Will staffing issues in healthcare persist in 2024? 3 tips for rising above

December 28th, 2023 | 7 min. read

As we go into 2024, many dental professionals have one thing on their mind: Am I still going to wrestle with the staffing issues in healthcare in 2024?

The nationwide staffing shortage has been a huge challenge, especially across the dental industry. It’s hard to find people with the right experience, as well as enough experience, and it’s even harder to keep them. Turnover and inexperienced staff cause chaos in your workplace, not to mention the high cost of hiring and training.

With inflation still high and your team feeling less stable than usual, you’re searching for answers.

So let’s talk about it: Will these staffing issues continue into 2024?

YES, the healthcare staffing shortage will continue through 2024

Forbes offers this dire forecast with alarming numbers:

“Healthcare staffing shortages will continue to create challenges in 2024, as one study projects more than 6.5 million U.S. healthcare professionals will permanently leave their positions by 2026, while only 1.9 million will step in to replace them. This will create a national shortage of more than 4 million workers.”

This hurts the dental industry, especially because the need for dental insurance expertise has never been more vital. Insurance companies continue to make it more and more difficult to receive claim reimbursement upon first submission.

They find more reasons to deny more claims, pushing your team into the series of steps needed to appeal those claims — a process that costs them time, which costs you money, and also crimps your business’s cash flow by delaying insurance payments.

To avoid difficulties with claim submission, you require team members who have the training, knowledge, and experience to keep up with insurance claim policies so you can avoid denials and timely filing to get paid ASAP. When you hire a novice to learn on the job, their mistakes will end up costing you.

You need experts on your team. Your revenue depends on it.

So what can you do to weather the storm that is the staffing shortage? Here are our 3 top strategies:

Strategy #1: Automate where you can: Optimize your staff’s time and talent by handing repetitive tasks to AI-assisted tech

Administrative tasks in the dental office are oftentimes tedious and time-consuming. Because of this, it’s easy to put off these tasks until later to give attention to in-office patients. And when your team does finally have time to circle back to these tasks, mistakes are made because they’re only human.

These accumulated tasks can overwhelm your team and monopolize their time when they could be doing other things, such as revenue cycle management (RCM) tasks that require a human touch or more directly affect your bottom line.

The solution? Automate where you can. There are AI-assisted tech tools for various parts of your practice that will remove the repetitive, monotonous administrative tasks from your team’s plate, and perform them unceasingly without errors.

The parts of a dental practice that are often and easily automated are:

Check-in and check-out
Appointment scheduling and reminders
Patient billing, including—
- Patient payment processing
- Patient collections
- Patient payment reminders

When you automate these aspects of your dental business, it reduces the need to hire more hands on deck to take on mountains of administrative work, while also lessening the load on the staff you already have.

And remember, robots don’t call in sick, go on vacation, quit, or retire — they’re always hard at work.

Perhaps most importantly, administrative automations free up your in-house team to focus on the tasks that only people can do, such as delivering a clear treatment presentation, addressing questions and concerns, and forming relationships with patients.

Strategy #2: Cultivate a welcoming workplace: For low to no turnover, hyper-focus on employee satisfaction and company culture

The last thing you need during this staffing shortage is for team members to quit, as it’s difficult to replace them. As we mentioned before, when your turnover is high, your work environment becomes less stable, and that impacts your patients, your team’s productivity, and your business’s profitability.

You can improve your employee retention by attending to your team’s happiness and satisfaction with their positions. Everyone wants to feel valued for their work, and they also want a proper work-life balance.

As your dental business’s leader and/or owner, your work environment is the one thing you can control about this workforce shortage.

“Data from Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index Annual Report showed more than half of Millennial and Gen Z workers who quit cited either lack of work-life balance or lack of flexibility as the reason.” –BBC

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that work-life balance and healthy company culture are priorities for many people. If your business does not offer this to employees, they’ll simply quit and go someplace that does.

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That being said, here are a few tips to ensure a healthy workplace culture:

Tip #1: Foster an open-door policy: Communication is key

Tip #2: Support work-life balance: It’s a must in this new world

Tip #3: Invest in professional development: Show your team that you care about their future

Tip #4: Embrace diversity and inclusion: Value everyone’s contributions

Tip #5: Where you can, make things easier: Provide the right resources

For 5 additional tips, read, “10 ways to create a healthy work culture your dental team loves [Free Guide]”

When your team is a happy and cohesive constant, your business will run more seamlessly. And if the bigger problem is that your team is overwhelmed?

Your best bet is to bring in an RCM expert. Let’s get into that next…

Strategy #3: Use outside expertise: Bypass the staffing shortage by partnering with a dental RCM services provider

A huge concern dental leaders are facing during the staffing shortage is an overwhelmed dental team. The first impulse is often to bring more hands on deck to tackle the mountain of time-consuming tasks.

But not only is it harder to find anyone to hire, it’s harder to find the right person — someone with the skill set and wealth of experience you need to manage your dental billing.

Like we said, training time, learning curves, and mistakes can make it costly to hire someone who learns on the job. Ideally, the person handling your billing tasks will walk in on their first day with the expertise needed to complete these essential tasks efficiently and accurately.

Luckily, there are 3rd-party providers you can partner with that will eliminate the need to hire a full-time, in-house insurance coordinator. And what’s better? The right service provider is usually less expensive than hiring in-house, and they’ll be more dependable, too.

Our services at DCS, for example, will take over your ongoing, time-consuming RCM tasks:

Credentialing
Insurance verification
Insurance billing
Patient billing

And we did the math. You can save up to $58,000 each year by working with us instead of hiring a full-timer. Dive deeper into a cost comparison between hiring an RCM provider vs a full-time insurance coordinator here.

With our experts managing your business’s revenue cycle, you truly will bypass the need to hire or replace e full-time staff. In fact, many of our clients aren’t feeling the weight of the staffing shortage at all.

Amber Jean of Children’s Dental Care explains:

“After our Financial Insurance Coordinator of 15 years moved on from our office, I wasn’t sure where to turn. While interviewing, it was impossible to find someone who had the dental knowledge and insurance expertise combined. A quick Google Search for third-party billing led me to DCS. They have been fabulous to work with.”

With seasoned experts like the team at DCS, you don’t have to worry about training, if an old unpaid claim is getting needed attention, or if you’ll be left stranded when a key team member quits or retires.

At DCS, we guarantee every claim gets its due attention, our experts will get you the reimbursement you’ve earned, and there will always be someone on hand to drive consistent cash flow for your dental business.

Take on 2024 knowing the staffing shortage is a problem — but it isn’t your problem

So yes: The staffing shortage will continue through 2024. But now you’ll be facing it confidently with these strategies in mind:

Strategy #1: Automate where you can: Optimize staff time and talent by handing repetitive tasks to AI-assisted tech
Strategy #2: Cultivate a welcoming workplace: For low to no turnover, hyper-focus on employee satisfaction and company culture
Strategy #3: Use outside expertise: Bypass the staffing shortage by partnering with a dental RCM services provider

You won’t have to stress about staffing issues after you implement these strategies and partner with RCM experts who will help you weather every storm.

You can skip the staffing shortage altogether by partnering with us at DCS. Our services take huge loads off of dental teams’ plates, empowering them to focus on patient experience and growing the practice.

Kick the staffing shortage to the curb: Schedule a call with DCS today.

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