COVID-19 Recovery Guide for Dentists
Digital Doc's Covid-19 Recovery Guides for Dentists
Before the COVID-19 pandemic held the world hostage, it was normal to set a five-year plan for your dental practice. As a dental care professional, you are faced with a real existential question of where your practice will be five months from now. With the pandemic in full force, it is now crucially important that you adjust how you approach strategic planning only to focus on the four critical components that will determine the survival of your dental practice. Here’s a quick COVID-19 recovery guide for dentists from Digital Doc.
The 1-Page Recovery Plan
Dental offices that think ahead and plan how they will recover once this crisis is over will be miles ahead of those that scramble to come up with a solid plan in place.
This one-page COVID-19 recovery guide for dentists may look simple, but it will require lots of hard work and careful thought to generate. To ease this process, our team at Digital Doc suggests the following steps.
Step #1: Create 4 Quadrants on a Piece of Paper
Get a piece of paper and divide it into four quadrants. Each of those four will represent a strategic area that you need to pay attention to at your dental practice. Those four aspects are patients, staff, practice, and financials.
Step #2: Add Value-Based Strategies
Think carefully about each of the four quadrants on your piece of paper and select 3-4 value-based strategies which you can include under each category. Make sure that everything you include as a strategy has to aid the recovery effort after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anything that doesn’t assist the recovery process is a low priority. You want to have laser-focus on recovery so that your practice can bounce back as quickly as possible.
When we say you choose value-based strategies, we mean that you need to list only those activities that will add value to your plan to recover post-COVID-19. For instance, you are unlikely to add any value to your recovery plan if you spend time calling patients who have gone three or more years without coming for their scheduled appointments. Instead, focusing on those with more recent missed appointments is likely to yield better results. Dr. David Moghadam, the best dentist in Easton, PA, recommends using dental software for scheduling patients. That way, patients can easily schedule their appointments.
Step #3: Write Goals for Each Quadrant
Select 1-2 goals for each of the four categories outlined in your one-page recovery plan. The goal should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound). Remember, you are focusing on recovery, so the goals should drive your practice on that path.
For example, in the quadrant of financials, you could indicate that you want to grow the monthly revenue to $30,000 between July and December 2020. Such a goal may help you recover some of the income you lost while the office was closed due to the pandemic.
For the quadrant of staff, you can set a goal to cross-train each team member so that they can take on additional roles in case you have to reduce staff or give some members days off work.
In the practice quadrant, you can set a goal to increase efficiency in every process. For example, you can upgrade to the best handheld dental x-ray device or the best dental cameras from Digital Doc so that patients’ photos can be uploaded directly to digital files. Once these goals are properly outlined, proceed to the final step of the process.
Step #4: Work the Plan
Get to work and implement your recovery plan. You need to measure how you are doing on each quadrant. Course-correct as soon as you see that you’re off track. Make sure that you and your team look at the one-page recovery plan daily so that everyone is reminded of what needs to happen.
Strategic planning now takes on added importance as the pandemic continues. Sadly, many dental practices will not survive the crisis and its aftermath, but yours doesn’t have to be one of them. We hope you utilize this COVID-19 recovery guide for dentists. If there is anything else we can do, please let our Digital Doc team know. We are always happy to help. Let us know what we can do to better serve your practice. For information about our dental technology or customer support, contact Digital Doc today.