As states prepare to open back up and dentists gradually open their doors to patients once again, it’s a good idea to consider the future of your practice and act accordingly. It may be difficult to know where to start, and there is no denying this is a stressful time for dentists, but here are some tips for easing the transition back to normal as we continue to fight COVID-19.

Take Advantage of Financial Relief Packages

The government’s financial relief packages are exactly what dentists need right now, and because this is new territory for everybody, everyone can learn from this and help one another survive.

Keep Your Current Team Close

Many businesses are laying their employees off and some medical practices and dental practices are considering doing the same in order to reduce their financial burden. However, in the long run, getting rid of your current staff will be costly if you bring in new staff and have to train them. If your team works well, gets along, and prioritizes creating a positive patient experience, then keep it as is. At a time like this, being close with a team you trust is crucial to recovering from any losses and continuing to run your practice.

Take Advantage of Free Time

Whether you have decided to open back up on limited hours, or are holding off, you have a chance to take advantage of free time. 

Future Technology

If possible, it’s a great idea to brush up on skills or consider new dental technologies and mobile apps for dentists to introduce in the future. Some new technologies may include practice management software that automates billing, keeps track of tasks, and keeps your team more organized and efficient overall.

If your practice offers dental braces treatment, another technology you may consider is OrthoPhoto App, our app that snaps clinical braces photos, automatically places them in a template with the right image sizing and order, and automatically organizes them into patient files so you don’t need to spend hours doing it yourself. This app makes it much easier to keep track of your patients’ braces progress, improving record-keeping, your quality of life, and the patient experience. 

Sterilize and Clean

This is something most dentists already do in their dental practice, but COVID-19 has made consumers and patients much more cautious of germs and cleanliness, so they are becoming more and more familiar with this concept. This also means that people may consider switching dentists if they feel their current one isn’t doing enough. Take this time to thoroughly sterilize and clean your entire practice and be sure to share that with your followers on social media so they know you are taking precautions and prioritizing health and safety. When it’s time to re-open and see more patients, they will gladly return.

We’re In This Together

COVID-19 has certainly flipped everyone’s lives upside down, but the good thing is we as humans are learning to be more cautious. Additionally, dentists are fortunate enough to be so essential that they may not get hit as badly as other professionals in other industries. Because of this, now is the time for you and your team to work together to really, truly assess your practice and grow from this experience.

We often get used to how our workplace looks and feel comfortable in it, so we don’t think about making any changes. However, first impressions are always going to be important, and any new competition that arises will make the effort to ensure their workplace is more modern. In today’s competitive landscape, modernness and efficiency are additional traits that your target audience is factoring in when deciding which dentist to go to. This may be due to the fact that modernity and efficiency suggest a better patient experience, so here are some signs that indicate it may be time to modernize your dental practice.

Your front desk team is swamped with paperwork and taking a long time to get patients signed in or out

Filing papers away in cabinets and drawers was once efficient, but now this method of record-keeping is asking for clutter. Often, the dental office staff are more focused on sorting through these documents, which is fair, except for the fact that this isn’t ideal for the patients that come and go. 

A good starting point would be putting new-patient forms on your website so that patients can be that much more prepared when they arrive. In the future, you may consider investing in software that helps you manage your entire practice in terms of appointments, team members, tasks, and patients. This will be handy when it comes to records, billing, and booking.

Your team seems scatter-brained and all over the place when attempting to complete tasks

Dental practices can get very busy, and while this is a good sign, being too busy may result in your team members not performing their jobs as well as they normally would. To remedy this, we recommend introducing scheduling blocks. Scheduling blocks allow team members to streamline their focus on one type of task instead of dedicating minimal attention to multiple tasks. 

For example, you may block 3 hours in the morning for treatments only relating to Invisalign Clear Aligners and dental braces, while your front desk team focuses on billing. This helps everyone at the office get more to-do’s done successfully.

When working on braces progress photos, you spend too much time after hours

Dentists and orthodontists often use a DSLR or a point-and-shoot camera for their dental photography, which highlights their patients’ braces progress. However, once they take the clinical images, they work after-hours to upload, crop, place them in a slideshow, and sort them into specific patient files. 

OrthoPhoto App automates this process so dentists can manage their clinical photos in less time. Using your smartphone, take your patients’ braces images right on the application. It automatically places the images into a template that formats them correctly into their respective patient albums. OrthoPhoto App was created by a dentist for other dentists so they can enjoy more quality time with their loved ones instead of being hunched over a computer.

