The most successful dental practices are run efficiently and managed thoughtfully and actively. Overseeing day-to-day operations of the practice, managing staff, budgeting, marketing, and ensuring compliance with state regulations and laws are only some of the elements that dental practices have to juggle on a daily basis.
Here are three key areas to help your dental practice thrive:
Staff Management: Talent Acquisition and Retention
To say that the current staffing environment is challenging would be an understatement. The battle for attracting and retaining talent will last far beyond COVID in our view. This includes hiring, onboarding, and training new employees, creating and managing schedules, leading team meetings, and ensuring that everyone is working cohesively and effectively. The competition is fierce!
In addition to managing staff, successful practices develop, implement, and enforce a policies and procedures system to ensure that employees are following appropriate policies and regulations. This can include creating employee handbooks, developing training programs, and enforcing workplace safety protocols, to name a few. While this sounds a bit overwhelming, successful practices, including our clients, systemize these management necessities to remove stress and ensure they are guided by process rather than chaos.
Financial Management
It’s hyperbole to say financial management is a bedrock for practice success, but it’s a fact. This includes creating and managing budgets, tracking expenses, and overseeing billing and collections. One of the keys to success is the active review of daily profit and loss statements which provide you near real-time insights into your practices’ performance. By effectively managing the financial aspects of your practice, an operations manager can help ensure that the practice is profitable and can continue to provide high-quality care to patients. It’s important to point out that producing these reports and financial mechanisms are only as good as their proper interpretation because it’s within that realm that dental practices can affect positive change in your practice.
Patient Experience
Managing the patient experience is vital to your practice’s success because it impacts so many things, including patient referrals, brand perception and ultimately revenue. Ensuring that patients can do business with your practice with ease is one way to build a strong brand. Yet managing and delivering an excellent patient experience isn’t a standalone exercise, it’s part and parcel of thoughtful and efficient practice operations.