How virtual assistants help increase revenue in dental practices

Operating your dental practice takes more than just providing outstanding patient care. How? Administrative work, scheduling appointments, and dealing with customer inquiries can easily inundate in-office staff. That can be considered a heavy workload. They might cause your business inefficiencies that can frustrate patients and result in lost revenue opportunities. 

That's where Reach can give you a hand and virtual dental assistants come in. By handling essential non-clinical tasks, VAs help streamline your operations, enhance your patient experience, and boost revenue.

In this article, we present several reasons why virtual assistants help to increase your profits for your dental practices.

1. Reducing missed calls and increasing appointment bookings

Calls that are missed equal revenue that is missed. Research indicates that 32% of calls from potential patients to dental offices do not get answered. When this happens, those patients will likely seek dental services elsewhere. 

Suppose your dental office has a virtual assistant. In that case, it will ensure that every call from a potential patient gets answered, that appointments are scheduled promptly, and that any inquiries from potential patients are handled in a way that will significantly raise the chances of those patients retaining your dental services.

2. Minimizing Administrative Burden

Medical care is only one of the many tasks performed in a dental office. Dental specialists are the focus of attention. But there are tasks behind the scenes that make it possible to attract new customers. From answering phones to doing insurance verifications, this can be done by a VA.

When your staff is overloaded with administrative duties, our VAs can do wonders on many levels. A virtual assistant can handle tasks such as these:

• Appointment scheduling and confirmations
• Insurance verification and claims processing
• Data entry and record-keeping
• Responding to patient inquiries via email, chat, and phone

With the same number of in-office staff, if these tasks are handled by a virtual assistant, generating more dental practice revenue. That way the in-office team has more time to focus on patient care.

3. Enhancing patient engagement and follow-ups

A major part of the income in a dental practice comes from patients who return for treatment. But if the office does not follow up properly, many patients tend to put off their treatment or cancel it altogether. Dental virtual assistants help with this problem in the following ways:

• They send out reminders for upcoming appointments, which, in turn, reduces the number of no-shows that dentists see in their practices.
• They make sure that any patient who has recently undergone a dental procedure is followed up with promptly to check on how satisfied they are with their overall experience.
• They educate patients on the treatments that are recommended for them and on occasions when special promotions are happening to engage patients to come back anytime.

This direct communication helps with two things. First, it satisfies the patients and helps them feel more engaged with the practice. Second, it guides them back to the practice for more procedures.

4. Optimizing your marketing efforts

Yes, investing in a marketing campaign will generate visibility and engagement with audiences interested in your services. But if you don't have staff to manage those leads, you will lose money.

Boost your revenue! Your marketing attempts can be for naught if they do not result in a steady intake of new patients from your end. Fortunately, dental virtual assistants can help turn the tide in favor of practices that employ them. They can do this by:

• Responding to online inquiries swiftly
• Helping manage phone calls remotely and interactions
• Communicate with leads interested in your services.

5. Cost-effective growth in the short term

While an in-house employee can cost you several thousand dollars a year, for as little as $1,950 a month, full-time, you can have a trained specialist for personalized attention to your business.

Having someone in-staff to be part of your staff can be efficient, but costly. We attack the problem at the root. At Reach, we offer you the help you probably need. We have English-speaking remote virtual assistants who can help you manage calls and do insurance verification to streamline processes and increase customer satisfaction.

Add a Dental VA to your staff

Reach has several trained virtual assistants ready to work in your dental practice. They can work with administrative issues, handle insurance validations, answer calls, and assist with various administrative tasks. Contact Reach for more information!