As a provider of excellent oral care, you know that it’s the personal touch that helps your patients feel at ease, ensuring excellent care, time after time. To provide further efficiency in your office, however, there are other improvements you can make that will make your office staff’s jobs easier and your patients’ experience more enjoyable. To help you discover improvements you may not have considered, here are four ways to improve your office for smoother dental procedures.
Automate Where Possible
While some aspects of dental care should never be automated, there are certainly menial tasks that must be done which can be automated. These tasks may include sending billing notices, confirming appointments, alerting patients to extended wait times, and other tasks. By automating these time-wasting procedures, you free-up your office staff to increase their productivity at tasks that truly matter, such as efficient patient scheduling and triaging new patients.
Learn from Data
One thing you have on your side as you seek to make improvements in your office is data on past performance. One way this comes in handy is in the process of developing accurate procedure time estimates. During this process, it’s vital that you consult with all office staff, including receptionists, hygienists, and dentists, to ensure you gain a clear picture of how long a specific procedure takes. When you know exactly how long a procedure takes, you can ensure that you don’t under-schedule someone’s appointment so you end up overbooked.
At the Ready
Another way to improve efficiencies in your dental office is to think through contingencies and have the necessary equipment ready to respond when these situations arise. For example, if you ever need to use med gas in the course of dental procedures at your office, it’s a good idea to have this resource available at every chair and to train each hygienist on its proper use. This allows this resource to be deployed quickly without any scrambling or uncertainty.
Label Everything
If you know someone who is especially organized or if you are yourself that person, you may know that one common trait of organized people is that they like to label everything. While this is a great practice to use around the home, it’s an even better practice to use around a dental office. Proper labeling ensures continuity throughout the office that allows for smooth operation even as new personnel are learning their way around. Additionally, this makes it easier to recognize when supplies need to be ordered, ensuring you never come up short.
In an already-efficient office, changes that are made to increase efficiency can sometimes cause difficulties in the interim. That’s why it’s important to encourage your office staff throughout the process to ensure everyone stays on board with all the changes that are made. This allows the transition to be smoother and the new procedures to be more effective.
