In the dental industry there are many services available to help make the administrative side of running a dental practice easier. One of the services that I recommend all practices use is an automated eligibility service. 
 
This type of service can check the eligibility of patients, and sometimes provide a full breakdown of benefits, with click of a button. While not every insurance company participates, most of the big ones do. This will save your team a lot of time on the phone with insurance companies, and typically for just a low, flat monthly fee.
 
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When evaluating eligibility services, an important differentiating factor to look for is ease-of-use. The benefit of this type of service is efficiency, so make sure you have the ability to check an entire days’ worth of patients with the click of a button.  If you have to click on every patient each day it is not as efficient.
 
My recommendation is that you have the eligibility system check patients a week in advance of their appointment. This provides the dental team time to contact patients if needed before their appointment.
I strongly believe that the best thing that practices can do is put these type of automated systems in place. This allows the team to focus on more important tasks and most important, their patients.
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Virtual Dental Office is now providing an eligibility service for a low monthly fee of $29.95. To learn more about it contact Jennifer Schultz at jennifer@virtualdentaloffice.net or 563-582-4762.

When you are serving patients and running a small business it makes for a busy day (and evening many times). While many dental professionals continue to take on more themselves, as a practice grows there will be a tipping point where they need to step away from some of the day-to-day duties and start delegating. Without having a team to delegate to, practice growth will inevitably stall. 

Delegating can sometimes seem like too much work. You need to take the time out of your busy schedule to teach someone else how to do it. There will always be some up front time investment and a learning curve, but if you are assigning the right tasks to the right people it will help you, and your dental practice, in the long run.

How do you go about delegating?
Here are some tips on how to start delegating.

• Write out a list of your daily/weekly/monthly tasks and ask yourself, am I the only one that can do this for each task? Who on my dental team is capable of taking this on?

• Take some time to understand each of your team member’s current workload and strengths, so you are able to delegate it to someone who has the time and will be successful at it. If your team cannot take on another task, then you have two choices, hire and additional team member or delegate to someone outside the practice. 

• When delegating tasks make sure you explain your vision and the “why”, not just the “how”. Helping them understand why it is important to do it and do it a certain way will give them more of a vested role.

It can be hard to let go of things you have been doing for so long, but delegating is the only way to increase your time to ensure that essential tasks for growing your practice can be accomplished.