management, dental supply optimization, appointment scheduling and recall systems.
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Investing in Building and Retaining a Team: on skill development, providing feedback and measuring performance.
When looking into practical (and realistic) ways of improving your dental practice starting this month, your strategy should be geared for incremental improvement, developed around specific strengths and weaknesses.
We’ve been working with dental offices for over 40 years, and from continuous feedback, built out an intro list of the most effective ways to scale profit, attract clients and retain quality staff.
We’ll cover key areas of focus that can help you to direct your growth strategy and solve pertinent problems. In 2021, the following focal points can guide your next steps when making changes to improve your core business operations.
Prioritize Overall Patient Experience
Health care systems of all types are prioritizing end-to-end patient experience which often begins with increasing patient engagement and good communication. A positive patient experience is the best measure of your success.
Helping your patients and having practice autonomy is the reason you started your dental office, so you should make it a focal point when planning any changes to improve your business.
Build on empathy and communication skills
Building rapport with patients and expressing empathy are essential for developing positive patient-dentist relationships. In a profession where phobias are common, empathy helps to reduce patient anxiety, and increase patient satisfaction and also treatment adherence.
Empathy and communication may be improved by providing your staff with the right educational resources and training. Often, communication skills are overlooked during training, so focusing on these skills will make your onboarding process more thorough and educational.
Another aspect of empathy to address is compassion fatigue or secondary stress trauma. This is workplace emotional or physical exhaustion that ultimately hinders an employee’s ability to empathize with patients. Colloquially, it is known as workplace burnout. Compassion fatigue is more common in caretaking positions that require continuous engagement.
For your team, empathizing with patients at work can also be emotionally draining, even for the most resilient staff members. Indeed, dental professionals witness the stress and discomfort of their patients regularly, internalizing high amounts of stress.
As a result, it is vital to develop a workplace culture that encourages rest and self-care so that your staff has the energy they need to take care of patients empathetically. One way you can help your staff is by educating them about workplace burnout and ways to stay mentally healthy and avoid overworking yourself - this will build loyal, long-term staff members as they’ll feel appreciated.
Educate your patients
Providing informative educational materials that highlight the importance of getting treatments will give your patients the information they need to make health decisions. Consider developing educational resources in multiple forms such as waiting room visuals, pamphlets, emails, photographs, and videos.
After-visit summaries (AVS) are a key element of patient education. An AVS is a document given to the patient following a treatment that provides actionable information with clear instructions. It also contains a summary of the visit and the date and time of the next appointment.
When developing your educational content, be mindful of your audience. In general, your material should have the following characteristics:
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Written in easily understandable terms and rich with visuals
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Scientific and authoritative (but simple)
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Culturally-competent
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Created with your specific audience in mind (ex: what your practice is mainly focused on)
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Based on oral health guidelines
Earn patient loyalty
Customer loyalty expresses how likely any patient that comes into your office will keep coming back for recurring care. It results from patient satisfaction with your care and services. Remember that loyal patients will recommend friends and family. 72% of surveyed dentists state that positive word-of-mouth referrals are their strongest method for obtaining new patients.
Collecting data is one way to seek insights about your patient retention rate. For example, you can calculate your active patient number. This is the number of patients who received care in the past 18 months. Use this data to calculate annual patient attrition, the rate at which patients become inactive each year, to then tune dental marketing efforts on both patient acquisition and retention.
The changes you implement must be targeted. Bolster efforts in scheduling your next appointment before a patient leaves the office. This easily helps patients remember their annual oral care checkups (at the very least).
By gathering basic data about patient retention and actioning on patient experience, you can improve the number of loyal clients that come back to you on-time. Try to look at your office through the eyes of your clients and consider all aspects of their experience under your care.
Maximize Dental Practice Management Efficiency
Efficiency can be defined as the successful completion of processes using the least amount of time, resources, and labor. Increasing the efficiency of your dental clinic is a life-time task and necessitates a realistic long-term strategy. Below are tried and tested tips you may consider.
Automate mundane processes with technology & consulting
Automating processes using software helps you spend more time building relationships with your patients and less time doing repetitive tasks. Just about every monotonous task that regularly occurs in the dental business can be automated with the right dental office practice management services. Consider the benefits of investing in technological solutions that will save your staff time and save you money.
Utilize inventory management software solutions
Efficiently managing your supplies is necessary to balance the fluctuating forces of supply and demand. Supply management software supports you and purchasing staff by tracking all aspects of data related to ordering and supply storage.
The right software will help you reduce time spent counting inventory, avoid shipping fees from last-minute ordering, and prevent overstocking. When considering implementing an inventory management solution, consider the immediate problems you’re aiming to solve.
Here are top examples of medical supply management software:
Implement appointment scheduling software, yesterday.
It’s best to schedule longer appointments that will require more focus and attention in the early hours of the morning
Self-service appointment software allows patients to schedule appointments online at their own convenience. The dental business is highly competitive, and Smart practices are rapidly adopting digital self-scheduling software to gain competitive advantage (ex: increase new patient flow and return customers).
