You and your dental office staff have a certain number of hours per day. Ultimately, the amount of money the office makes is a direct result of how you spend those hours. The more efficiently everyone works, the more gets done, the more the practice can grow.
And on the other hand, the more causes of inefficiency lurking around the office and its processes, the less you get done, and the less you make. So, what’s holding things up?
You rely on receptionists to perform the bulk of the front-facing work. The dentists perform the actual service, but it’s the receptionists that do the work to get people in. They’re the voice patients hear on the phone when booking appointments, and they’re the face that greets them when they arrive.
But are they trained properly? Do they have the communication skills you need both to do the rote work of booking appointments, but also encouraging a reschedule when someone cancels? Do they embrace your practice management system and get the most out of it?
A cancellation is a huge source of inefficiency. When you’ve got a full schedule and people trying to book appointments that are convenient for them, your wait list grows. This might seem like a good thing—a full schedule’s a full dentist’s chair—but when something goes wrong, as it often does, and somebody doesn’t show, you’ve now got an empty timeslot.
When many people cancel, that full schedule is now full of holes—and every hole represents income you’re not earning. Reception can only do so much on short notice to fill them, and ultimately, you could end up operating far below your capacity and live with daily disorder.
The longer you go without updating your software, the less effective it will be. Even if it’s doing everything you think you need it to, the reality is that software will continue to innovate, competitors will adopt these innovations over time, and one way or another, your ability to compete will diminish—whether because your solution grows slow and unwieldy, new innovations respond to changing market conditions, your changing staffing structure means it no longer makes sense, or perhaps because your vendor no longer supports the old system.
You don’t need to deploy an entirely new system every year, but if it’s been a few years, it’s probably time to check out what’s available. If your staff have started developing workarounds to systems that aren’t working anymore? It’s definitely time.
One of the key ways to reduce inefficiencies is to seek out opportunities to employ automation to perform simple tasks.
In the dental world, one prime example is in automating your appointment reminder process. Taking your receptionists away from the laborious constant task of reaching out to people for manual confirmations, an automated system can be set up to your specifications and let loose to obtain confirmations, send reminders, and give any information patients need to know about their procedures before they come in.
This doesn’t mean you now have inessential staff—far from it! With their time freed up from many of their phone-related duties, your receptionists are able to re-prioritize their time and better provide an outstanding patient experience.
Interested in automation? EasyMarkit is one such service. It’s an automated patient reminder system built to allow receptions to provide a better standard of patient experience and reduce inefficiencies in the reminder process. To find out more and book a demo, click here.