You’ve already gone through the steps of choosing to provide dental sleep medicine services in your office—now what? To thrive in a new healthcare environment, dental sleep medicine organizations must improve and expand what they offer because just offering these services is not enough. If you are unable to provide sufficient unique value, you could possibly disappear and no one wants that to happen to their dental practice. Let’s take a look at five rules for growing your sleep service offerings.
- What is Your Goal?
By creating a goal, you can ensure you are on the right path to success. To do this you might want to write down different traits of how you would like things to work out with your dental sleep medicine practice. Don’t forget to ask your staff members to do the same, and then share the results. By looking at overall goals you can create a vision for your office that becomes successful with the help of your team members.
- Look Toward the Future
If you asked hockey legend Wayne Gretzky about his success on the ice he says, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has already been.” When you rely on data and what others say works with dental sleep medicine, you are missing the right opportunities. If you are to benchmark your practice you are only setting your sights on yesterday’s success—not the future.
- Ensure a Steady Flow of Patients
As with any business, you want to ensure you have a steady flow of patients. There are two possible sources for patients: current patients at your practice, and patients not yet in your practice. Because of this, two systems must be created: one to identify existing patients who would benefit from dental sleep medicine, and one to identify and attract new patients into the system. For a growth perspective, targeting your existing patients is the best place to begin. Once they are your patient, you want to keep them. New patients can be gained through a working relationship with the local Sleep MD.
- Properly Communicate Your Message
One of the biggest mistakes of offering new services is underestimating the importance of how you are wording the information. It is important to integrate new behaviors, and when you are talking about something new in your office, words matter a lot. The ways in which your service is described can be a huge determinant of whether your program skyrockets or falls flat on its face. Everyone in your dental office should have a solid understanding of what the service is, who can benefit, how it works, and why it is important.
- Maximize Operational Efficiency
Updating the services you offer requires careful planning. Although, successful growth of your dental office demands flexibility and the ability to adapt and adjust as you gather information for your planning. You will need to consider the following:
- Billing
- Revenues
- Staffing
- Equipment
- Expenses
Include each member of your dental team in the implementation of the new services and assign different tasks to keep everyone involved.
Contact Dr. Mayoor Patel to learn more about what you need to do to successfully implement dental sleep medicine into your dental office.
