Key Considerations When Expanding Your Dental Practice

By Lucy Wyndham

As well as providing the highest quality care, running a dental practice involves maintaining patient retention while still achieving a high investment return. The way you run your dental practice has a significant impact on its growth. Maintaining a strong customer rapport and staying up to date on best practices is critical. At some stage, you may need to scale up your practice in order to retain service quality while meeting your expenses. Here are a few approaches to consider when expanding your dental practice.

Make your business more technologically advanced

As in any other enterprise, a dental practice expansion may require incorporating additional technology, especially in the current climate. Today, technology is used everywhere, including in the dental practice industry. You can install applications that will aid in the easier tracking and retention of customer data and the automation of all other processes. Going paperless has many benefits because it allows you to focus on other tasks instead of dealing with paperwork. To ensure that you budget appropriately and make sensible financial decisions for your practice, calculate the costs of all changes before you begin. From there, come up with a sound financial plan before making any commitments. 

Work on your team

When the dental practice expands, you will need to recruit more support to keep up with daily tasks. Be sure to recruit and train employees who meet professional standards. You’ll need staff to bring out the best of any dental patient they work with, whether they’re your receptionist or a dental practitioner. Maintain regular training to ensure that your staff are up to date on dental procedures, and that you are likely to grow rather than decrease your customer base.

Consider relocation

Your dental practice may require relocation to accommodate the large number of dental patients who visit the clinic. To accommodate your increasing workforce and meet patient demand, you may need to build a more modern and sophisticated office. However, if possible, it is best to improve your current office to make it a better environment where all patients can be comfortably accommodated without running out of room. If you plan to move, it is often preferable to do so in a rapidly growing region with many potential clients.

Streamlining the processes

Keeping up with the best records practices can be challenging, especially when the practice grows and recruits new employees. Different practices approach this differently and still see the same results. However, you should be aware that your clients are used to these procedures, and that deviating from the standard can be unsettling. To improve your performance, you will need to systematize your operations. You can write down your operation methods, record everything, or even have someone videotape you as you practice. This way, employees will have a clear understanding of how to do things while maintaining the status quo. Any time you trial a new practice, make it known to your employees: this will aid in the business’ productive performance when you’re not in the office.

Scaling up a dental practice may appear to be a daunting process, and you will have to relinquish certain positions that you are used to handling on your own. Choosing the correct variables to scale it up while employing the best practices, however, can be highly beneficial, especially when the right team is in place.