Managing a dental practice comes with a lot of responsibilities. As the leader of a dental practice, your priority is patient care, of course. But it’s also financial success for the dental practice and professional success for you and your employees.
For more than 10 years, Dental ClaimSupport has worked with dental teams to achieve financial success through our billing services. As a trusted dental billing partner, we have seen how proper management of a dental practice can affect its success.
That’s why in this article, we are sharing 5 tips for managing a successful dental practice. These tips will help your dental team build healthy cash flow, a healthy work environment, and a better patient experience.
Let’s dive into 5 tips for managing a dental practice.
1. Invest in your team
Your dental team is the heart of your dental practice. From your hygienists to your administrative team - they are who keep your practice running smoothly.
To ensure their professional success (which also impacts the success of your practice), you need to invest in them. This means offering opportunities for growth, education, and training.
What do we mean by growth?
Do you promote your team members internally? If you have an administrative assistant, is there room for him or her to be promoted at your dental practice? Are there opportunities or initiatives to earn financial bonuses based on performance?
If the answer is no to any of these, consider making some changes that provide professional growth opportunities for your team members.
Exploring training or continuing education can also be a great way to invest in your team. For example, Dental Claims Academy is a great educational resource for your administrative team to enroll in. It offers courses on billing, coding, and practice management topics. Dental Claims Academy also offers CE credits.
Looking into resources like this for your team helps expand their knowledge that they can use to directly benefit your dental practice. But it also can create a sense of confidence and empowerment for them, that everyone hopes to feel in their job. Providing this resource for your employees lets them know you value and care for them and their professional success.
And it also reminds them that you are a good leader.
2. Meet regularly with your team
Another way to effectively manage your team is to meet with them regularly. Some dental teams have weekly meetings to touch base on how the previous week went, and expectations for the upcoming week.
This not only can keep everything organized and running smoothly but also creates a sense of camaraderie in the office. Everyone has a chance to sit with you and chat about work, but also personal things as well. For example, in our Monday morning meetings at Dental ClaimSupport, we start our meetings briefly discussing our weekends.
This helps us create friendships and grow closer as a team, which leads to more cohesiveness at work.
And as a leader, when you are willing to talk about personal things with your team members, they will feel like they can come to you when problems arise, or they need to discuss something serious.
3. Make sure everyone’s priority is patient experience
Without patients, the dental practice has no purpose. So as a leader, everyone's priority should be creating an amazing dental patient experience.
This means you help your administrative team create a seamless patient scheduling, check-in, and check-out process. As the leader and dentist, being involved in this process can help patients feel more seen, and not just a number in the chair.
Related: How to improve the dental patient experience: 6 tips
This also means that your team understands the sensitivity of billing, and how to properly handle patient billing. Going to the dentist can sometimes be pricey, and collecting from patients can get tricky if there isn’t a clear process for it. Your priority is to treat the patient and explain the importance of treatment to the patient.
Your team’s priority is to explain the insurance coverage to the patient so that they understand their out-of-pocket cost.
4. Don’t be afraid to delegate
Sometimes it can be hard to relinquish control when you’re a leader. And if you started your dental practice from the ground up, it can be even more challenging.
But having the right team in place to delegate tasks and processes to is a huge part of being a good leader.
Managing your dental practice successfully means trusting your team to get the job done. You know they’re going to follow the standard operating procedures (SOPs) for patient care, billing, and scheduling - because you put these SOPs in place.
Having clear processes in place can help assure you that your dental practice is a well-oiled machine. And when your dental team knows you trust them to do their job, they will take more initiative and feel more confident.
5. Track your dental practice’s performance
Managing a dental practice means you know when processes are and are not working.
You can evaluate your dental practice through key performance indicators (KPIs) that you find in your financial reports. These reports can let you know how your patients' billing and your insurance billing is performing.
Related: 5 signs you have a great dental billing process
Has your team had trouble collecting the right amount from patients? Perhaps there needs to be some extra training on calculating patient out-of-pocket costs.
Are you facing frequent insurance claim denials? Maybe you need to revisit what your current claim process is, and even consider looking into a billing service to outsource to.
You can even track your dental practice’s performance through patient experience surveys or Google reviews. Is there something in your patient check-in or scheduling process that could be improved?
Knowing what parts of your dental practice need to be changed can help you give your team the right tools to make the adjustments and be successful.
Ready to learn about tools that will make managing a dental practice easier?
While it can be challenging to manage a dental practice, there are steps you can take that will ensure success.
From investing in your team and creating relationships with everyone, to implementing and maintaining efficient processes for every task - you’re sure to find financial and professional freedom at your practice.
Dental ClaimSupport is a financial tool that can help dental teams find even more success by relieving them of the burden of insurance billing. We focus on getting your insurance claims paid, and you can focus on creating an amazing patient experience.
To learn more about how outsourcing your dental billing can be profitable for your practice, schedule a call with one of our experts.
Related Posts
Dental billing resources