You want to make your dental practice more profitable (who doesn’t?) but when hiring more staff isn’t an option due to budget restraints or recruitment challenges (thank you, Great Resignation), it’s time to look elsewhere.
That begs the question, how can I increase dental practice profits when I have a small team?
It’s all about maximizing efficiency.
Easier said than done, especially if you and your staff are already under a lot of pressure with patient workloads.
Plus, they never taught you how to run a dental practice efficiently in dental school, so you might know your processes aren’t super efficient but don’t know how to change that.
That’s why we’re here. As dental marketing, web design, and business growth experts, we’re compiling our hard-earned wisdom into this blog, which gives you our top pointers for increasing efficiency and productivity so that you can stress less and profit more.
What you can do for a more profitable dental practice
When hiring new staff is out of the question, you must focus on streamlining and improving your internal processes to fit more patients throughout the day, avoid wasting time, and increase staff productivity.
Switch to teledentistry
According to a recent study, 93% of dentists surveyed think teledentistry will change how they practice dentistry long-term. And it’s easy to see why.
Offering a virtual consultation option for your patients can help you to fit in more patients in one day, as it’s often quicker than in-person appointments, leading to greater profits and heightened efficiency.
Let patients book online
Having built countless dental practice websites over the years, trust us when we say that allowing patients to book online can significantly improve the efficiency of your practice.
By automating patient intake, scheduling, and cancellations, you’re freeing up your dental staff to focus on more pressing tasks and letting your website do the hard work for you.
Create email automations
Email automation is taking the dental (and many other) industries by storm and is a great way to increase dental practice profit.
Using various tools, you can automatically send emails to your patients to remind them about upcoming appointments, updates about your opening hours/dental practice, and even special offers.
Outsource insurance billing
Submitting and tracking your patient’s insurance claims is extremely time-consuming and can seriously affect your profits and cash flow, especially when there are issues with your insurance company.
To save time, streamline the insurance billing process, and ensure you receive your payments on time, it might be a good idea to outsource to an insurance billing company to do the hard work for you and free up your team to focus on patient care.
Invest in staff development
Investing in your team is vital if you want to maximize staff productivity and increase your dental practice profits. By helping them to upskill with training specific to their goals, you can offer a better experience to your patients and improve retention.
Additionally, investing in your team’s development will help your dental practice to run smoother, faster, and more efficiently, as each staff member will need less management and can train up in areas that are slowing your practice down.
Reduce waiting room time
If long wait times are an issue for your practice, consider grouping similar procedures together to reduce time spent switching equipment.
You can also evaluate the layout and design of your dental practice to see if moving tools, equipment, or technology can speed up your treatments. For example, you might keep essential equipment for your most common procedures further away than needed.
Digitize patient intake
Instead of wasting time writing down your patient’s details on paper and then having to file, organize, and manage these records, why not go digital and create a paperless patient intake process?
Going digital can save you countless hours on manual data input and prevent you from missing essential information due to human error or poor handwriting. You can even give your patients an iPad to fill in their details themselves and free up your staff even more.
Brief your team every morning
Many dental practice owners don’t do this, yet it’s one of the most essential and easy ways to increase efficiency and, therefore, dental practice profits: Team meetings.
Get your team together every morning and brief them on their workloads, schedule for the day, and any updates they need to know about. Doing this can prevent staff from wasting time working on irrelevant tasks or making mistakes as they weren’t aware of a new system/process.
Ready to start maximizing efficiency in your dental practice?
We sure hope so! From digitizing elements of your patients’ journey to streamlining the appointment booking process, there are so many ways you can simplify, automate, and accelerate your business processes for more productivity and profit.
If you want to grow a more profitable dental practice and reduce the headache of running it, you need help from experts who know the industry, know automation, and have the dedication needed to help your practice reach its best growth phase yet.
That’s us!
At PatientBoost, we offer business consultancy, digital marketing, and web design services for dental practices ready to streamline and automate their processes, attract new patients, engage their employees, and upsurge profits.
With a long-term, strategic, and data-based business plan, we can help you reach your growth goals at a pace that feels good to you. Interested? Book a free 15-minute consultation today!
