Understanding Dental Practice Blind Spots
Dentistry is one of the most challenging professions due to the unique nature of running your own practice and providing excellent services. It is all too common for dental professionals to become overwhelmed with the duties of their position and important aspects of the business can end up falling through the cracks. Representatives here at Unified Smiles understand the challenges that independent dentists face and we have helped countless dental professionals navigate the daily struggles of running their practices. With some outside perspective and guidance, our clients have seen improvements in all areas of their business. Keep reading to learn more about how a dental consulting company can help you improve your business practices so that you can better serve your patients.
Evaluating Internal & External Communication
Communication is a major hurdle of running a small business and it often goes unmanaged. Both internal communication and external communication can influence how well your staff performs, how patients perceive you, and how you present yourself to potential new customers. The first step to improving communication within the office is to ask the staff how they feel things are running. Your employees are your most valuable asset because they are who will be interacting with patients the most. Find out what is and isn’t working and involve your staff when deciding how to make improvements. The most important thing is that the whole team feels heard and respected. Listening can go such a long way when you are trying to make improvements to office communication. Create a common goal that everyone can work towards so that each member of the staff is on the same page.
External communication includes email reminders, posts on social media, and even responses you are leaving for online reviews. All external communication should have a common tone that represents your business. You want to make sure that all your marketing efforts and every attempt you make to contact a potential patient is cohesive across all forms of media. This seemingly minor detail leaves a big impression on current patients and prospective patients, so someone should be managing your content across all platforms. Having an outside perspective come in and evaluate your external communication performance can open your eyes to potential areas for improvement and new opportunities. Unified Smiles can offer connections to dental consulting companies with valuable insight into how you can better utilize your external communication practices to help convert more new patients and boost overall profits.
Organize Administration & Streamline Procedures
There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to general office admin and daily procedures. Choosing to deep dive into how your office organizes records, schedules appointments, sets scheduling reminders, and tracking financial progress can seem like a constant uphill battle. This major area of business is often where we find the most valuable information when it comes to making better decisions for your practice and your patients. Many dental consulting companies will advise dental practice owners to improve organization, but don’t take the time to break down what is truly necessary. We recommend consultants that take the time necessary to get to know our clients and understand where they currently stand, as well as where they would like to go in the future. They can look at the big picture and then work backwards to narrow down the details of how you can make real improvements in your streamlining process.
Organization of patient records, updating technology and computer software, and breaking down the true financial costs associated with current operations can provide your office with improved performance and financial gains. While some procedures may appear to be bringing in revenue, net production may be lower than you think. Dental practice owners may be experiencing significant opportunity costs that they are totally unaware of because they do not have the time to go over every financial and scheduling decision made in the last few years, and that is where many practices have major blind spots.
Dental consulting companies generally advise practice owners to streamline wherever possible to increase production but may not give enough insight on how that can be properly executed. Unified Smiles can help do the difficult work of breaking down where you may be overspending, identify potential opportunities for major financial advancement, and find other methods of getting you closer to reducing your overhead.
The only way to learn what you don’t already know is to get some alternative perspective. To learn more about how you can identify your practice’s potential business blind spots, call our representatives at Unified Smiles. You can reach us at 844.US.UNITE or fill out the form below and a member of our team will reach out to you at your convenience. We look forward to helping you reduce your overhead in your practice, so call our team today!