Helpful Tips for Your Multi-Location Dental Practice Management and Growth
A Good multi-location dental practice management is important for working dental groups looking to scale and preserve their quality experience across more than one office. Managing multiple dental clinics comes with its challenges around keeping people together, consistent patient experiences, and management of efficiency.
Whether this is your first time at scaling a dental practice or you’re part of a business with a successful network of multiple offices, the right procedures put in place can help make a huge impact.
This blog talks about simple steps to manage dental clinics and ideas around how to manage multiple dentistry offices effectively, all while identifying opportunities to optimise your dental group practice operations.
Key Strategies for Mastering Multi-Location Dental Practice Management
1. Create a Unified Management Program: Provide a common framework for scheduling, billing, and reporting that creates uniformity at each location while encouraging transparency throughout.
2. Preserve Local Lifestyle: Give each location the ability to adapt to the uniqueness of the community or cultural sensibilities, as well as the patient expectations, while still maintaining the standards of the brand.
3. Standardize Treatment Protocols: To ensure continuity and quality of care, standardize treatment protocols, treatment procedures, hygiene standards and protocols, training modules, etc., across all locations.
4. Invest in Technology: Purchase practice management software (cloud-based) for patient records, appointment scheduling, and analytics, so that performance can be gauged in real-time.
5. Build a Leadership Structure: Hire qualified local managers and owners, and appoint a leadership board from the dentist CEOs, to create a general oversight of the locations, address issues that emerge, and facilitate communication across the locations.
6. Emphasize Patient Experience: Create standards for service quality, monitor feedback that impacts patients’ experiences, and offer loyalty programs, so that trust and satisfaction remain high across every location.
7. Schedule Regular Accountability: Each month, conduct audits and review KPIs against each location, which will allow you to look for improvement measures and hold the team accountable.
Also Read: Difference Between DSO and Private Practice
Tips for Managing Dental Clinics: Centralization and Standardization
The effective management of dental practices in multiple locations depends on a combination of uniform systems and local flexibility. By centralizing operations and standardizing systems, dental group practice operations can preserve quality, efficiency, and patient satisfaction.
1. Develop a Strong Management: A strong, centralized management structure is what will truly drive your dental group practice operation. That includes centralized scheduling, centralized billing, and centralized reporting systems, which give you the flexibility to allow your locations to handle certain issues locally, while every location follows the same overall protocols.
2. Develop Clinical and Administrative Protocols: A great piece of advice for managing dental clinics is to develop standard clinical and administrative protocols. You can detail your group’s treatment protocols, infection control, patient communication, and billing processes.
The main aim is to provide the same quality of clinical care to every patient at every clinic, no matter where the patient accesses care, and standardization helps build trust in your brand.
3. Use Technology to Integrate Multiple Sites: While considering how to manage multiple dental offices, technology is key. Invest in a cloud-based practice management software that will allow you to streamline appointment management, patient records, and financial reporting.
4. Develop a Solid Leadership Structure: The leadership framework you establish is critical to your success in managing multiple locations when you scale your dental practice. Create a leadership structure that keeps certain current functions centralized while allowing for some local autonomy.
5. Create Patient Experience Consistency: Brand consistency is necessary for the brand’s success as you scale your dental practice. Clinics to which you also manage the branding will have to maintain the same branding and patient care protocols throughout, from signage, marketing materials, appointment reminders, and other patient care documents and protocols.
6. Improve Communication: For your dental group practice to operate seamlessly, you need clear communication between all staff members at each location. There are many internal communication tools you can use, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or apps powered by the dental staff management platforms, to continue to connect staff members across the group. Regularly scheduled team meetings, either virtual or in-person, give an opportunity for staff and managers from different locations to create alignment on their individual goals while sharing updates.
7. Create Centralized Training Programs: Another way to maintain the standard you want while you scale your dental practice is to create a process to train all staff members regularly. Some of the ways you can offer training to staff in a systematic way would be to create a digital training library, set up webinars as a regular occurrence, and run an annual workshop on the latest clinical techniques, administrative processes, let alone the latest resources that impact patient care.
8. Keep Track of KPIs and Performance Metrics: All of the same data-driven decision-making strategies are equally important to ensure that a multi-location practice is managed efficiently. Important KPIs include:
• Patient wait times
• Treatment acceptance rate
• Revenue per patient per appointment
• No-show or cancelled appointment rates
It is essential to conduct performance reviews and assess the various areas of your practice, to identify changes in performance, to focus on areas of underperformance, and to identify strategies to improve.
9. Balance Local Market Needs: Standardization is important, but when considering how to operate multiple dental offices, you must remain flexible. Different markets will have different demographic needs and different behaviours regarding treatment and competitive operational standards.
10. Marketing for Multiple Locations: Good strategies for managing dental clinics also involve establishing marketing plans for every location. While your brand can create a level of standardization, marketing efforts can be localized in the community by way of community involvement, targeted digital marketing/advertising, or by forming partnerships with local businesses to help attract engaged new patients in the community who will trust your practice.
Final Call on Helpful Tips For Multi-Location
Running multiple dental offices is hard work, but it can be so meaningful when done right. By building centralized processes that allow nimbleness at the practice level, spending time and money on practice technology, and enhancing a strong culture of leadership, you can be successful in multi-location dental office management while delivering effective dental care that is consistent and of quality.
Are you ready to elevate your dental business? Apply these strategies today and watch your dental group practice operationally thrive across all locations. To augment your growth with the right talent, engage a dental recruitment agency you can trust to partner with. Hire Smiles connects dental practices with outstanding candidates while ensuring they fit your culture and vision.
Contact Hire Smiles, and the stress of hiring will be gone as you build the team for your successful multi-location dental practice.
FAQs on Multi-Location Dental Practice
Q1. What does it mean to manage multiple locations in a dental practice?
Managing multiple clinics involves coordinating clinic operations, staff, and patient care at multiple sites and achieving consistency and efficiencies.
Q2. What is the best way to run multiple dental offices?
By creating systems, standardizing protocols, using technology, and being open to differences in the local marketplace.
Q3. What are some recommendations for coordinating and managing clinics?
Utilizing the same EHR, providing regular and meaningful training, branding, and performance metrics.
Q4. Why is centralization a good idea in a dental group practice?
Centralization of care improves efficiency, increases consistency of care, and lessens administration at all locations.
Q5. What role does technology have in scaling the dental practice?
Cloud-based technology is proven to provide streamlined scheduling, records, reporting, and communication with locations.
Q6. What is the best way to structure a leadership team for multiple clinics?
A hybrid model can work well, with local managers overseeing the day-to-day, and centralized executive staff managing strategic decisions.
Q7. How can I ensure patient satisfaction for multiple locations?
By providing the same expectations concerning quality of care, customizing the experience, and responding to their complaints promptly.
Q8. Is it possible to grow too quickly when opening new dental offices?
Yes. Growth without having the proper systems, people, and resources to support the new office can negatively affect your quality of service, your corporate culture, and ultimately, your profitability.
Related Article: 5 Key Factors to Consider Before Building Your Dental Practice
