3 Effective Ways Technology Can Help You Efficiently Manage Staff in Your Practice

Dentistry is constantly evolving with new technology and advancement in practice operations and treatment protocols to improve both staff and patient satisfaction. Aside from improving clinical and administrative aspects in dentistry, dentists still find the profession challenging and even stressful at times. Dental practice ownership is not a course taught in dental school or residency; it takes time and experience to understand all of the responsibilities associated with practice ownership.

Many dentists are unprepared for the challenges associated with being a solo practice owner, particularly as it relates to personnel related administrative duties, such as human resources, payroll, timesheets and managing and scheduling your team. With the right approach, you can eliminate this stress, schedule quickly and easily, improve staff satisfaction, and find more personal time for work/life balance.

One key way to achieve this harmony in your daily practice life is through your integrated healthcare management solution. Here are three ways how:

One pervasive issue impacting the management of the human resource (HR) function within a dental practice is that despite years of medical education, dentists often are not educated in management and strategic planning. This is a critical deficit as this function is inexorably tied to the overall strategic goals of the practice. Many dentists combine the functions of the office manager with that of an HR manager, or personally perform these duties themselves. This double duty can create a lot of additional stress and work in an already hectic day.

An integrated healthcare management platform eases this burden by providing a single location where all your staff profiles can be stored, monitored and managed in one place. This includes access to online HR forms and documents, such as contracts, proof of employment and performance reviews. It also enables you to view all personnel across your organization on one scheduler. For example, this single view allows you to create an event, like an annual holiday party, and invite employees to it right through the application and automatically notify your team of the upcoming event particulars.

Another key function supporting your practice is the ability to list job postings for your open full time or temporary positions, which is critical with the current recruitment challenges facing the dentistry industry. You can advertise them to your existing team members or automatically post them on integrated job boards to help qualified candidates find your vacant positions, quickly and easily to expedite your hiring process. Once your new staff is hired, you can also streamline your hiring process by creating automated onboarding workflows (and off boarding should the time come) so training is consistent for everyone in your practice(s).

Your dental office is a busy place, with patients constantly coming and going and receiving the various professional treatments you provide. But you see what patients don’t see – that the constant fluctuation of your staff is also a busy and sometimes complicated conundrum of scheduling and staffing requirements. Scheduling and time management headaches are common issues in a dental practice.

What happens behind the scenes must function smoothly to facilitate the careful consideration and treatment of patients because let’s face it, no dental practice owner wants to be scrambling to cover shifts. This includes managing vacations, ensuring coverage for sick days, hiring temps and multi-location scheduling complexities for businesses with more than one practice.

With an integrated healthcare management solution, scheduling and time management becomes streamlined and efficient. Your staff can easily book/request time off and quickly share them in your office calendar. As a practice owner, you can quickly align your staff availability and schedules with patient bookings to maximize operational efficiency and maintain a healthy level of profitability.

When it comes time for a shift, your staff can automatically clock-in and click-out using their mobile phone or a dedicated workstation in your office, making timesheet tracking and payroll processes as headache free as possible, which leads to our third way to more effectively manage your staff...

Handling payroll is one of the most arduous tasks a dentist/owner has to deal with on a regular basis. A dentist with 6-10 employees can spend anywhere between two to four hours a week focusing on payroll. Doing it yourself eats up valuable time that would be better spent treating patients or creating a sense of work/life balance where you can focus on self-care and time with your loved ones.

When using an advanced integrated healthcare management solution in your practice(s), you can gain clarity, save time and take control of your personnel’s working hours. These non- clinical operations are automated to create efficiency with frictionless workflows for timesheets and payroll.

Through the platform, you can view your staff cost in real-time to identify trends and improve staff utilization when it comes to patient care and providing the best possible experience. Your staff timesheets are also digitized allowing your staff to clock-in and out with efficiency for every shift. They can easily submit their timesheets or create an invoice for the next pay period for review and approval. Office managers and practice owners can then view timesheets in real- time on a mobile phone, approve them and generate reports to streamline the payroll process.

These are just three ways that an integrated healthcare management platform can improve your practice’s operational efficiencies.

For more tips on managing your practice effectively, download our Ultimate Guide to Creating Order from Chaos in Your Dental Practice.