Photography is a crucial component of dentistry that is sometimes overlooked and seen as unnecessary. However, dentists who photograph their work will find they greatly benefit from doing so.

What Do Dentists Gain From Dental Photography?

Marketing

Taking photos during a patient’s dental or orthodontic treatment is a fantastic way to market themselves to those who may be considering that same treatment. Real patient photos showcase the before and after so potential patients can see the value in your work and become a lead.

Your Patients Will Understand You Better

Through all their schooling, dentists understand their patient cases far better and more in-depth than the patient would. Unfortunately, the dental jargon may not resonate with patients, which is why there are so many mobile apps for dentists that successfully help educate their patients. By showing patients their own clinical photographs, though, they will gain a much better understanding of their case and how treatment will help. 

Record-Keeping is Easier

Images are a fantastic way to keep track of your patients’ teeth before, during, and after treatment. Overall, being more diligent in record-keeping helps make your dental practice more efficient, therefore making for a more positive patient experience.

Recommended Cameras for Dentists

DSLR Cameras for Dental Photography

DSLR’s, such as those by Canon or Nikon, take beautiful pictures, as well as HD video. Newer cameras even shoot video in 4K, which is excellent for testimonials that you can then upload to your website and social media. Combine a DSLR with a macro (close-up) lens and you will take great photos of your patient’s teeth. The downside? They are pricey and tend to offer too many features that go beyond a dentist’s needs.

Point-And-Shoot Cameras for Clinical Images

Point-and-shoot cameras offer just enough for dentists to get the most use out of them, and they are far simpler than a DSLR because, as their name suggests, all you need to do is point it and shoot the picture. The trade-off with these is that the photos may not be the best quality.

OrthoPhoto App Smartphone Camera for Braces Progress Images

OrthoPhotom, an iOS app that you can download here, has successfully automated the time-consuming process of capturing and sorting progress images for dental braces patients, affordably. With a typical camera, dentists have to take the photos, upload them, manually crop and organize them into a file, and then place them into a patient’s file.

With the mobile application, however, dentists can take photos right on their smartphone camera, and today’s smartphones have astounding camera capabilities that keep getting better. Next, the mobile app automatically places the braces progress photos into a template with the correct crop, size, and order and then places them in a specific patient file. This significantly cuts down the time it takes to organize braces photos so dentists can dedicate their energy on other aspects of their job.

Most of us will admit that our workflow could use some improvement. Maybe we can designate different tasks to different people; maybe we can rearrange our schedules a bit; and maybe we can automate some processes that simply take way too long, which would give us more time to focus on other tasks. If you are wondering about ways to improve the workflow at your dental office, then look no further.

Tip #1: Reconsider How Your Team Multi-tasks

Multi-tasking used to be an asset we all looked for in our team members, but the connotation of “multitasking” has changed. Working on multiple tasks at the same time has been proven time and again to be messy and inefficient. 

A revised method of multi-tasking would be to distinguish between what is important and what is urgent. What is urgent should always be done first. What is important can wait a little bit, at least until it becomes urgent. Another way to improve your dental office’s multitasking is by juggling related tasks as opposed to completely different tasks, which leads to our next tip...

Tip #2: Implement Time Blocks

Time blocks refer to blocks of time in which your team members focus on one kind of task. Maybe you focus only on dental fillings, or only on cosmetic dental procedures. Maybe your front desk receptionist focuses on billing for said time block. The good thing about time blocks is that they are fully customizable to what suits the individual or the team and can be adjusted as needed. Once the team is used to their time blocks, you will all notice a weight has lifted off your shoulders and everyone is far more focused and efficient.

Tip #3: Automate the Time-Consuming Task of Capturing Dental Braces Progress Images With OrthoPhoto

There are plenty of different mobile apps for dentists, each of which is designed to make them more efficient and improve the patient’s experience. OrthoPhoto is the newest dentist app, which allows dentists to take clinical digital images of their orthodontic patients. Instead of taking photos, uploading them, cropping them, and placing them into a slideshow–which takes a lot of time–OrthoPhoto App automatically does it with the snap of the smartphone camera.

The mobile application automatically places the images in the correct order and into a template that organizes them in the proper crop, which is then saved to the corresponding patient’s file. Dentists who treat braces patients no longer need to work after-hours to sort through clinical braces progress images. Download it today on the App Store, free for a limited time only.