You know how crucial dental scheduling is to your practice, especially to ensure the best patient experience possible. But let’s face it — scheduling can be a hassle. The good news? Dental software can make scheduling easier and more efficient.
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What This Article Covers:
Best Practices
Efficient dental scheduling can save a dental practice time and money while reducing patient no-shows and appointment cancellations. To optimize your scheduling, the first order of business is following some best practices.
Plenty of your clients will already be comfortable with using mobile health apps and patient portals by now — but not everyone.
You’ll likely still have some holdouts for traditional scheduling practices, but automated appointment booking and rescheduling can still be a huge time-saver and convenience for you and your more tech-savvy clientele.
Many patients even look for clinics providing online scheduling as it eliminates the need to call and book at specific times. 24/7 appointment booking services might increase your customer retention and cash flow.
Are you excited to find out more about medical scheduling best practices? Here we’ve listed the most important tips.
Note: There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to dental scheduling. Knowing the requirements of your clinic is essential before creating a scheduling strategy.
Set Objectives
Your dental practice is a business at the end of the day. Therefore, it’s essential to have a goal before delving into day-to-day operations.
Take a step back and ask yourself what you want to accomplish within your dental scheduling process.
An aspect that you might think of is reducing stress on medical staff while increasing cost-effectiveness. If this is indeed your train of thought, we suggest you focus on creating a profitable schedule. Some key points which you may consider here are:
- Total profit you want to see by the end of a calendar year.
- Monthly objectives to meet the yearly quota.
- Daily production expectations according to working days of each month.
Having the required estimates will help your office administrators, workers and everyone associated have a clear idea of the expectations from them. It’ll help you efficiently plan time-consuming processes, such as root canals and periodontal surgery, and balance appointments.
Apart from these, you’ll also have an idea about the time spent in the office and the live revenue streams.
Strategize Dental Scheduling
To have a good dental scheduling process, you need to be cognizant of the support systems behind the curtain. If your staff is aware of incoming patients’ ongoing treatments, they can preset the operating chair in advance. This will enable the team to react faster and dedicate more time to patient care.
In addition, you need to be aware of several factors, including available time slots, types of procedures and cancellations, to strategize appointment scheduling in a profitable and stress-free way. Ensure there is a 10-minute buffer time between each appointment to allow staff time for preparing patient notes and sterilizing checkup areas.
There are certain steps you should follow to help improve your strategy:
Create Daily Schedules
Having fixed routines will play an important part in increasing your dental clinic’s overall productivity while reducing stress levels. Create well-thought-out routines by mixing regular dental procedures such as teeth cleaning with time-consuming ones like root canals, periodontal surgery, crowns and bridges.
Knowing how long each procedure takes will give you an idea about how to take and organize daily bookings.
Organize Tasks Carefully
It’s essential to think of the team (medical staff and dentists) while planning the schedule for the day. Keep it as stress-free as possible. Often, longer procedures are tiring both mentally and physically.
Keep time for all team members to take a breath and re-energize. Perhaps placing a patient consultation after a root canal procedure might work.
Ensure Maximum Productivity
One way to ensure maximum productivity from ?medical staff and dentists is to allow them to perform tasks concurrently. Try organizing dentists’ and assistants’ tasks separately so neither party has to wait for the other. This will help extract maximum efficiency from both.
For example, if you have multiple chairs in your office, a dental technician can prep the next patient while the attending dentist finishes up the previous appointment.
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Set Up Proper Clinic Practices
Certain procedures help you set up dental scheduling. These processes help medical staff record and keep track of recurring appointments. They also help your staff better understand the total time each patient requires. This makes block scheduling easier.
Further, initiating patient recalls will ensure your schedule remains populated regularly.
Enable Note Taking
Patients differ from one another. While some are chatty, others go in?, get treated and exit. Taking detailed notes will help you know every patient’s nature and preferences.
Keep aside proper time for patients requiring more attention, whether due to their personality traits or the nature of the work you’re providing them. This can help increase patient satisfaction manifold.
Send Automated Reminders & Streamline Patient Recalls
Patient recalls are one of the most important functions of a dental office. Getting patients back in the operating chair regularly for follow-ups is daunting. With a dental scheduling application, your staff can pull out patients’ contact info and help patients book follow-up appointments.
Create custom reminder settings to automatically alert patients of upcoming appointments using Dentrix. Source
Another aspect of scheduling is sending automated reminders. Often, patients forget about upcoming appointments because of busy schedules. Reminders are a great way to alert them about the upcoming event. This can potentially reduce patient no-show rates.
