How to Run a Successful Dental Practice in 2023

It is hard to keep businesses thriving at the time of a global pandemic, and dental clinics are no exception.

However, while Covid-19 and many other unpredictable challenges require you to be flexible and resilient to deal with the changes, there are some golden rules to help your dental practice weather the storm and beyond

Check out the 7 tips to run a successful dental practice in 2021 and beyond:

Build a powerful brand
Embrace social media marketing
Improve patient care by upgrading clinic management software
Enhance staff training
Expand service options
Improve patient referrals
Improve quality of care

Build a powerful brand for your dental practice

In an increasingly competitive dental healthcare marketplace, building a brand for your dental practice is more important than ever.

You need to differentiate your dental from the competitors and stand out as a trusted industry leader

Specifically, perform the following to build a powerful brand for your dental practice:

Conduct brand research to know your clinic’s brand perception
Identify the factors that make your clinic stand out
Define how you want to be perceived
Communicate your brand identity
Build your brand awareness consistently

For more detailed steps and guidance, check out our article on how to build a powerful brand for your clinic!

Embrace social media marketing

Social media allows for direct-to-consumer marketing approaches and is a powerful tool to reach potential patients. In Singapore, its user penetration is 76% in 2021 and expected to reach 78% in 2023, meaning you can reach out to roughly 4.33 million residents through social media.

You need to embrace social media and content marketing to connect and communicate with your patients while helping them make more informed decisions for their health.

However, there are also strict regulations on social media marketing for the healthcare sector that you should follow.

Want to learn more about the Dos and Don’ts on social media and specific strategies for social media marketing? Check out our guide on social media marketing for healthcare clinics for tips that your dental practice can start using today!

Improve patient care by upgrading your dental practice software

Running a successful dental practice requires more than clinical proficiency, you also need to stay current and efficient with an upgraded dental software that streamlines your workflow, automates your operations, and improves your overall patient care.

There are three parts of your clinic management system that you should take note of:

Inventory and business management
Appointment management
Billing management

Every successful dental practice needs an inventory and business management system to save time and money given that the dental supplies can be overwhelming. Expired dental products, lacked products, or delayed products can easily stall the progress of your busy dental practice. Managing inventory efficiently is key to keeping your dental practice staying on budget.

Upgrading your Dental Software can provide you with more convenient stock and inventory management. It gives you an instant overview of low stock, expired stock, and excess stock. You can thus achieve easy stock and procurement management.

Managing dental schedules is another major headache for many dentists. By upgrading your dental software, you can reduce patient waiting time, avoid no-shows, manage appointments effortlessly, and automatically schedule follow-up appointments that greatly increase patient engagement and retention.

Dealing with dental insurance and corporate claims can be frustrating and tedious. To improve the profitability of your dental practice while enhancing patient experience, you need a quality billing management system that streamlines the payment process.

Enhance your staff training

Needless to say, having experienced dentists and well-trained staff to assess and address patients’ concerns is critical to run a successful dental practice. You need to make sure you have built a professional team that is also compassionate and friendly.

Your patient’s first impression of your dental practice is your front desk team. Their attitude and communication skills are so important that they will leave patients a lasting impression that can make or break your dental practice.

They should be well trained to be able to address patients’ questions and needs intelligently (I.e., billings or medication side effects), offer details regarding your clinic’s medical practices, and most importantly, maintain a good attitude.

Besides your front desk team, how all your medical staff including your assistants and nurses interact with the patients also matters. The professionalism of your staff determines the quality of your dental’s patient experience.

Offer professional training to make sure your staff can make the most of each patient interaction, whether in person, over the phone or through email.

Expand service options

A proven way to run a more successful dental practice is to look for ways to expand your range of services. A wider range of service options can add value to your dental and pique the interest of potential patients.

One straightforward way is to offer competitive pricing for common services such as scaling & polishing. The increase in patient volume will make up for the competitive pricing.

You can also provide unique, creative services that are hardly offered by your competitors. For example, you can offer nighttime or emergency dental services.

No matter how you expand your service options, make sure you don’t compromise the quality of your services, which is the determining factor to retain your patients.

Improve patient referrals

Word-of-mouth referral remains the most effective way to get more patients. Recommendations from a friend, colleague, or family member can often be the critical reason why the patient chooses your clinic over others.

You can hand out referral cards to patients after the treatment, offer them a referral bonus program, and provide quick links to write online reviews.

Always remember to build strong relationships with your existing patients by following up and following through.

For more tips on attracting more patients to your clinic, check out our article that can help you increase your patient flow in 2021 and beyond!

Improve the quality of patient care and patient retention rate

You are not going to get patient referrals if your dental’s patient retention rate or quality of care is poor. Only satisfied and happy patients will keep coming back to your dental and potentially refer you to their friends and family.

It’s widely known that for the majority of businesses, the cost of acquiring a new customer is 5 times more than retaining an existing customer. Simply retaining your existing customers can help you maintain a healthy level of profit while saving you a lot of money.

The key to a high patient retention rate is through improving your dental practice’s quality of patient care.

Quality of patient care can be improved by:

Reducing patient waiting time
Be informative
Patient-friendly administrative workflow
Communicate with patient
Improve outcome

Let UNO help you run a successful dental practice!

UNO Technologies has years of experience serving dental clinics, we have helped many dental grow and prosper. Our Dental management software has all the tools you need to run a hassle-free and successful dental clinic, including dental workflow automation, queue and appointment management, detailed dental charts, and many more.

Conclusion

Pandemic or not, being more strategic in running your dental practice is always important. With UNO Dental Software, your dental workflow can be more efficient and streamlined than ever.

If you want to share any problems or business goals, our team at UNO Technologies is standing by to talk with you.