How Digitization Can Empower Your Dental Team

With more than 9 out of 10 Americans planning a visit to the dentist this year, it’s a busy time for oral health professionals. Appointments are ramping up, and patient footfall is increasing — and that means that both clinical and administrative teams are under pressure to deliver efficient and high-quality experiences for patients.?

To make that happen — and ward off the growing threat of burnout —? dental leaders need new ways to empower employees and enhance operational efficiencies.?

That’s where new technologies have a key role to play. When deployed effectively, digital practice management platforms can streamline administrative and clinical processes, improve diagnostics, and deepen business insights, helping staff to hit maximum productivity while simultaneously delivering the very best patient care.

Better care, better business

First and foremost, the right software can help your team to deliver better care and better patient outcomes. Practice management software can help dentists to share information — from clinical notes to radiographic images — more quickly and effectively. No more blurred faxes or scrawled notes: today’s practitioners have all their patients’ records at their fingertips, and that makes it easier to collaborate and deliver sophisticated and coordinated treatment plans for patients.

Just as importantly, digital tools can elevate the logistics of running a dental organization, allowing practices to streamline everything from speedy online booking to straightforward billing, and everything in between. That means happier patients, fewer scheduling mistakes, improved collection rates, and a more profitable and faster-growing operation.

That kind of streamlining isn’t just good for business — it’s good for your employees, too. Smart technologies can lighten the workload on practice teams, and also eliminate friction with patients, significantly reducing the risk of exhaustion and staff absence.?

With increased standardization across your operations, it also becomes easier to train new employees and ensure that work is being done properly, even by newly onboarded administrators. And if your practice wants to join a Dental Services Organization, or seek equity financing, that’ll be far easier if you have a well-organized business with sensible and standardized IT and data infrastructure in place.

The bigger picture

Finally, it’s important to remember the bigger picture. Many of the employees who benefit most from well-implemented digital tools are those who’ve traditionally worked hardest and been least appreciated: the frontline receptionists and office managers who work so hard to keep your business running smoothly.

Putting strong technologies in place can reduce inefficiencies and help these vital workers to do more with less — without forcing them to work overtime to keep your business operational. That can sharply reduce their stress levels, while also freeing them up to use their knowhow and creativity to find innovative new ways to add value for your patients and your business.

That’s especially important because so many of these underserved employees are women. With the dental industry as a whole increasingly moving in the direction of gender equity, and men and women now finishing dental school in roughly equal numbers, it’s more important than ever that practices treat their female employees as valued team-members, and give them the digital tools they need to do their jobs effectively.

Empowering dental teams

Dental businesses are sometimes seen as being resistant to change. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, nothing could be further from the truth: we’ve all had to innovate and pivot in new directions in order to survive and keep on serving our patients effectively.

As we move past the worst days of the pandemic, and patients come flocking back to our practices, we need to lean into new technologies and digital tools in order to keep on driving our businesses forward. To succeed in an increasingly crowded and competitive market, dental organizations must invest in their employees — including and especially their vital frontline team-members.?

From streamlining administrative tasks to unlocking new diagnostic capabilities, digital platforms are the future of dentistry. Their biggest benefit, though, lies in empowering dental teams to keep doing what they do best: delivering unparalleled patient care and exceptional clinical outcomes.?Want to find out more? Reach out to the tab32 team, and start laying the groundwork for your organization’s future.