How to Uncover Savings in Your Dental Practice Without Sacrificing the Patient Experience

• The main takeaway: By optimizing your front office, payment processes, and financing program, your dental practice will bring a better patient experience while increasing efficiency and fostering stronger patient loyalty.
• Impact on your practice: Deploy strategies that free up your staff to focus on high-value tasks, embrace modern payment tools to accelerate cash flow, and explore digital payment optimizations that can lead to faster collections and happier patients.
• Next steps: Aprio can help you uncover savings now and adapt your processes and systems as your needs change over time.

The full story:

The dental industry is constantly evolving in response to new technologies, tools, and treatment methods. As you plan for sustainable, long-term practice growth, you may look to your internal operations first for ways to decrease costs, increase efficiency, and improve the bottom line.

But achieving financial efficiency in your dental practice goes beyond cutting costs; it’s important to optimize your systems, align your staff’s strengths with your operational needs, and adopt tools that create smoother workflows. Regardless of the size of your dental practice, it’s possible for you to uncover meaningful savings without damaging the patient experience you’re known for.

Here are a few ideas and questions to get your mental wheels turning.

Is your front office positioned to succeed?

The front desk is the heartbeat of your dental practice; your receptionists and administrators juggle communication, scheduling, insurance verification, and billing — all while striving to offer a welcoming experience to patients. However, when your front-office team is overwhelmed with detail-heavy administrative tasks, it’s hard for them to give the patient experience the attention it deserves. What’s more, those conditions are ripe for stress and burnout, which could increase labor turnover and shortages.

To help improve retention and keep your staff (and your patients) happy, you can try exploring outsourced solutions or automation tools for more repetitive tasks like insurance processing. You could also try cross-training your front-office staff members on insurance follow-ups, payment posting, and other tasks that are time-consuming yet essential to helping your practice run smoothly. By delegating responsibilities or finding solutions to free up workloads, your front-office team can focus on tasks and responsibilities they enjoy.

Have you properly embraced technology?

Today’s patients want easier, digital ways to pay for their dental visits and procedures. According to a study conducted by PYMNTS and Rectangle Health, 35% of millennials and younger patients are willing to switch healthcare providers to find better digital healthcare management tools — which includes scheduling and even payments processing. If your dental practice relies solely on mailed statements or phone-call-only appointments, you run the ultimate risk of having poor cash flow and low collections.

But here’s the good news: if you readily embrace tools like text-to-pay, automated recurring payments, and digital payment plans, you can increase your collections rate and improve patient satisfaction, retention, and attrition. At Aprio, our Payments Consulting team works to connect our clients with integrated payment and engagement solutions that not only automate collections, but also support digital forms, two-way texting, waitlist management, and other features that increase efficiency.

Over time, we have found that these tools and digital-forward platforms have helped our clients reduce the number of missed appointments and fill last-minute cancellations quickly, which ultimately protects their bottom line and boosts revenue.

Are your payment and financing options competitive?

When it comes to third-party financing and payment plans, it’s important to understand your patient population and choose the programs that best fit their payment behaviors and general credit profiles. Like many dental practices, you may already offer something to your patients, but it may come with low approval rates and high fees that can leave both parties feeling frustrated.

Try researching alternative third-party financing platforms and programs with higher acceptance rates or determine whether offering in-house payment plans may be a better option for your patients.

The bottom line

If you haven’t revisited your staffing model, payment systems, or financing strategy recently to identify efficiencies, now is the time. Whether you’re a solo dental practitioner or you run multiple locations, your dental practice’s needs will evolve as your patient base and the industry change — and you don’t want to leave money on the table.

At Aprio, our Dental Team works with a wide range of payment partners to offer dentists scalable options that grow with them over time. To learn more about our solutions and how we may be able to help you and your practice, schedule a complimentary consultation with our team today.

Related Resources

• Aprio’s Payment Consulting Services
• Aprio’s National Dental Practice Team & Solutions
• Merchant Services for Dentists