Using this time...

At Dentally we support the need for dental teams to adjust to new ways of dealing with the provision of emergency dentistry, whilst complying with social distancing measures and helping patients reduce the spread of transmission of Covid-19.

As dental practices focus on only staying open with a rota of skeleton staff and only seeing patients with a requirement for emergency dental work, cloud based patient management solutions like Dentally can support you by not only helping with telephone triage but also in helping you use this down-time to do some essential housekeeping of your practice management system and patient information. 

This can be done from the practice or by staff working remotely, through their secure login in to Dentally.  Staff members accessing Dentally from home can be restricted to a specific location and certain hours set for their working day if required.

This is just a short run through of just some of the areas of your patient management that you could consider allocating as tasks to your staff members to work on remotely:

• Treatment plan reports:

If you are a NHS practice you might wish to look for any UDA’s that might be slipping away.  Why not look for open courses of treatments that should be closed and complete your claim submission?

• Patients report:

This report is super powerful so why not use this time to run it? Start by trimming down your patient lists and produce lists of patients not seen for a certain period of time that you could approach once the current situation has begun to resolve.  It is also an opportunity to identify patients that could be archived. Another suggestion is to review patients against acquisition sources, so you start to identify which marketing channels are working for you and refine them, developing plans for the future.

• Appointments report:

Take a look at this report to find out cancellation numbers and use it to update your reminder policies.

• Undertake some correspondence spring cleaning:

This period is a useful time to update medical history questionnaires, plus why not review and revitalise your communication templates.

• Practitioner activity report:

Spend some time looking at this report and see which treatments are carried out regularly or others which are not as popular.  You could also identify how much you are earning from treatments against the time spent and see how you could make improvements.

• General admin:

Consider chasing debtors lists and reviewing treatment costs, look at whether you need to amend pricing.

We appreciate these are challenging times, but our team is here to advise you on the software as they always are - so you can focus your time on your patients & your practice.  Please do email us hello@dentally.co if you would like help on any other suggestions we have discussed here.