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Management Tips for Every Dental Office
One of the best boons to collection is the acceptance of credit cards. Every office should offer the use of major credit cards, such as MasterCard®, Visa® and Discover®. You can shop around the banks in your area for the best merchant rate. The banks provide you with electronic transfer and in most cases the payment is credited to your account in 24 hours.
In addition to credit cards, there are plans available where the patient can finance their dentistry and pay it off in installments. In-house payment plans are never a good idea. In essence, when you treat a patient and they haven't paid you, you are loaning them the money. Since you are not a bank, this is not feasible.
Another way to get paid is to offer a discount for payment in advance. The best way to do that is to have that payment in full made at a short preliminary appointment. Then make longer appointments. The purpose of the short preliminary appointment is to avoid loss of a large block of time to a last minute change of heart.
All case presentations should be made in writing on a formal form with the doctor's name, address, telephone number and the date of the presentation on it. The statement, "this treatment plan will be honored for ___ weeks from the above date" must be on the form. That gives the patient an incentive to make a decision. It also keeps the patient from coming back in several months or years expecting to have the treatment for the same fee.
Your biggest expense is staff salaries. Therefore it behooves you to choose your staff carefully. There are companies that help with hiring. It is essential that you are absolutely clear about what you expect from your staff. The best way to achieve that is to create staff handbooks for each position.
Each book must have the duties of that position clearly defined. You also need to include general office policies that state the "rules of the road." Some examples of rules are: attendance requirements, vacation, sick days, new patient protocols, personal use of the telephone, termination policy and anything else you want on the record.
This avoids the "I wasn't aware of that" excuse. Each staff member must be accountable. You can accomplish that with a routing form. This form is given to the patient on arrival and follows the patient until they leave. The router consists of the areas of reception, treatment, finance and appointments. Each person the patient sees in the practice must initial their portion to attest to the fact they completed the requirements for that patient -- including the doctor.
Each employee should have a start-of-day and end-of-day checklist. One hour each week should be devoted to a staff meeting with a specific agenda. The practice of having mainly part-time employees to avoid benefits leads to inconsistency. The patients sense that and are uncomfortable. The staff is detached and there is an absence of loyalty.
For the specialists, it is essential that you develop a good working relationship with your referring doctors. Patients are generally unhappy about having to see another doctor. By having open communication and consulting with your referring doctors, the patients gain a sense of confidence and security. A consultation with the patient and both doctors would be helpful even if it is done in the specialist's office and the referring doctor is on the telephone.
Every dental office can thrive and boom if it is managed like a corporation. You need to know the reason you are there and the benefits you derive from the efforts you put in. The doctor and the staff need to be on the same page in order to be successful. The staff needs to feel valued and validated for their efforts. One of the ways to accomplish this is by the use of progress reports and management by statistics.
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