Scaling dental practices without increasing overhead

Every dental practice encounters this problem, and your business is probably one of them. Scaling dental practices relates to enhancing patient care while trying to keep costs in check. 

Here are some suggestions for keeping your expenses low: from outsourcing tasks to managing unnecessary costs, the idea is to maintain the quality of service while still getting revenue.

This article is focused on dental practice growth strategies and how you can have a cost-efficient expansion in your dental practice. We’ll present you some advantages of hiring a virtual assistant and mention some advice for scaling dental practices.

The Role of Dental Virtual Assistants

Let’s cut to the chase. At Reach, one of our top recommendations for scaling dental practices today is to have a virtual assistant (VA).  

Consider dental virtual assistants as remote professionals. They are specially trained to handle all sorts of admin tasks. They’ll give you a hand with:

• Insurance verification: They Check details with accurate precision and up-to-date methods, facilitating smoother billing processes.​
• Appointment scheduling: They manage patient appointments to optimize time and reduce no-shows.​
• Recall services: Following up is in their scoop (if needed). Routine check-ups, pending treatments, thereby enhancing patient retention.​
• Phone answering and live chat: Handling patient inquiries promptly, providing information, and addressing concerns, which improves patient satisfaction.​

Advantages of outsourcing administrative work

Having external staff to lend a hand can facilitate process management. But there is more. Some of the advantages of outsourcing administrative work also include:

1. Enhanced focus on patient care: With administrative duties managed externally, dental professionals can dedicate more time to direct patient care, improving the service quality.​
2. Recall services: Enhancing retention of patients to the practice by ensuring routine follow-up is done for patients due for routine check-ups or pending treatments.
3. Retaining and improving lead quality. A satisfied customer is a customer who is likely to return. Although your dental service is important, customer service and the entire management are part of the care clients will receive when they come to your practice.
4. Cost-Effectiveness: Engaging virtual assistants can be more cost-efficient than hiring full-time, in-house staff. Practices economize on overhead expenses related to office space, equipment, and employee benefits.
5. Access to the specialized skills needed for specific tasks: When you outsource, you gain access not just to a greater number of potential workers but also to a far wider array of skill sets. And in this age of telework, the actual physical location of the worker is largely irrelevant. You use the whole globe as your talent pool.
6. Increased concentration on patient care: When dental professionals work with external administrative support, they can spend more time serving the patient. Because their patients have busy lives, dentists must make the most of every moment spent with them. It must be quality time.

Dental practices can maintain a high level of administrative efficiency without adding to the on-site staff by delegating these tasks to VAs.

Implementing Virtual Assistance in Dental Practices

Scaling dental practices can start with a dental virtual assistant. But how do you do that? To effectively integrate VAs into a dental practice, consider the following steps:​

• Find a Reputable Service Provider: Reach offers dedicated assistants experienced in various administrative roles, including insurance verification and phone answering.
• Ensure Compliance and Training: Verify that virtual assistants are trained in relevant regulations, to maintain patient confidentiality and data security.​
• Integrate with Existing Systems: Ensure that VAs are proficient in the practice's management software to maintain seamless operations.​

If you would like to know more about our service and all that our virtual assistants offer for dental practices, please contact us. For just $1,950 you can have a remote specialist for 40 hours a week, fully trained, ready to take care of all your administrative issues from day one.