Top 9 Benefits of Streamlining and Automating Workflows in Your Dental Practice
Today, successful dental practice owners are embracing a more holistic healthcare business management strategy in order to manage rising costs, meet patient expectations, and do more with less. They’re doing so by adopting the trend of implementing cloud-based, AI-driven, fully-integrated digital automation platforms in order to automate interfaces between systems, processes, and users.
This integrated healthcare management approach helps dentists, office managers, healthcare administrators, personnel, vendors, and patients connect, collaborate, and thrive by simplifying the everyday tasks of the business of healthcare management.
Benefits of an Implementing a Fully-Integrated Digital Automation Platform
By automatically integrating a full range of healthcare management workflows—staff management, payroll integration, patient scheduling, practice management, ordering, inventory management, patient communication—through an all-in-one platform, you can empower your team, seamlessly communicate with your healthcare community, and simplify your day-to-day operations to optimize patient care and grow your practice. You create a connected healthcare ecosystem that empowers participants. You have the ability to organize your business and life for increased efficiency, efficacy, and profits, whether you operate one practice or multiple clinics. And, you can simplify your practice to make your life easier and more balanced—without compromising patient care, business growth, or employee satisfaction.
When streamlining and automating workflows across the practice, an integrated healthcare business management platform delivers benefits for stakeholders within the organization (e.g., dentists, hygienists, office staff), but also for individuals and entities interacting and collaborating with the practice, such as patients, pharmacists, specialists, and suppliers.
Specifically, we have 9 benefits that an integrated solution offers to your dental practice:
1. Saves time
An integrated solution will support seamless and efficient connection and collaboration with multiple stakeholders, including patients. It eliminates unnecessary and time-consuming administrative tasks, automatically orders supplies from vendors to replenish stock, simplifies billing and accounting with integrated systems and allows you to gain more personal time for family, friends, hobbies, and physical activity with efficient, integrated workflows.
2. Reduces practice errors
Human error is impossible to avoid, but it’s possible to eliminate them with automation and integration of your entire healthcare ecosystem. With an integrated solution, you minimize administrative mistakes and duplicated effort with efficient, reliable connectivity and communication.
3. Increases practice productivity
Practice productivity is critical to eliminating operational roadblocks. There are several ways an integrated solution can increase practice productivity. Staff scheduling, inventory management and payroll process efficiencies are dramatically enhanced. Patient interactions such as appointment scheduling, rescheduling, communication and follow-up become streamlined and improve patient experience. For dentists operating multiple clinics, it simplifies and creates consistency in staff training regardless of location and ensures that healthcare personnel are in the right place at the right time with the resources they need to do their jobs.
4. Reduces practice costs
To maintain your practice success, you must be able to control your overhead and cut costs. Overhead is like cancer: it merely wants to grow and spread. By leveraging an integrated solution, dental practices are experiencing tremendous benefits through improved visibility to operational costs through dashboard and reports. Your inventory control and planning process become streamlined with automated ordering of supplies and tools to prevent overstock. Staff schedules are optimized in alignment with patient bookings to maximize operational efficiency. Patient recalls and communication are automated to minimize costly human errors and reduce personnel hours. And finally, you can leverage economies of scale by managing staff, patients, and operations at one or multiple clinics from a single cloud-based platform.
5. Improve work/life balance
Taking care of patients and managing personal time while maintaining a practice—with all the inefficient, manual administrative tasks and time-consuming behind-the-scenes work that is required to keep the office running smoothly—can take a toll. Dental professionals often find themselves stuck at the office, buried under paperwork and reports, or spinning their wheels trying to grow the business and sacrificing personal time with family and friends. With a digital automation platform, you will minimize stress and friction with streamlined workflows and full integration across the healthcare ecosystem and you can replace time-consuming admin tasks with personal time for self-care and connecting with family and friends.
6. Deliver superior patient experience
A positive patient experience is essential to the success of any business, but especially in healthcare settings. Of course patients want the best possible care, but they also want to feel seen, heard and understood. With an integrated platform, you have one place to view and manage health-related information and book appointments. Patients have access to an online portal to find and book an appointment quickly and seamlessly at a time that is convenient for them without having to call your office. You can create a streamlined billing experience and also automatically ensure that you have adequate inventory levels of supplies, tools, and resources on hand to provide high-quality care.
7. Improve hiring efficiency
Hiring and retaining dental assistants has become the number one challenge cited by Canadian dentists. And now that dental practices have reopened post COVID-19, pent up consumer demand is expected to drive a 20% year-over-year growth going forward. Unfortunately, dentists’ offices are running with less clinical and support staff and experiencing high turnover rates. With an integrated solution, you can onboard and offboard personnel with ease. Your available job placements, permanent or temporary, are integrated with online job boards enabling you to post and share job opportunities at your practice helping qualified candidates find your vacant positions, quickly and easily. Plus, you can utilize internal personnel for temporary job placements and for backup when staff are on leave.
8. Tighten inventory control
By automating inventory management tasks, you can take the guesswork out of ordering supplies; you will never run out of the materials and tools you need to run your practice and never have to worry about over-ordering or expired products. An integrated healthcare business management platform can conduct automated stock audits to determine what supplies you have on hand and how much you’ve used. It helps you avoid overstock and expired products and when stock is running low, supplies can be automatically ordered from preferred vendors to replenish stock.
9. Create positive employee experience
Dentists are looking for something that can make their practice stand out from the competition and attract the best healthcare talent, particularly with attracting and retaining dental assistants being the number one challenge they currently face as mentioned above. With a single, fully integrated platform, you can foster improved work/life balance and enable staff to view and manage work-related information from one application. Communication and collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem is optimized with streamlined office workflows, which reduce stress and frustration, and inefficient admin and data entry tasks to free up employees’ time.
How an Integrated Platform Delivers Results
Using multiple tools and solutions to manage a complex mix of operational processes and systems is unsustainable. Whether a dentist, pharmacist, healthcare administrator, office manager, healthcare personnel, vendor, job seeker, or patient, you’ll reap the benefits of greater operational efficiency, better communication and collaboration, and a higher standard of care that a holistic, integrated model of healthcare management delivers.
To discover the full benefits of a holistic, integrated model of healthcare management and what it can do for your practice(s), contact us today.
For more tips on managing your practice effectively, download our Ultimate Guide to Creating Order from Chaos in Your Dental Practice.
