Successfully Choosing a Business Partner

Finding the right business partners is important to the success of any business. For multilocation dental practices, that partner you need is the right dental practice management software. So how do you know what to look for?

The Right Software

With more than one office (and maybe more growth in the future), you know how important consistency and centralization are to creating profits. To meet these needs and others unique to multisite practices, you need dental software that can help keep your organization running like a successful, well-oiled machine — no matter how many locations you have.

The right software for a multilocation practice should be a robust solution that can

• Create consistency across offices
• Streamline day-to-day tasks in areas such as reporting, billing and insurance processing
• Provide the features needed to centralize processes
• Be user-friendly

Good dental software can reduce the need for prolonged training time, which is especially important when new practices become part of your group or you hire new staff. When you implement standardized workflows along with your software, employees can transfer to or work at different locations and be productive immediately without needing weeks of training to get started.

How do you know if you’re using the right software for your practice now? The big picture answer is determined by how well your investment centralizes common tasks to make each office, and the practice as a whole, more efficient and productive. The right software will impact your organization at all levels and result in improved patient care. It should standardize front office, accounting, operations and clinical procedures throughout your practice, enabling greater production, better revenue cycle management (RCM), higher efficiency and lowered costs.

Another element the right software delivers for large group practices is the ability to connect various office locations through a centralized system. Centralizing gives multilocation practice owners the ability to effortlessly manage all locations through a single system with a shared database. Centralizing actually provides a more unified feel as your various locations can function like branches of the same organization that share data and patient information. With a central server, you’re also able to capitalize on new opportunities for revenue, such as by using a centralized call center with specialized phone agents. These employees can schedule patients who call in for appointments at any location and then stay busy adding to your bottom line as they work to fill schedule holes in different offices with outbound recare calls.

The right software will help enable you to achieve your financial goals, thanks to centralized billing and insurance processing. It will help minimize time-wasting administrative busywork while maximizing the capacity to use economies of scale to your advantage and to find revenue opportunities. In short — you can’t afford to be without it.

The Right Partner

Choosing dental software isn’t just about finding the right sales pitch, though. There are a lot of dental software companies out there. When you evaluate their software, you are essentially interviewing that organization to become your business partner. The kind of vendor business partner you want will truly collaborate with you and:

• Be available to listen to your problems, concerns and ideas
• Act on customer feedback to make things better for you
• Keep your practice’s business objectives at the forefront
• Allow you to seamlessly expand via acquisitions and partner offices
• Stay with you through the long haul

So maybe there’s a cool, new startup company that’s offering amazing deals, but is that a good long-term strategy? If the software is young, it likely means bugs for users (that means you) and you may have to wait for the company to develop all of the features and functionality you need now. What happens if the partner you choose isn’t around in a few years? You’ll need to start over with new software, including downtime for learning a new system and transferring data. Sometimes the software you originally thought was such a great bargain turns out to be very expensive.

Instead, seek a reliable, long-term partner. Look for a well-known software brand with a good reputation. A software vendor who has the potential to be a strong partner should have a proven track record, sell time-tested software, be responsive to feedback and support customer goals. That’s the kind of business partner you can count on to help you succeed.

Having the right kind of software — and software partner — is the foundation for a successful dental practice. To learn what else you need to run a profitable, consistent and centralized dental practice, download the eBook, Keys to Success, by Dr. David Ting.

Author: Dentrix Enterprise Marketing
Published: 04/10/2017