3 Strategies To Double Dental Practice Production

The dental industry is increasingly competitive. To stay profitable, you need to increase dental practice efficiency by lowering cost and increasing production while improving clinical efficiency and treatment outcomes to keep patients coming back.

Thankfully, new technologies can help you streamline workflows and discover hidden revenue opportunities. In this blog, we’ll review three main strategies to improve your dental practice efficiency.

Industry Best Practices

Implementing systems and standardizing workflows are key to saving time and minimizing errors without reinventing the wheel. You can identify and incorporate relevant industry best practices into your processes to increase practice efficiency:

• Conduct a time audit to identify old and clunky processes that are costing you most so you can priority resources to improve or redesign them, e.g., with automation. Some of the best candidates include time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone tasks, such as data entry.
• Create EHR templates that can be attached to patient records with just a few clicks to save time and standardize processes. You can use tab32’s dental EHR module to set up templates for explosive codes, progress notes, auto notes, exam forms, and messages.
• Set up a list of most-used billing codes so you can enter them into the EHR during treatment. tab32 users can use the customizable “explosive code” feature in our Dental EHR module to automatically populate a chart with all the appropriate billing codes so you don’t have to search for and enter each one manually after every treatment.

Treatment Planning

The process of treatment planning helps you understand patients’ needs, identify problems, and consider all possible treatment options. Effective patient communication during the process is key to increasing production and improving clinical efficiency.

• Make treatment planning a collaborative process to get patients’ buy-in. For example, tab32 users saw a 20% increase in acceptance when they present treatment plans on an iPad and educate patients by sharing radiology images with our dental imaging module.
• Track incomplete treatments and follow up with patients to ensure they’re achieving the outcomes they want. You can use tab32’s Revenue Discovery module to automate workflows so you can find and book appointments for patients with incomplete treatments.

“Standard of Care”

Designing a “Standard of Care” allows you to take a proactive approach in ensuring that every patient is getting the appropriate care and at the right time to optimize clinical outcomes while increasing your practice’s production and efficiency.

• Add relevant procedures to upcoming appointments by reviewing the benefits and eligibility of the patients coming to your office. Then, recommend appropriate procedures during the appointments.
• Optimize your hygiene program by making sure hygienists are scheduling patients’ next hygiene visit at the end of each appointment. You can add an incentive to encourage hygienists to book more appointments.
• Stay on top of comprehensive exams by keeping track of existing patients who are due for one and send out reminders in a timely manner. 

Although you can track patient activities manually with a spreadsheet, it’s much more efficient and effective to automate the process using a dental practice software. This can help you minimize overlooked opportunities, deliver care consistently, and increase operational cost-efficiency by automating workflows.

Conclusion

To improve your dental practice’s efficiency and clinical efficacy, it’s important to keep track of your patients’ records and procedures. This will enable you to follow up proactively and recommend the best treatments at the right time.

You can use a cloud dental software with a patient engagement module to automate communications, such as sending out links via text or emails for patients to book visits or fill out online forms, to streamline the patient experience without added overhead costs.

Not to mention, a dental practice software allows you to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks (e.g., checking eligibility and sending re-care reminders) so you can increase operational cost-efficiency while freeing up your staff to focus on patient care.