How to prepare to bring on a new dentist at your practice: 3 tips

If you’re looking to bring a new dentist to your dental practice, you’re searching for the best course of action. You’ll be bringing on a new dentist to join your team, and you want to set them up for success. This is going to be a transition, and you want it to go smoothly for the sake of your practice, team, and patients. 

Dental ClaimSupport has spent the past 10 years helping dental practices find financial and professional success by providing a worry-free claims process. Through this work in the dental industry, we’ve seen how bringing on a new dentist can sometimes disrupt the productivity and dynamic of the dental practice. 

This doesn’t have to be the case. By properly preparing to bring on your new dentist, you and your team can work successfully with your new dentist. In this article, we will share 3 big tips for preparing to bring on a new dentist at your practice. 

With these tips, everyone at your practice will move through this transition smoothly, and your practice will thrive.

1. Create a process for onboarding and training your new dentist

Having documented, step-by-step processes for each task in your dental practice can be helpful for keeping everyone and everything organized. You may have never brought on another dentist before - so you might not already have a process for onboarding and training your new dentist.

This is a great opportunity to create a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for your new dentist. SOPs are exactly what we mentioned above - a documented step-by-step process for a task in the office that anyone could follow. 

Your dentist is going to need to know what the protocol is at your dental practice for processes such as billing, check-in and check-out, and of course - dental treatments. 

It’s a lot! But obviously, you’re hiring a dentist who has been to school and should know what they’re doing when it comes to oral care. They just need to understand how your dental practice works, specifically. 

2. Prepare your team for a new member of the practice

Hopefully, your dental team already knows you’ve been interviewing dentists to bring on to your practice. If not - let them know!

Whenever a new employee is added to the team, your current staff should be made aware. This way they can help you prepare to onboard the new dentists and help out in other areas such as administrative processes. 

Your hygienists specifically will be working directly with your new dentist, so letting them know the experience level of your new dentists and what they should expect can be helpful for preventing negative workplace behavior. 

For example, if your hygienists have several years of experience, and you’re hiring a younger dentist that is just out of dental school but the hygienists know this - they’ll know to be patient and give the dentist time to learn the ropes.

Give everyone a chance to prepare to help out your new dentist in any way they can.

3. Introduce the new dentist to patients

Lastly - let your patients know! Patients love to stay loyal to dentists, but by hiring another dentist, you’re able to increase productivity and treat more patients. 

So, if your patient that typically sees you is going to be treated by your new dentist instead of you have a conversation with them about it. Introduce them to one another, chat about when you hired your new dentist, mention where they went to school or where they previously worked, and let the patients know they’re in good hands. 

This will build trust with your patients, and it will let your new dentist feel at ease as well. This will also give your new dentist a chance to build their own relationships with patients and find some “regulars” of their own. 

When you don’t warn your patients and put them in a chair with a stranger, it could create some anxiety that could cause the patient to not want to return to your practice. This leads to a loss in dental patient goodwill and revenue. 

Embrace the change of bringing on a new dentist and a new revenue tool

When you don’t properly prepare onboarding and training processes, your internal team, and your patients for your new dentist - you might face some challenges. You can avoid those challenges by creating solid SOPs, and keeping everyone in the loop about future staffing changes.

When you hire a new dentist, your entire practice adjusts to the change. When this happens, your billing might be put on the back burner. Avoid this by hiring a dental billing company to handle all of your insurance claims so that your team can focus on welcoming new dentists and handling patient care. 

Dental ClaimSupport is a trusted billing partner that can help your dental practice easily collect claims income. To learn more, schedule a call with one of our experts.