Dental Support Specialties Blog

Even though the holidays are still a few months away, you’re trying to plan ahead. You know that your staff will ask for time off to travel and be with their families, but you need to have someone cover the phones at your practice. Do you settle on someone who can write down messages? Or do you find a dental answering service that does much more? At Dental Support Specialties, we’re not your typical service company—when you turn to us for phone support, you can get these amazing benefits for your practice.

As the saying goes, good help is hard to find. That has definitely proven true for you as you’ve searched for the right team members for your practice. You’ve struggled to build a successful practice, but you know you need strong support to reach your goals. As you look through a resumes and interview candidates, you wonder if there’s an easier, better way to build the team you want. Here are some common struggles with staffing and how Dental Support Specialties’ dental answering service could be the perfect answer to your problems!

As you finish an appointment with a patient and they prepare to leave, you hear your front desk team stop them on their way out. There seems to be a problem with their insurance. After a while, they finally have the issue sorted out, and your patient leaves a little frustrated that their visit took much longer than expected.

While it may seem logical at first to leave insurance verification until the patient is actually in the office getting treatment, this gives you very little room for error. If issues arise, your team needs to rush to fix the problem quickly, preferably before the patient leaves. Otherwise, you may not get paid on time. That’s why we recommend verifying patients’ insurance one week before their appointments. In this post, you’ll learn how this early insurance verification can help your practice’s success.

You come into the office in the morning, boot up computers, turn on lights, and start the coffee machine. Before unlocking the door and officially starting, you take a quick look at the schedule hoping to see a full, productive day ahead of you. Instead, you see gaps here and there. These are times when you’ll have no income but still have to pay your team and the bills. Every now and then, a slow day isn’t harmful, but consistent inefficient patient scheduling can greatly affect your bottom line. What can you do about these holes? Check out these three scheduling tips that can help your team be more productive today!

The signs are unmistakable: the phone rings incessantly, your front desk team looks ragged and overwhelmed, and the office culture suffers. Perhaps your practice has been flooded with calls from patients who need to get back on track after missing their appointment in the chaos of COVID-19. Maybe you lost an employee or two who were concerned about their health. Regardless of the circumstances, your staff needs backup to manage your dental scheduling and other front desk responsibilities. In this post, you’ll learn about how Dental Support Specialties can lend a helping hand and keep your practice running smoothly.

At Dental Support Specialties, we pride ourselves in the quality of service we provide our diverse clients. While many of the practices we support are general practices, we’re more than just a one-trick pony. Unlike at “normal” dental practices, our team has the experience and expertise to work with periodontist practices and oral surgery practices as well. Each comes with a unique set of challenges, but we’re familiar with these issues and know how to tackle them. In fact, here are four basic services we can do for your specialty practice.

Software is amazing these days. In dentistry, keeping track of patients has never been easier. With many programs out there, you can get all kinds of information and perform many tasks—more than just count the number of patients you have. But are you using the software to its fullest potential? One area where many practices fall short is determining active patients and seeking those who haven’t started treatment. In this blog post, you’ll learn the value of this information and how to maximize it to your benefit with a dental answering service.

You’re pouring over your practice’s finances, as you do on a regular basis. Although you’ve treated several big cases lately, you aren’t seeing the kind of profit and growth you think you should. Then you realize that you have many unpaid insurance claims and patient bills.

It may be tempting to consider your aging report and uncollected fees as good as money in the bank, but they’re not! Until you get your dental billing under control and consistently get paid when you’re supposed to, your practice cannot thrive or succeed. That doesn’t mean your front desk team has do everything on their own. At Dental Support Specialties, we can help you collect what you’re owed in a timely manner, helping you reach your goals for your practice.

You need to make an appointment with your doctor, and you prefer to schedule it over the phone rather than online. As you call their office, expecting to have your needs met, instead of talking to a real person, you have to leave a message with a machine and wait to be contacted later. You hang up the phone unimpressed and frustrated by your interaction—or lack thereof—with the practice.

If you rely on an automated answering service at your dental practice, this is exactly how it can feel for your patients as they attempt to contact you. A smarter alternative is to turn to us at Dental Support Specialties for your dental answering service so that your valued patients can interact with a friendly team member and build a trusting relationship that lasts for years to come.

With the rest of the world, you waited at home during the pandemic for permission to reopen your practice. Like many out there, you’re feeling the economic pinch from being closed for several months, but now you have the chance to make up for lost time! But where do you start to recuperate? A great place to begin is with patient recall. In this post, you’ll learn how you can get patients back into your office and set your practice up for success in the coming months with scheduling support.