Looking on any medical news website or the national news will showcase a problem with medical practices struggling to stay open due to the usual reasons. Whether you run a general medical practice or a dental surgery, you can fall victim to careless mistakes that can cost you clients or will cause you to underperform. Here are some of the most common.

It is so easy to place the blame on the state of the economy, but this shouldn’t be an excuse for underperforming. You should be educating patients on addressing small dental issues before they turn into big ones that threaten their health. Marketing your practice through happy patients who are healthy will work more effectively. As patients mature, so should their treatment plans, and by treating them at the earliest possible sign of problems you are helping them act as advocates for your services.

Create A Budget

If your practice has not got a budget in place, it can be easily achieved. It can be easy to be swamped down in other issues if you are single-handedly running a practice, but you can start a simple budget by looking at the finances from the last year and using the key benchmarks in order to set goals. If you are looking to physically expand your dental surgery and you haven’t been able to see if you could afford the dental design costs, by having a suitable filing system in place (something like QuickBooks is simple and effective) it will be so much easier to see what you have the budget for. If you have been hoping to expand your surgery in terms of color schemes and a more appealing layout, you need a good amount of money in place.

Are The Staff Consistent In Their Service?

This is a big question in any office environment, especially for those offices that provide a detailed service like medical help. Helping staff to be “on the same page” can improve a stressful environment, and will work to help patients feel a bit more relaxed. As well as having calm and happy environment benefit patients and staff, it also has been shown to increase productivity and morale levels. To offset any potential problems in the work environment, it is very important to hold regular meetings with staff, as a team and individually, to assess the quality of the job being done as well as the general feeling in the air. Getting the impression of what's on the “shop floor” can be a valuable insight into how the staff views the workplace.

Go Over Your Cash Adjustments

By working with an accountant to go over the books, you may find a trend in people paying late for services. If you implement a policy to collect in a more efficient manner, such as upfront payment, this will provide an incentive to not miss an appointment and will bring waiting lists down and help to decrease the business accounts receivable load.