Therefore, set automated reminders in the form of emails, texts and phone calls to alert patients when it’s time for their next appointment.
Practice Block Scheduling
In dental practices, block scheduling helps medical staff ?plan a day properly. After understanding how long a dentist spends with individual patients, you can put together low-value appointments such as recalls and deliveries and high-value appointments such as crown preps and SRP in a single day.
You can do this by blocking time according to the treatment’s time requirement. Remember when we talked about having set production goals? That’ll come in handy during block scheduling. The key here is to find the proper mix of low-value and high-value appointments without overwhelming the staff while maintaining optimum productivity.
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How To Choose Dental Scheduling Software
An efficient dental scheduling application should address every part of your scheduling process. However, it’s important to know your clinic’s requirements before buying one.
While selecting the right solution, there are some aspects you need to check out:
- HIPAA-compliant: Before purchasing any dental scheduling solutions, ask whether the solution is HIPAA-compliant or not. Some software may not have strict patient data protection protocols.
- Integrations & Replacements: Do you need a scheduling solution to integrate with your existing systems or replace what you have? Are you looking to overhaul your current software architecture with a robust practice management solution? Consider how extensive your requirements are and what you need a solution to integrate with.
- Features: Every dental clinic is unique. Your clinic might require a solution that allows patients to choose a location and a specific care provider. Or it might require it to help patients choose consultation types (dental treatments or basic consultation). Look for a solution that covers what you need.
Implementation
Buying a dental scheduling solution is easy. However, if you do not have proper practices and procedures for implementation, success may be hard to come by. One key element of software implementation is staff training.
We do not mean sitting in a webinar once a week and watching videos. Mostly, every dental clinic staff member will have a part to play during implementation. It’s essential to brief them before the process begins. Only with a unified and well-informed team will you be able to achieve successful implementation.
Furthermore, everyone should collaborate with the vendor installation team. Lack of communication between teams is one of the main reasons for implementation failures.
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Primary Benefits
Employing dental appointment scheduling software will enable your clinic to execute appointment scheduling efficiently. This allows your staff to focus more on patient satisfaction and save valuable time.
You can pair the scheduling software with an EHR application to automate reminder processes and record-keeping.
Now, let’s take a look at the top benefits a dental scheduling application will bring to your dental clinic.
Streamline Bookings
In today’s internet-driven world, you can rest assured that online appointment booking capabilities will come in handy. Most clinics operate at similar hours as workplaces, so patients might find it difficult to book appointments.
Therefore, a 24/7 appointment scheduling service can help you keep patients satisfied. In addition, new patients do not need to wait to book an appointment until your office opens.
Further, save patients the hassle of calling the clinic repeatedly to know the dentist’s availability. Instead, empower them to search for their preferred dentist, look up the calendar, and book appointments from the comfort of their homes and offices.
Reduce No-shows & Patient Cancellations
Having an empty chair in the middle of the day is dreadful. Patients are more likely to cancel appointments as their daily routines get busier. However, there is a way you can reduce no-shows and appointment cancellations. The trick here is building trust.
On top of sending appointment reminders and marketing emails, show patients you truly care. Patients like a personal touch from their caregivers as it helps them to trust.
Making every patient special may play to your advantage, as it’ll certainly increase patient satisfaction. You can provide a personal touch by sending discount vouchers or free samples of toothbrushes and more.
Improve Productivity
With dental scheduling software taking care of appointment bookings and calendar updates, your medical staff might have some free time on their hands while performing other office duties. Look for appropriate tasks that can benefit the clinic and assign them there. This way, you can get more out of the staff without causing additional stress.
Simplify Appointment Reminders
Every dental scheduling solution comes with an automated reminder capability. Leverage it to send timely texts, emails and phone calls to patients, reminding them of an upcoming appointment.
You can also use it to remind patients to book follow-up appointments beforehand.
All of the above benefits are paving the way for dental offices to adopt efficient scheduling software to make life easy for the staff and dentists.
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Next Steps
Have you heard the expression “practice makes perfect?” Creating ?a sound dental schedule is subject to experience and application. With the right attitude, you’ll soon see a difference in the team’s morale and the overall bottom line.
Mastering scheduling will take time. There will be new challenges every day. However, if you continue following our best practices, the process will straighten out in time.
Do you feel the need to look for dental scheduling software with online appointment booking capabilities? We’ve got you covered with this comparison guide.
How did the dental scheduling application help your practice? Leave comments.