Dentistry is a tough profession. It has been a fascinating and frustrating journey for me to learn all about it. I was thrust into the role of co-practice owner about five years ago. I have since juggled being business manager, office manager, receptionist, dental assistant, treatment coordinator and more. My dental IQ was close to zero when I started out, but I was a seasoned project and program manager. How hard could it be to learn the ropes to manage a small business? Oh boy how wrong I was.
The dentist is too busy to train you and neither is any outgoing staff member. Oh and good luck on finding documentation to help you. And all the information “out there” is scattered, un-structured, costly, not applicable to your practice, or of questionable quality. There is a lot of focus on clinical information but there is terrible information on administration and operations. After all, a dentist hires you to run a profitable operation! A practice that is run profitably and efficiently benefits everyone from patients to staff and the dentists themselves. Unprofitable and inefficient practices devolve into hellish circles with stressed and surly staff who then inevitably mismanage patient services and treatments. No one wants this outcome. I firmly believe all dental professionals start out with good intentions of wanting to help people, do their jobs well, and go home without being utterly exhausted and frustrated.
I want to change all that for you. No, you don’t have to hire me to be your overpriced consultant and I am not a front for selling you any expensive practice management tools or software. I want to empower YOU to be able to do your jobs excellently. That can only come from a deep understanding of the dental business and operations.
My experience is in general dentistry but lessons learned from here will also apply to specialists. The target audience here is administrative and support professionals in the dental industry. Business owners, I hope you are listening as well since without excellent operational support, all your clinical efforts can dissolve to naught. This is not a resource for clinical information. Staff that work in corporate practices will certainly benefit from this information, but staff in dentist-owned practices have it especially hard due simply to a lack of adequate training resources. Practices that take dental insurance have significantly more business challenges. I will have a lot of content on understanding dental insurance and related operations.