Digital self-scheduling increases the ease-of-access for your patients. New patients in particular are seeking an easy solution when researching dentists in their area. Your potential patients want to save time during their busy lives and make decisions quickly. Keep in mind that easy dental appointment scheduling allows you to collect email and text info so that you can send reminders via email and text of their next appointment.
Here are some great scheduling apps local offices we spoke with utilize on their websites:
When scheduling your days consider your procedure goals, and fill time slots with a variety of different procedures (major, tertiary, basic etc.) One way to optimize efficiency is to use block scheduling, a method of scheduling that involves reserving blocks of time for certain operations in a way that meets your production goals.
To get started, it is best to schedule longer appointments that will require more focus and attention in the early hours of the morning. Less intensive care should be reserved for the afternoon and evening hours. Keep with the block schedule method unless a time slot does not fill up a couple days out.
Add on a dental recall management system
Recall management systems are a series of automated texts, calls, emails, or mail that help your patients to remember to make it to their appointments.
This software benefits your practice by providing professional and customized follow-up messaging that highlights your brand’s unique voice. Customization helps to keep your messaging human and relatable despite the services being automated.
Importantly, many recall management systems allow patients to customize their notifications to choose the contact method that they like the most. Have a look at:
Work with the right dental supply company
On average, offices purchase from 4 suppliers to cover all of your inventory needs. Typically we see inefficiencies in continuous non-bulk purchases, which eat up thousands of dollars yearly, which aren’t noticeable when purchased piecemeal.
The Noble Dental Supply team has ample experience working with dental offices’ inventory and invoicing spreadsheets and software to find high-quality supplies at lower prices to maximize your profits. Our purchasing & supply specialists help local practices save between 30% to 50% in getting like and better quality products with factory-direct discounts.
Best-practice advice is that your inventory costs should not exceed 5-6% of overall collections. If you are paying too much for supplies, you may want to consider working with a new dental supplier and investing in software that helps your team to manage the complexity of supply ordering, usage, and storage.
Build up Your Professional Team
A passionate and dedicated team will naturally seek to improve their skills and also develop positive rapport with your patients - which will keep them coming back.
Your team will function optimally when members feel that their job is fulfilling, supportive and conducive to their development and growth as a dental professional.
Invest in education and skill development
Investing in education will keep you and your team committed to growing and developing as professionals.
It is necessary to give your team the resources that they need to advance in their careers. Continuing education credits are being required for more and more staff besides dentists. Keeping up to date with the latest developments and strategies for success in the profession is necessary to help your employees do their jobs well.
Continually training your team helps them follow your unique systems set in place to increase productivity. Developing your management team is a key strategy to make sure that your employees are getting properly trained. Leaders need to have the skills to communicate workplace processes effectively and serve as role models who show how to do things properly.
To invest in your team, identify the key skills that need improvement. If you can, bring in experts on a particular skill to teach your team. Hard skills such as mastering software or new medical devices can often be taught by a vendor.
While continuing education is not required for dental managers. You can also benefit from learning more, and there are resources available to improve your skills as well such as online dental management classes. For example, The New York State Dental Associate provides an online course on risk management. Investing in education will keep you and your team committed to growing and developing as professionals.
A great example of full service staff training can be taken from Cambeo Dental, which provides a robust online training tool filled with content which includes Osha compliance, employee compliance training, clinical compliance and soft skills training. Cambeo helps staff understand how to increase new patients, eliminating no shows, effective patient communication and more.
Provide feedback and measure employee performance
Employees enjoy frequent feedback and the feeling of certainty that they are meeting the expectations of their position.
Providing feedback about performance should be an objective process that focuses on key performance indicators influencing your office's productivity and efficiency. In addition, the feedback should provide clear guidelines for how your hygienists, dental assistants and front office staff can improve their performance and meet your service standards.
Hiring supervisors that have positive traits such as clear communication, honesty, forgiveness, and empathy will help your employees to have satisfactory appraisal processes. During employee evaluations, supervisors and staff can work together to develop measurable and obtainable goals. Lastly, rewarding your people for improvements is essential for recognition and appreciation.
In order for your team members to develop their skills and grow professionally, they must be given clear and consistent feedback. Employees enjoy frequent feedback and the feeling of certainty that they are meeting the expectations of their position.
Consider implementing a well-established employee performance appraisal strategy to create healthy avenues of communication between members of your team. For example, the 360* feedback method can help to develop a culture of team-work and accountability.
On Improving Your Dental Practice in 2021
No matter what aspects you seek to improve, the most important advice is to continually optimize repetitive tasks and apply what you learn in the process. Running a successful dental practice does not happen overnight, so have patience and develop a vision of the future which aligns with your goals. Even minor shifts in operation can cause a cascade of positive changes.
An optimistic attitude can carry you and your staff forward into the New Year. We know that the past year was tough for healthcare professionals, and we want to do everything in our power to make running your practice easier, rewarding, and more affordable. Thank you for caring for people during these difficult times and being heroes. Your commitment to providing quality care is admirable, and we hope you have a fantastic New Year.
If you’re looking to save more on quality dental supplies that don’t break the bank, please call our office and we’ll help you have quality, predictable and on time supplies - one less thing to worry about while running a smart dental practice.
