Dental Practice Management: An Introduction

Dental Practice Management

by
Dr Vikram Venkateswaran
B.D.S, M.B.A

Remember the time your grandparent visited a doctor in his dingy hole of a clinic only because of the man�s reputation of being a saviour. Try taking your child to any similar looking clinic and chances are that he/she would wail loudly and refuse to enter the place.

Appearances matter, particularly in a dental clinic, where a large number of patients there are children. They not only observe the dentist�s technical skill while working on their teeth, but also his people skills, the ambience of his clinic and the nature of his support staff.

Though these patient observations extend to every area of medical practice they attain greater significance in professions like dentistry and ophthalmology where patient interaction is more extensive than in areas like cardiology or urology that is diagnosis driven.

The Indian consumer today is more demanding of the medical care he is provided and is willing to pay for better quality. It is hence important that we dentists gear up to this scenario and serve our patients better.

The challenge

Dental institutions (colleges) equip us with the right technical skills but often miss out on imparting management skills. Dental professionals have to rely on their own experience or guidance from an experienced dentist to improve their quality of patient care.

In a series on Dental Practice Management I would share some of the concepts I have learnt and applied in business and hope it would add some value to you readers.

Core Functions

The three core functions that dental organisations carry out daily are

� Material procurement- This includes activities like procuring the dental materials from dealers and suppliers, maintaining stock, sending out the models and casts to dental technicians and labs.
� Treatment and maintenance of dental equipment- This is the only function that we dental surgeons concentrate as this is what we are trained for in Dental colleges. In this activity we are usually aided by para-clinical staff like dental surgery assistants and dental hygienists.
� Pre and Post treatment services- This is usually carried out by auxiliary staff like the dental secretary or receptionists and includes activities like scheduling appointments, sending patients reminders, feeding in patient data and administrative work.

Support Functions

Supporting the core functions are activities such as

� Accounts
� Patient records
� Recruitment of Clinical and Para-clinical staff

These support functions are often neglected/ under utilized and distinguish an efficient practice from an inefficient one. Any organisation has to efficiently use its resources in order to provide value to its consumers and a dental clinic is no different. Thought the scale of increasing resource utilisation is much smaller, it does not mean it is a simple task.

Support services are activities that do not show much return on investment in the short term. But once the practice grows, they attain significance and have to be seamlessly integrated into the business. It is important that dentists develop a long-term vision for their practice and address these support functions in their nascent stage.

In the next part of this series I would talk about incorporating management practices into the core as well as support functions in order to create an efficient enterprise that provides value for both us and our patients.

(The Author is an Associate Manager with CSC-India and can be reached at drvikramvenkateswaran@gmail.com)