Having a wide-variety of dental services and the most experienced staff are key tenets of any good dental practice. However, as your practice begins to grow and more patients begin scheduling, it can be daunting task to keep track of all of them throughout the year. With so many people scheduling, your chart audits can quickly become disorganized. By the time you stop to go over them and try to figure out why a patient cancelled or never showed up, it starts to feel like a lost cause.
That doesn’t have to be the case when you have a dental answering service to help you organize your busy practice. Here’s how they make it happen.
If you’re practice gets many calls on a regular basis, then you understand the implications of missing calls from current or brand-new patients. Missing a call today could mean you never hear from that prospective patient again! However, what if you had a support team that did more than simply field calls and take voicemails? What if they could build a stronger connection with that person, present a positive image for your practice or make it easier to help patients already present in the office?
When you’re patients rely on dental insurance to receive treatment, making the process simple and straightforward is a very high priority. Each step of submitting claims forms needs to be taken into careful consideration; you don’t want patients to get upset when they realize that their treatment isn’t getting properly covered or their statements take forever to come in the mail.
Whether it’s for their first appointment with your office or one of several as part of a treatment plan, following up with patients is essential to maintaining consistent cash flow and a reliable client base. Without routine follow-ups, people may have no idea that they have an upcoming dental appointment. They may not realize that follow-up appointments are needed to complete their treatment!
It doesn’t matter how good your dental services are or how friendly or helpful your team members are if they don’t answer the phone often enough. If someone calls during normal business hours and they don’t get to speak with a real person, the chances of them calling back later or even leaving a message are incredibly low.
Whether you’re dealing with high volume or you simply can’t find team members that meet your standards, it can be difficult to find the right support for your practice’s unique needs. Not all employees are capable of performing all the tasks you need seamlessly. Even then, it’s difficult to measure their performance and determine what needs to be changed in order to give patients a better dental care experience overall.
Have you considered limiting or even completely removing insurance from your office because of the fear that your patient’s insurance will get rejected? If so, you should know that you are far from the only dentist to do this. Insurance companies make it increasingly difficult to keep up with their changing plans and terms, making it harder to know what can be covered and what cannot.
These days, it’s hard to find employees that are not only good at their job, but reliable when the office gets busy. Unemployment is lower now than in previous years, so chances are the employee you’ve been searching for is already employed or has moved elsewhere for another job opportunity. With that being said, what if there was a way to get a highly-qualified employee whose only role was managing your practice’s many administrative duties?
As a dental professional, your biggest concern is making sure your patients are properly cared for. You also want to confirm they have the tools to manage their oral health for life. Of course, running an entire dental practice is rarely a simple process. Missing calls from prospective patients and having current patients’ insurance rejected only makes your job more stressful.
When dentists learn about the concept of a dental answering service, it’s common that they have many questions. For example, if answering service employees aren’t required to show up to the office and learn how the practice operates, how are they supposed to help? How is there service any different than an answering machine? How are they supposed to use the practice’s existing software?