Elevate your oral surgery practice efficiency: 10 tips for maximum success [Free guide]

As an oral surgery practice owner or leader, you know how important efficiency is in your business. There are so many moving parts in an oral surgery practice, and it’s easy for everyday processes to become convoluted, disorganized, and rushed to the point that mistakes are made. 

But inefficiencies in an oral surgery practice can lead to costly mistakes.

DCS is a full-service revenue cycle management (RCM) provider with a department dedicated to the specialty of oral surgery. The nature of your business is more complicated than a general dental practice, and through our 10+ years of experience with RCM, we know what it takes to produce healthy cashflow and an efficient oral surgery office. 

This article will cover 5 tips for oral surgery practice efficiency, with 5 more tips in our free download Your Guide to OMS Workflow Efficiency: 5 Tips to Increase Cash Flow with Ease. Fill out the form below, and we’ll drop 5 additional tips in your inbox. 

Now let’s get into the first 5 tips to maximize your oral surgery practice’s efficiency… 

Tip #1: Streamline Appointment Scheduling

Does your oral surgery practice utilize online scheduling? If not, consider it a modern upgrade to your dental business. It makes scheduling appointments easier for patients, and it also means your administrative team spends less time on the phone trying to fill your calendar. 

By utilizing online scheduling, it’s easier to create open slots that provide the ideal amount of time for each of your dentists to perform treatments that end just as the next patient arriving. No more long wait times, which are a no-go for maximum efficiency.

As you may have experienced, one off-schedule appointment can throw off the entire schedule for the day, leading to a domino effect of inefficiencies.

According to Dentistry Today:

“The average wait time to see a physician is 19 minutes. The threshold before the patients get frustrated is 20 minutes.” 

Keep this in mind when you’re working to streamline your scheduling process — there’s no need to cut it that close!

Tip #2: Optimize Patient Intake Processes

When your patients make appointments, your team needs to gather their information to perform insurance verification. This is a tedious process that many oral surgery professionals either avoid or wait until the last minute to do. 

But waiting can cause issues with your patients’ treatment coverage. You don’t want your patients to find out on the day of their treatment that their out-of-pocket cost is going to be much higher than they originally thought.

And this gets more complicated with oral surgery because you’re not only dealing with dental insurance, but also medical insurance. 

Insurance verification services can take this responsibility off your team’s plate. They’ll also ensure that each patient’s insurance is verified by an expert at least 2 days prior to their treatment.

Handing off the insurance verification process will give your team more time to provide treatment presentations. An unhurried talk through out-of-pocket costs and payment options in a transparent way is a process your patients will appreciate. 

Learn 5 benefits of partnering with insurance verification services here. 

Tip #3: Implement Efficient Insurance Billing Practices

As we mentioned in Tip #2, insurance billing gets more complicated at oral surgery practices because your team is always submitting both insurance and medical claims. 

This means you need a seamless insurance billing process, especially because mistakes and delays can affect other processes at your practice — that’s easier said than done, though, right?

With many other things on their plates, it’s easy for your team to neglect a billing task like working the insurance aging report. But then one day you’ll look at it, and you can’t imagine how it grew so large, so quickly.

Our customer, Aspire Oral Surgery, saw a huge transformation in their accounts receivable when they partnered with DCS’s billing services. 

In November 2020, their accounts receivable (AR) over 30 days had crept up to 75% of their overall AR. Then they partnered with DCS, and since 2020, Aspire’s AR is down from $472,281 to $238,214 — a decrease of 50% since working with us.

Your dental business will also benefit from processes in place that ensure your aging report is being worked at least once every week. This could require hiring a designated insurance biller, or partnering with billing experts like DCS to take over this revenue-generating task. 

Compare the cost of hiring someone in-house vs partnering with an RCM provider here. 

Insurance billing is often most people’s least favorite task, but it should be a priority because revenue is on the line. You’ve already provided the services, make sure that payers reimburse you for them.

Tip #4: Enhance Team Communication

How well your team works together is reflected in the efficiency of your oral surgery practice. And how well your team communicates will depend on what kind of work culture your leadership has created.

Here are some quick tips to enhance your team’s communication and work culture: 

1. Foster an open-door policy: Communication is key
2. Support work-life balance: It’s a must in this new world
3. Invest in professional development: Show your team that you care about their future
4. Embrace diversity and inclusion: Value everyone’s contributions
5. Where you can, make things easier: Provide the right resources

Cultivating a healthy work culture in your dental practice isn't just a feel-good measure; it has real business impact. When your employees are motivated and satisfied, they’re likely to stay, which in turn improves patient care and eliminates hiring and training hassles. 

Low turnover also helps your team perform cohesively and move through processes without hold-ups, leading to higher cash flow. And happy staff cultivate a harmonious environment for your patients, while also fostering better patient relationships.

Tip #5: Develop a Patient Follow-Up System

Your administrative team’s time is too valuable to be wasted on the phone, chasing down patients for their outstanding balances. 

And the patient billing process is a delicate balance of needing to collect your revenue, while also maintaining a positive relationship with your patients.

Unfortunately, when patient collections gets complicated, it can cause a huge halt in your team’s productivity. So it’s important to develop a system where follow-up with patients is easy and even hands-free for your team, instead of a time-consuming, stressful and distracting headache. 

We highly recommend automating your patient billing system. Through automation, patient follow-ups are always happening in the background, and your team can give their attention to patients who are actually in the office.

Once you automate your patient billing, you’ll see: 

• Patient statements issued automatically with easy payment options
• Friendly automated payment reminders
• Minimized costs and maximized time due to the elimination of paper statements
• Monitored direct deposits and outstanding balances

You’ll also see fewer errors, as automation takes over the manual tasks associated with patient billing and follow-up — tasks that can create errors when done manually, which hampers the productivity of your office.

Automated patient billing is a win-win-win, as it eliminates manual tasks (and their inevitable errors), frees up your team’s time, and offers your patients an easy and convenient payment process. 

Read more here: Master dental patient collections process for profitability: 3 smart tips

Get 5 additional tips when you download Your Guide to OMS Workflow Efficiency: 5 Tips to Increase Cash Flow with Ease 

To get 5 additional tips, fill out the form below, and have Your Guide to OMS Workflow Efficiency: 5 Tips to Increase Cash Flow with Ease land in your inbox within minutes. 

The guide dives into 5 more profitable tips for an efficient OMS practice and also provides additional resources for implementing those tips. 

Our Ultimate Tip: Partner with DCS to enhance office efficiency

To recap, here are our first 5 tips for oral surgery practice efficiency: 

• Tip #1: Streamline appointment scheduling
• Tip #2: Optimize patient intake processes
• Tip #3: Implement efficient insurance billing practices
• Tip #4: Enhance team communication
• Tip #5: Develop a patient follow-up system

Remember, for 5 additional tips, download Your Guide to OMS Workflow Efficiency: 5 Tips to Increase Cash Flow with Ease. By implementing these 10 tips, your oral surgery practice will become an unstoppable force with thriving revenue and growth. 

DCS provides revenue cycle management services for OMS practices looking to maximize their cashflow and efficiency, with our experts supporting your billing processes. 

Capitalize on these OMS efficiency tips: Partner with DCS services.