For any type of business, but particularly those dealing with patients such as medical clinics and dental practices, outdated back office systems and inefficiencies can lead to a lack of harmony among team members, and ultimately, dissatisfaction among patients.
How can you fix these problems for your dental practice? Work with accounting services for dentists who will help you follow the key strategies outlined below:
- Reduce chaos with consistent systems
Systems that makes every day easier to predict, are far more effective than relying on memory alone. Note down every task that recurs – from verifying insurance to checking patients in – and make sure your team is clear on how each process works.
Then, make reports that happen on a daily and weekly basis, automated. This will enable you to clearly see collections, production, and outstanding claims at a glance. Consistency and time saving are crucial.
- Make patient communication automated
With the help of automated communication tools for appointment reminders, confirmations, and follow-ups, that sync with your existing dental software, you can make your patients feel cared about, without tying your team to the phone.
Reducing no-shows and giving your team more of a chance to talk to patients when they arrive, automated systems can benefit everyone in a dental practice.
- Simplify insurance verification
With tools that automatically verify eligibility data straight from insurance carriers, you can eliminate time consuming manual calls, and limit errors. While your team may still need to handle some cases, automation kicks in for the rest, keeping the whole process smooth and expediting the claims process.
- Remove IT responsibilities
With so much sensitive data to protect, it can feel like an immense burden on the shoulders of dental teams. However, by partnering with a managed service provider who has specialist knowledge and expertise within the dental industry, you can return your team to patient care, rather than tech troubleshooting.
- Encourage efficiency throughout
Building a mindset of efficiency within your entire team, can help encourage members to speak out about what might be slowing the practice down, and what steps could be taken to make the process smoother. After all, it’s often the front desk and back office staff who see the kinds of things that dentists and even practice managers, may not.
Even the smallest of changes can have a considerable impact on you, your team, and the practice as a whole.
Engage in practical, professional analysis
Often, to be able to truly see the things that might be holding a practice back, you need to observe it almost as an outsider. While this might be difficult to do yourself, engaging with financial advisors, accountants, and services specialising in bookkeeping for dentists in Miami, can give you the kind of unbiased, birds eye view of operations that you need.
Not only will this give you invaluable insights, but with their guidance, you can also put practical steps into place to resolve any back office inefficiencies picked up on during their assessment.
Running an efficient dental practice back office isn’t always about the latest software or pushing your team to achieve more (although these things can sometimes help). While engaging in professional help from dental bookkeepers and accountants is crucial, more often than not, it’s about creating systems that support teams in their work and empower them to run the practice, its back office, and all of its processes, smoothly and more efficiently.