Running a dental practice today involves a lot more than just answering phones and scheduling patients. From office management and budgeting to keeping track of new technologies and computer systems, the business of dentistry has really become just that: a business. That's just as true whether you're a managing a small, individual office or running and coordinating a rapidly-expanding practice like ours headed by. Kirk Pasquinelli, DDS, and Nicole Olivares, DDS.
Fortunately, there's good news. Over the past several years, technological solutions that were previously only accessible for large companies with huge budgets have become available to everyone, often for free. The challenge is to understand how technology can work for you, and to assess what role you want it to play in your practice. Here are three key lessons we've learned in the last few years as we've grown to 17 employees.
1. Look to other industries for ideas. We're all familiar with the computer systems and solutions marketed specifically to dental and medical practices for managing patient files, imaging, lab results and even scheduling. While the transition to electronic health records has been – and will continue to be – complicated and time consuming for many practices, we can look outside dentistry for other ways to make the business side of our businesses run better.
From easy-to-use website templates, to email and web services through Google Apps, to online time tracking systems, to human resources software suites, there are now a host of services that allow companies of all kinds to do more than they could before. Just because you aren't running a flashy tech startup in San Francisco doesn't mean you can't benefit from the same tools and platforms that allow those companies to scale up quickly. In our case, we recently switched to managing our HR through Zenefits, a free, online system that allowed us to automate time-consuming tasks like employee onboarding, payroll, benefits administration and compliance.
2. Automation can strengthen employee relations. When we think of automation, it's easy to think of it as removing the human element from a process. Anyone who spends 15 minutes endlessly cycling through the automated menus with a cable company or bank can wind up with a negative view of computer-driven systems. But for many office functions, automation can actually lead to a better and more personal experience for employees.
I'll go back to the example of HR management. When we switched to handling all of our employee onboarding and benefits administration through an online platform, it allowed our employees to go through the process of selecting benefits (and learning about their options) at their own paces, rather than having to make major financial decisions all at once while sitting at a table filling out paperwork. In that way, taking the onboarding process from an in-person experience to a digital one actually meant that our employees felt more connected and valued because they really had the opportunity to understand their choices.
3. Remember what your job should be. Take a step back for a moment and write out a list of the things that someone in your position – whether you're the head of a solo practice or the HR manager of a larger one – should be focusing on every day. This isn't your personal to-do list; it's more like a job description in an ideal world. Now think about all of the things you do each day that aren't on that list – and in many cases, there could be simple and free solutions that will help you spend less time working on those side tasks and more time focusing on what matters most for your practice.
In my case, we had separate companies we worked with to handle different HR tasks. We would contact the medical carrier, get out the paperwork specific to that company, explain everything to the employee, and make sure the employee got their papers back on time, filled out correctly and signed. Then get those papers to the agent and hope the employee got coverage on the correct date. The same routine would occur for vision insurance, FSA/HSA accounts, tracking time off, monitoring time clock programs, payroll services and general onboarding paperwork, like filling out the W-4 and I-9 forms from the IRS. The paperwork burden quickly got to a point where I was no longer available to focus on practice growth and improving patient care. Switching to an automated, online system like Zenefits quite literally allowed me to start doing the rest of my job again. Now, instead of dealing with paperwork, the time I spend working on HR issues can be focused on helping employees grow, improving the patient experience and finding new benefits we can offer our employees.
Ultimately, the tools you use to run your business have to match your needs. If you only have a few employees, advanced timekeeping and scheduling systems may not be for you. You may not need an easily-updatable website, but you still need to pick out a good email and social media platform. If you already have more employees or are looking to expand, an HR platform could make a big difference. There are as many choices as there are different types of practices – and when you have the right set of tools in place, working for you, you can get back to focusing on what matters most: helping your patients have beautiful, healthy smiles.
Joyce Carter is the office manager for Kirk L. Pasquinelli DDS Inc., a San Francisco practice specializing in periodontics, esthetic and pre-prosthetic oral surgery and dental implants.