Tips to Increase Productivity in a Dental Office

A dentist’s office is most successful when everyone works together to create an organized, safe, productive, and efficient workplace. Some of the best dental offices in the country have mastered office efficiency, and have found a way to blend top-notch quality of care with innovative technology and procedures that keep patient data, billing, and scheduling organized. If you’ve been looking for ways to increase productivity in your dental office, keep these tips in mind.

Focus on First Impressions

Scheduling an appointment with a dentist can be a major source of anxiety for some patients. Focusing on first impressions means training front office staff to answer the phone professionally and set the tone for the rest of the visit. The initial phone call to your office can play a significant role in whether a patient decides to make an appointment or not. Train front desk staff on friendly and courteous phone call etiquette and equip them with all the information and resources they need to answer patient questions over the phone.

Many callers do not have the time or patience to be transferred to a dozen different departments to get their questions answered. If a patient calls your office for the first time and can have all of their questions answered in a single phone call, make an appointment based on their schedule, and feel heard and respected by the end of the conversation, you’ve taken the first step toward establishing a long-term doctor-patient relationship.

Streamline Patient Intake

Getting patients to make an appointment is important, of course, but keeping them as long-term patients at your practice takes more effort. One of the best ways to increase dental office productivity and improve the quality of care that you’re offering is to streamline patient intake. The average patient waits 20 minutes or less in a dentist’s office. You can use this wait time productively by offering modern and innovative ways for your patients to sign in and provide their medical information.

Consider switching to a paperless registration method, where patients can fill out customized forms on an in-office tablet or mobile device. This eliminates the time that would otherwise be needed for your front office staff to transfer information from paper into your digital system, and it provides your patients with a convenient way to quickly fill out their forms. This means you can reduce wait times, improve the overall patient experience, and get patients in and out of your office faster—so you can see even more patients.

Create patient intake forms as unique as your patients. See how easy it is to use the custom form builder from Device Magic.

Encourage Patient Feedback

It’s often said that when you know better, you do better. This holds true when it comes to increasing productivity in your dentist office. Encouraging patient feedback allows you to get an inside look into the various aspects of your practice. Patient satisfaction surveys can enable you to see how each step of the dental experience makes a patient feel and which areas need improvement.

Many practices are encouraging this type of feedback by making it easy for patients to leave reviews on a mobile device before they even leave the office. In most cases, patients will be happy to leave feedback if it is easy and convenient.

Check out our post on the Essential Patient Satisfaction Survey Questions to help you get actionable feedback for your practice.

Digitize Your Scheduling Process

Writing down the staff schedule on a paper calendar is an outdated and often confusing way to manage the employee scheduling process. This is another area where you can go paperless, stay organized, be more efficient, and free up more time in your day to complete other important tasks.

Digitizing your employee scheduling process helps to reduce human error, keep everyone organized, and allow for quick and easy schedule changes. When everyone is on the same page regarding their schedule, you can eliminate short-staffing issues while making it easy for things like time-off requests or trading shifts.

Explore more tips to Eliminate Paper from Your Business.

Consider Your Office Layout

The setup of your office can dramatically impact how productive you are throughout the day. The welcoming area should be warm, clean, organized, and inviting. Bathrooms should be spotless, and the waiting room should be clean and designed with the patients’ comfort in mind. Each dental station should be organized and set up before a patient ever sits down, and your office should have a place where the dentist can view medical documents in privacy. Create a space for private conversations regarding treatment, insurance, and payment as well.

The layout of your dental office should allow medical staff to move effortlessly through each different section of the office. It should also allow patients to feel more comfortable instead of cramped and crowded. If you notice you’re constantly bumping into patients or other staff members, or specific processes feel unorganized, it may be time to re-evaluate the layout of the office so that it works better for your team.

Try Device Magic for Free

Going paperless can help to improve productivity in many areas across your practice. Device Magic mobile forms software can help you do just that. Use our custom form builder to create fillable forms that can help you streamline the patient intake process, gather valuable patient feedback, and more.