Top Challenges Facing Dental Clinics
Dental clinics are facing a range of issues nowadays – from accumulating and retaining patients to increasing practice revenue to adapting to technological advancements and everything in between. Let’s take an in-depth look at the most common challenges facing dental clinics in today’s highly competitive, fast-paced environment. Many of these challenges can actually be alleviated with the right technology partner on your side.
1. Acquiring new patients:
The market is becoming increasingly competitive, whether you’re a single dentist or a group practice, there’s no denying that it’s not always easy to find and retain patients. You want to keep your waiting room busy and phones ringing with people looking for dental services. Fortunately, there are many innovative software programs that allows you to better manage the patients you have – helping ensure they’re satisfied enough to send referrals your way.
The right IT company can help you implement a software program that helps track when patients are due for appointments, send automatic reminders, and even identify and contact dormant patients to bring them back into the practice.
2. Increasing practice revenue:
Of course, you need new patients to increase the revenue within your practice. But taking care of more people can often lead to less face-to-face time with each patient. That’s where leveraging the right solutions to increase operational efficiency comes in handy. Many dental practices struggle with outdated hardware and software, which bogs them down throughout the day.
When you’re leveraging current, updated systems, you’re able to ensure all of your tools work seamlessly together to streamline treatments. This means you’ll see more patients in less time without sacrificing patient satisfaction. The right IT company is able to help you improve operational efficiency with technologies that enable you to:
- Automate time-consuming administrative tasks, such as appointment scheduling.
- Secure protected health information against threats and/or unauthorized access.
- Access and share patient information from any device, any time, in a safe manner.
Although finding new patients can help increase the revenue within your practice, it’s certainly not the only way. When you improve operational efficiency, you’re able to better serve your patients, and ultimately, see more patients in less time.
3. Maintaining dental equipment and/or technology:
Lastly, many dental practices struggle to keep their equipment and/or technology up-to-date. Although this is required to maintain compliance with various regulations, including HIPAA, many dental practices fail to apply patches, updates, and other important tasks. At the end of the day, it’s important to maintain your environment properly, in order to exchange patient and claim information, communicate with patients, and of course, keep them engaged with your practice.
The right IT company can help you maintain your dental equipment and/or technology with the following:
- Around-the-clock network monitoring that identifies issues before they result in downtime.
- Regular patching and updates applied in a timely manner to keep systems running properly.
- Data backup and business continuity planning that keeps your patient information recoverable at all times.
- A roadmap outlined to keep you prepared for upcoming upgrades and/or replacements for outdated technology.
Your patients trust you to deliver a high quality experience, each and every time they come into your practice. Let’s help you embrace technology to make that experience even more seamless, organized, and secure. Call us at (408) 849-4441, or email us at info@veltecnetworks.com, to book an IT consultation for your dental practice.
