You’ve done it! As the super efficient dental office manager you are, you’ve helped grow the dental practice, maxed out your chair time, and now are ready to open up a second (or 3rd or 50th) dental office. Congratulations!
But, the even harder work is about to begin.
Among myriad other things, you’ve got to:
The Surface Details of Opening Another Dental Office
Arrgh!
We can’t help you with all the little details of growing a dental practice, but we can help ensure that you set the new location up in such a way that you have perfect visibility into what goes on in each dental office, and solidifying the foundation to scale up quickly – at a minimal cost.
The Operational Challenges of Another Dental Office
Growing dental practices with more than one single location face a variety of challenges:
Issues in Acquiring Another Dental Practice
One big plus in acquiring a new dental practice is the great likelihood of more revenue coming in. But there are other advantages, too. When you combine dental practices, you can increase your purchasing power – and this can be a huge gain when it comes to investing in new technology.
At the same time, the staff in that dental office will have its own way of doing things that may not exactly mesh with yours. So you’re left with a dilemma. And, you’ve got to focus on:
- Human resource management
- Training and development
- Metrics/analytics
Do you let that new dental practice operate as usual, or do you go for scale and efficiencies by having all locations use the same workflow?
To Centralize or Decentralize Dental Practice When Growing?
Decentralized Dental Practices
If you decentralize your dental offices, each will have its own processes, procedures, and software and will manage its own billing, insurance claims, and revenue.
That makes things relatively easy in the short term. But, it could create a host of problems long term:
Loss of control in day-to day operations
Duplication of efforts in patient record keeping, billing, insurance claims
Dental office inefficiencies due to lack of standard procedures
Goals of the dental practice could get blurred
Centralized Dental Practices
Centralized means all in one place. So, centralized insurance processing. Centralized accounting and billing. Centralized reporting. Centralized scheduling. Centralized patient data.
The advantages of dental office centralization include:
Greater transparency and visibility
More control and accountability
Economies of scale
Consistency in procedures
Reduced operational costs
This is where your dental practice management software comes into play.
Rather than each dental office having its own dental practice management software and the responsibility for keeping data private and secure, an enterprise-grade package gives everyone who needs it access to any information from any location.
In a centralized dental office environment, “staff are freed up to focus on patient care and communication instead of things like billing and insurance, and the quality of interactions with patients is much higher…” Jon Morgan, CIO of STX Healthcare Management Services
But There Are Other Aspects to Your Workflow For Multiple Dental Offices
You’ve got your intra-oral cameras, x-ray machines, patient reminders, credit-card processing, accounting software, and servers that store the info you need. But often, especially if you have multiple dental office locations, these are separate and don’t communicate with one another, leaving you to piece together what you need from a variety of sources and locations.
Wouldn’t it be great if they could all be accessed anytime and anywhere? No more need to schlep across town to get a patient’s images. No more calling the second office to check on available chair time.
The Solution? The Complete Cloud™
Growing dental offices should prioritize efficient technological investments to help enhance the overall customer experience and add value to their practices…[Doing so] will result in performing dental procedures with greater precision, comfort, and efficiency than ever before, says Dan Croft, head of Healthcare Practice Solutions Group at TD Bank.
The Complete Cloud™ is a platform specifically designed for growing dental practices and the various software they use every day.
With it, you put all that software into a private, secure Cloud but still work on your regular desktops — and now also mobile devices — from anywhere.
YOU CAN:
- Access what you want when you need it
- Free up resources
- Simplify your IT infrastructure
- Cut IT costs by up to 50%
AND, YOU GET:
- Rapid disaster recovery
- Data security and privacy
- HIPAA technical compliance
- 24/7/365 support from a team of HIPAA, dental, IT, and security experts