6 ways to increase your dental practice’s profitability

August 29, 2019

Dental practices provide an invaluable service to patients by improving their oral health and their overall quality of life. While the importance of this care cannot be emphasized enough, your dental practice is, at the end of the day, a business.

Without finding continual ways to grow and drive revenue, practices are not as able to keep providing high-quality service to patients. But how can a practice – whether it’s been in business for either a few months or a few decades – find new ways to increase practice profitability?

Here are some key methods to drive revenue growth and expand your practice’s ability to improve your patients’ lives.

Have a plan

The most important step in maximizing your profitability – and the first one you should undertake – is putting together a plan for your practice’s growth. This includes:

  • Concrete, measurable goals
  • A beginning-to-end map of actionable initiatives
  • Incentives
  • Necessary changes to personnel, technology, and processes
  • Input and understanding from everyone in your organization

Once this plan is in place, you’re ready to start putting it into action.

Hire dedicated marketers

A marketing specialist, team, or third-party agency is necessary for a number of reasons – the most critical being time and expertise. You or someone on your team who is not entirely dedicated to marketing your practice doesn’t have the time or the necessary knowledge to do so effectively.

There’s a lot that falls under the scope of full-service marketing. On top of managing the overall image and brand of your practice, it also includes:

  • Website management
  • Social media
  • Content writing
  • Event management
  • Patient and prospect outreach
  • And much more

Some practices also delegate certain internal or administrative tasks to the marketing umbrella. The responsibilities of this role are ultimately left up to you.

Master the scheduling process

Effective dental office scheduling isn’t just about cramming as many appointments as you can into a given day. It’s about knowing what you want your schedule to accomplish and then setting appointments such that stress is reduced for your staff and patient experience is improved – along with quality of care.

It’s also important to be able to roll with the punches and adjust to scheduling changes on the fly, as there are rarely days where everything goes as planned. Helping your team understand the importance of their role in effective scheduling is key to boosting profitability.

Expand your services

Adding specialists to your team by either educating existing members or hiring new ones is a great way to attract new patients. Services like endodontics, periodontics, and sleep apnea treatment allow you to be able to see a wider range of patients for a wider range of reasons.

Just make sure this expansion doesn’t equate to quantity of services over quality of care. Offering additional specialties needs to be truly that – specialties. Make sure your team is fully educated in its key areas.

Streamline communication

Easy and personal communication is a big component of the patient experience – and this takes many forms. Everything from phone calls and reminders to birthday messages and in-person communication with hygienists and dentists contributes to the patient’s loyalty toward your practice, having a big impact on retention, referrals, and profitability.

Incentivize the team

Unless the entire team is on board with your plan and how to execute, the plan is going to fail. The best way to get everyone to buy in is to put the team in charge of its own success and compensation.

Establishing a team commitment system in which everyone succeeds when the team succeeds improves energy and morale, communication, patient experience, and profitability. A traditional bonus program won’t work, either. You need a system that rewards team members based on performance and accomplishment.

Boost your practice’s profitability with White & Associates

White & Associates Practice Consulting helps dental practices optimize all aspects of the business side of dentistry, delivering personalized strategies and solutions designed to improve communication, incentivize the team, boost patient recall, and more. Contact us today to start building a plan to grow your practice’s profitability.