Many dentists excel in dental school only to realize that they don’t know much about running a business. The good news is that you can run a successful practice by learning three basic skills: Clinical proficiency, patient communication, and practice management.
Let’s look at why these skills are critical and how to enhance them with the latest technologies.
Dentists spend most of their time learning about the art and science of the profession. While clinical proficiency is the foundation for building a practice, you have very little to gain after achieving a standard level.
Why? The truth is that most patients can’t differentiate good care from great care (or they don’t bother when they only need basic services such as hygiene.) When asked how they choose dentists and what criteria they use to evaluate a dental practice, most people value customer service over clinical proficiency.
Slightly better clinical proficiency isn’t enough to differentiate your practice from your competitors. You need the two skills below to stand out from the crowd and meet fast-evolving patient expectations.
Most dentists say they want more new patients. But the reality is that the majority of your revenue comes from follow-up care and returning patients. In fact, 60% of new patients won’t return after their first visit!
So what keeps a patient coming back? It’s the trust and relationships they developed with you and your staff. The emotional connection with your practice makes them more likely to return for routine care or even high-value elective procedures.
How do you build relationships and stay top of mind? Delivering relevant patient communication via various touchpoints throughout the patient lifecycle is key to success. For example, you can send automated email or text reminders for recare visits and check-in with patients post-op using tab32’s patient communication module to deliver a seamless care experience.
Besides nurturing relationships, you can also use our patient communication tool to send appointment reminders, have patients fill out paperwork via e-form before their visits, and pre-pay for treatments to minimize cancellations and no-shows.
A robust dental practice management system helps you run your business cost-efficiently and boost your bottom line, so you can go from surviving to thriving. But with so many tools available, it’s not easy to find ones that meet your needs.
Use robust electronic health record (EHR) software to manage patient charts and medical history efficiently and securely. It should integrate seamlessly with other practice management functionalities to help you leverage patient data to improve care delivery, marketing, billing, and operations.
For example, tab32’s Revenue Discovery module automatically scans through EHRs to discover incomplete treatment and sends out reminders to encourage patients to book a follow-up visit. This feature eliminates time-consuming manual processes and helps drive revenue while improving treatment outcomes.
Streamlining and automating billing and payment processes is also critical to boosting your profit margins and maintaining a healthy cash flow. Our billing module offers intelligent workflows to help you get claims right every time to reduce administrative overhead while getting paid faster.
Even if you know what tools can help you enhance patient communication and support practice management, you still need to put them together and hope that they’ll play nice with each other—which can take a lot of work, and something could still fall through the cracks.
That’s why more dentists now use an all-in-one cloud dental practice management platform, like tab32, to gain access to all the robust functionalities you need to run a modern dental practice and deliver a seamless patient experience without the headache.
Request a demo to see how we can help you differentiate your practice, stand out from your competition, and increase your profitability.
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