Opening your dental practice on nights or on a weekend can be quite productive however considering evening or weekend scheduling is typically a solution to some problem in the practice that can be fixed by upgrading the management of your dental practice. Here are some points to consider: 1. Only do so if your lifestyle can handle it as you may discover ten years later you never had a life outside of dentistry. 2. Expect more problem patients. It seems the more you accommodate people the ruder and more demanding they are. 3. Demand for weeknights or Saturdays is regional. For...

The two main reasons why most dental practices underproduce are: a. Staff non-compliance b. Double work  It is the small things that add up to consuming vast amounts of time and we all know time is money. Too often dental staff look busy but are in fact simply handling unnecessary work they needlessly generate caused by inefficiencies and lack of training. Examples: A lab case is not in the office and the patient arrives for their appointment.Incomplete information in patient charts.Incomplete dental insurance submission.Insurance not verified.Patient leaves the office without an appointment.Phone numbers for patient are not correct. Can’t confirm appointment.Delivering...

Until a dental practice has at least a half dozen staff or more there is no real need for designating any employee as the office manager as what a real OM does is hire, train, apprentice, correct and manage the other staff. A real OM is not answering the phone, scheduling, doing financial arrangements, etc. However an OM should be able to do all these jobs better than anyone else otherwise how can she properly train, correct and manage the other staff? A vital skill for of an OM is having the expertise to train other staff. The truth is when you...

I often talk to clients about the importance of role-playing with your dental staff but that may not be enough. Just because you showed someone how to do it once, doesn’t mean they will continue to follow the procedures you’ve shown them.  I have a client who thoroughly role-plays new staff members on their job duties until they have their procedures down to perfection but then he didn’t follow up on them until a few months later. Instead he assumed that they were doing the job the way he had shown them how to do it. After all, he was paying...