1. Expand and Train Staff
When you find the best people for your dentist practice, training them is one of the first steps to running a better dentist’s practice. Ensure that they know how to communicate with your patients properly. After all, if you want to keep patients going to your dental practice, communication is key. And they should know the jargon to use and how to talk and care for patients.
Aside from training your staff, you should consider expanding your team too. You don’t want to cut costs on staff. After all, you will need a dental nurse and hygienist too. Although you can train front-desk staff to handle dental-related services, it’s better to have a professional on board. Not only that, you may need an extra pair of hands to take care of more patients. As such, an associate dentist can also do wonders in your growing dental team.
Plus, you want to continue training your staff even as you expand your dental team. You want to ensure that your staff is improving continuously to give the best care to your patients.
2. Engage with Patients
You want to ensure that patients keep coming back to you. It helps that after their dental appointment, you can ask for their feedback. Your front-desk staff can provide them with a form to fill out, or they can click a link where they would send their feedback. It’s necessary that you engage with patients like this because it helps you improve your practice.
What should the staff improve on? How can you, as their doctor, provide better care for their patients?
Having these questions in mind will help you and the patient better understand how to run a better dentist’s practice. Plus, patients will have the impression that you’re listening to them when you take note of their feedback.
You can also reward patients when you engage with them. One way to reward patients is through referral programs. For example, once they complete their feedback form, you can give them a code or coupon telling them that your current patient could have a discount on the following appointment if they refer new patients to them.
3. Invest in Scheduling Tools
Before starting your dental practice, you need to ensure that you’ve looked at your market and surveyed the area. This helps you understand your market and know if there are other dentists in the area. Although you’ve chosen the ideal location to set up your dental practice, one problem that could arise is the number of patients you can have an appointment with within a day. As much as you want to be the go-to dentist, this is where scheduling comes in. It’s a small matter, but it has a huge impact on your dental practice.
If you have scheduling software, this allows you to look ahead and know how many patients to schedule in a given day for an appointment. This reduces the stress on you and your staff. And if you want to take it up a notch, make sure that you have a scheduling software that patients can schedule their appointments in. This allows patients to choose their schedules, and your staff can manage scheduling with ease.
