How to Boost Dental Office Productivity

Having a successful dental office requires you to create a perfect environment for your clinical and management teams to thrive. The best way to do this is to focus on efficiency and implement changes that drive productivity. 

With the above in mind, your entire team is responsible for handling dozens of different tasks in preparation for the different dental procedures you perform. Which leads to the question: what can increase productivity in a dental office?

In this article, we’ll discuss factors that improve productivity in your dental office and share the best way to create an efficiency-driven working environment. 

What Can Increase Productivity In a Dental Office

Before going over the steps on how to make a dental office more efficient, let’s take a moment to discuss the elements that increase productivity in an oral care practice. 

Productivity in a dental clinic refers to the number of patients that are treated every day. Productive dental practices treat the highest possible number of patients on a daily basis without sacrificing the quality of the treatment or the employee experience. This is important because it will help ensure that your dental practice productivity levels are actually sustainable in the long run. 

All dental practices are different. Therefore, you need to identify the different elements that affect your dental practice’s productivity and work on improving those variables. The general factors below can affect dental offices of all sizes, but evaluate each individual point to determine if it plays a role in the productivity of your clinical and desk staff. 

1. Streamlining Patient Intake and Other Interactions

One of the biggest elements that impact your office’s productivity is the amount of time your team spends interacting with patients. If your front desk staff handles intake and other interactions manually, your overall team productivity will likely be low. 

The best way to avoid this is to streamline interactions like patient intake, appointment reminders, and treatment bookings. 

2. Improving Communication Between Front Desk and Back Office Teams

Just like patient-facing interactions, having strong communications systems that link your front desk team and the back office staff is essential to maintaining high productivity. 

Front desk employees need to manage waiting patients and ensure that appointments are fulfilled in time. To do this, your front desk needs to be in constant contact with your back office and understand the stage that the current dental treatment is on. If not, it may lead to more patients in the waiting room, which can create a negative experience.   

3. Simplifying the Membership Management Process

Membership plans can help you attract more patients without having to depend on dental insurance providers. These plans provide patients with lower treatment costs in exchange for a monthly fee. But, manually managing the membership program can become burdensome for your dental staff.

The best way to avoid this is to simplify your program’s administrative processes through dental technology, like a membership management program. Dental membership management solutions can help you store patient data, update individual profiles easily, and create a more pleasant patient experience. 

4. Automating Billing

If you have one or more dental plans in place, you’ll have a large number of patients making monthly payments. While these monthly charges can be handled in different ways, the most efficient is to implement automated payment technology.

In this scenario, you can opt for a few alternatives. Dedicated dental billing software is always an option, but this often brings limitations when integrating with your current technology stack. You can also opt for a dental membership management tool that has automated billing features, which helps create a more streamlined practice.  

5. Creating More Comprehensive Patient Profiles

Having more comprehensive profiles for both new and current patients can accelerate the diagnosis process as well as the treatment itself. But, you need to have an administrative tool that allows you to include detailed data, record each patient interaction, and even upload detailed medical documents.

6. Conducting Training Sessions and Workshops

Hiring knowledgeable team members is a must, but remember that the dental care industry is always changing. Your staff members need to be updated with the changes to your treatment rooms as well as the procedures themselves in order to provide accurate information. 

You can ensure that each team member is prepared by conducting training sessions and workshops. Keep in mind that these events can focus on different areas, like time management skills or how to use new technical equipment. Rather than following a set list, evaluate the biggest areas of improvement in your dental practice and work on these to increase productivity.  

7. Implementing an Efficiency-Driven Office Layout

Intangibles like your dental marketing strategy and patient satisfaction protocol can help boost productivity, but you shouldn’t disregard your physical environment. 

The layout of your dental office directly impacts the productivity of your office staff as well as the patient experience. Instead of implementing a confusing design, think about how each patient walks around your dental practice. Where are your treatment rooms? Are they easy to reach? How much natural light does your waiting room get? Answering these types of questions can help you find an intuitive design.

8. Investing in High-Quality Tools

Whether it’s your office manager, a front-line customer service representative, or a member of your clinical team, all of your employees need high-quality tools. 

Top-notch software and administrative devices have features that increase office productivity by default, so your management team should have the best tools at its disposal. At the same time, patient care tools and technical equipment both play an essential role in the quality of your treatments. Therefore, you should focus on acquiring top tools that reduce human error and help provide treatment in a timely manner. 

9. Incorporating a Digital Scheduling System for Employees

There is no question that patient-facing variables impact your dental office productivity. However, you can also make improvements to the administrative side of your dental practice in order to increase productivity. 

Employee digital scheduling systems can reduce the amount of time you spend managing time-off requests and solving schedule conflicts. Your dental team members will also know exactly where to go whenever they have a question or request, which simplifies their administrative tasks. 

10. Leveraging Patient Feedback to Enact Change

Patient engagement is crucial if you want to establish a successful dental practice, especially from a productivity perspective. But, you need to study your audience in order to make changes that improve the patient experience and help improve your office productivity at the same time.

The best place to collect feedback is directly from the source. This means that you shouldn’t see patient complaints as fully negative events as these can show you the most important areas of improvement in your office. 

Instead, you should encourage patients to share their honest experiences and analyze this data to figure out what changes can improve your office efficiency. 

Increase Productivity and Reduce Costs with Membersy

Now that we’ve covered some ideas to improve dental practice productivity, let’s go over the ways that Membersy can help boost efficiency in your office. You can also get in touch with our team or sign up & register now to start improving your practice productivity now. 

Membership Program Management

Membersy is a superb tool designed for managing dental care membership programs. The platform allows your dental team members to manage your plans more efficiently and spend less time performing tasks manually. Which, in turn, can increase productivity across your entire practice. 

Payment Processing 

One of the biggest benefits of Membersy is the fact that it includes payment software for your dental practice. The best part is that you can set up automated billing, so your dental team won’t have to charge patients manually or send out reminders. 

Patient Profile Management

If your dental practice implements Membersy, you’ll be able to keep in-depth patient records and access these directly through the cloud. This means that you’ll have access to information about every patient quickly, including medical records, follow-up phone calls, and preferred communication systems. 

Conclusion

Focusing on productivity is the best way to improve efficiency and generate the most revenue from a dental practice. With that said, dental offices need to create tailored plans and focus on creating a great patient experience to get the best results. 

To pick up more dental office management tips or find out more about our membership software, get in touch with us today.