Mastering the Art of Time Management
For busy dental practice owners, trying to find the time to complete all their tasks is a constant struggle. Whether trying to maintain a practice’s daily operations, managing staff, performing patient care, or just trying to implement new ways of helping the business run more smoothly, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to finish everything the way you might like. Fortunately, by embracing the right technology and the need for more efficient scheduling, you can work to better streamline clinical workflow and administrative processes in a way that will allow you to reclaim invaluable time while mastering the age-old art of time management.
Effective Scheduling the Key
It’s not revolutionary to consider effective planning as the key to reducing the time spent on administrative tasks, but it does mean you need to create a schedule and make sure that all team members are onboard with what that schedule means for their role. Scheduling your team’s work schedules and scheduling patient appointments are two areas that can quickly eat away hours of your day if you fail to institute procedures on how to handle these two important tasks.
Patient Scheduling
For a dental practice to meet its production goals, you’ll need to schedule a variety of different appointment types that range from routine cleanings and follow up visits to cosmetic procedures and root canals. Unfortunately, you can encounter a lot of obstacles when trying to create an optimized schedule. Missed patient appointments, staffing shortages, and financial limitations can all contribute to making it very difficult for you to implement the type of schedule that best meets the needs of your practice.
Block scheduling offers one of the most effective strategies for successfully managing your daily production goals. By assigning slots to specific tasks such as major/minor treatments and new patient consultations, you can ensure you have the capacity necessary to complete your dental care commitments within the allocated time.
It’s important that your staff is onboard and using your practice management software system to schedule procedures appropriately, to ensure everything moves smoothly, and that your schedule doesn’t get overbooked.
Staff Scheduling
Successful staff scheduling has taken on even greater importance during the current pandemic. Staffing shortages can occur quickly and with little to no advanced warning, especially in a health care setting where every precaution must be taken regarding self-isolation following a positive test.
Attempting to manage and track vacation and work schedules with little notice is no easy task. Finding a suitable replacement, at the right location and the right time, is extremely challenging. Fortunately, you can alleviate some of this stress and save time by using software to schedule shifts.
One of the most effective ways to provide your workforce with the flexibility and transparency they desire is to allow employees to swap shifts. By providing your team with access to software that integrates with your existing practice management software system, your team can start to take an active role in scheduling their shifts. Helping to empower your staff with the scheduling and managing of the schedule not only encourages better teamwork, it also promotes a sense of self ownership and goodwill that’s so important for the health of your business.
Embrace the Use of Technology
Embracing ways to effectively utilize technology is one of the very keys behind developing an effective time management system. The right technology can help you to automate administrative processes, such as automatically sending out appointment reminders and post-procedure instructions. Plus, it also offers the potential of allowing your office to quickly connect to patients in ways not always possible when short on staff.
Practice Management System
Today, running a successful dental practice requires you to effectively find and utilize the invaluable data that lies at the heart of your business. An effective PMS not only enables you to accurately document everything from a patient’s contact and insurance information, but it also provides a combination of processes and data structures that play a vital role in documenting diagnosis, clinical information, deliverable services, and treatment plans.
At its core, a PMS enables you to manage electronic documents, run reports, assign tasks, store billing information, record test results, manage patient profiles, and so much more. Practice Analytics’ integration with your practice management system allows your dental office to fully maximize the data that is the key to unlocking your practice’s full potential.