Optimising practice efficiency

When you are running a dental practice, the to-do list can seem endless with all the tasks you need to think about in order to be an effective business, manage staff workloads and importantly deliver the best possible care to patients.  Today, with a global pandemic we have all had to adjust to living with COVID-19 and will continue to do so, creating unprecedented repercussions for many and adapting to ensure patients' oral health remains a priority.

Technology has been at the forefront of transforming the way we all live, work and stay connected to our loved ones and for dental practices, leveraging the power of cloud-enabled solutions like Dentally has proven transformative.   Dentally provides more than the basics of software patient management. It helps you save time and money and reduce the admin burden allowing your staff to be more agile and flexible in the way they manage and deliver care to patients.

Working through your to-do list becomes easier and simpler today as you optimise the efficiency of your workflows and processes with tools that automate tasks, tracking admin and managing staff whether they are working remotely or on-site.  Let’s explore just some of the Dentally features that for your practice, helps keep everything moving, stay connected to patients and keep your team working effectively.

Tasks list

Dental practitioners can easily assign, track and undertake tasks with Tasks Report in Dentally, improving patient communication and practice management, as well as managing staff workloads whether they are working remotely off-site or at the practice.   

Patient-specific tasks such as phone calls, correspondence and other admin can be set against target dates whether they are recurring daily, monthly, yearly or periodically to ensure they are completed promptly.   The tasks list also complements the outbound telephone calling feature in Dentally, so calls can be made directly from the patient record or task itself.  Learn more. 

Dentally Chat

Our instant messaging system supports dental practitioners and their teams to communicate easily with one another, encourages social distancing and helps practices to save time and run smoothly.  

Stay connected with staff on or off-site, whether you need to check details with a colleague or send a request from the surgery to the reception team. To set up Chat for your practice in Dentally, click here.

Automated Patient Communications

Automating your patient communications ensures you save time and never forget to set an invoice or message to a patient again!  Automated Patient Communications in Dentally is simple to set up, allowing you to send messages to patients that can be scheduled around certain events such as appointments, creation of invoices or estimates.   

There are many different scenarios when this tool can really help your practice. To learn more about how it works then take a look at our blog here.

Waiting Lists

It is essential in optimising your practice’s efficiency that you are able to easily track and report on patients that are waiting for an appointment.   Dentally Waiting Lists helps you fill cancelled appointments with priority patients, manage your lab work and allows you to track patients that have an urgent need for an appointment or examination.

A simple tool that support you to keep your appointment book filled because it lessens the impact of patients failing to attend or cancelling at short notice due to COVID-19.  Upon notification of a cancellation, simply open the waiting list, identify a suitable patient for that now empty appointment, and make the phone call.  With effective use of your waiting list tool contributes to the patient experience and ensures that waiting list times are closely monitored in line with the internal targets you have set for your team.  To find out more about it works, read our support document here.

Chair Utilisation Report

Dentally provides some powerful real-time reporting tools that can really support you in ensuring your practice efficiencies are optimised.   We take a look at two of those reports here.   Let’s talk about the Chair Utilisation Report.  On a week by week basis, the Chair Utilisation report shows the efficiency of each surgery and the number of hours each chair has been used.   This gives you a good indication of how well you are making the best use of optimising your surgeries and how cost effective they are.

If you are running a specific marketing campaign for a particular treatment or have been running recalls, it will also help you track their success. To learn more about managing your practice finances, you can read our guide here.

Practitioner Activity Report

Another important aspect of running a cost-effective and productive dental practice is being able to manage activity and fees for all dental practitioners at the practice.   The Practitioner Activity report allows Practice Managers and individual practitioners to track their activity over a period of time.   

The report also allows you to break down the activity by category and treatment so you can see how many diagnostic treatments have been carried out and by whom.  It allows you to look at how much each practitioner has earned over a period of time and pay associates accordingly.  To learn more about assessing your practitioner productivity, then read the support document.

Talk to our team

Our experienced support team can help you adapt to the changing world around us, so you can deliver exceptional care now and in the future.  

Optimising your practice is a priority for your business to be effective and if you would like to find out how Dentally can help you build the practice you want, please email us hello@dentally.co or if you are an existing user, then chat to our team in the app today!