How To Reduce Your Dental Practice's Overhead Costs
                     How To Reduce Your Dental Practice's Overhead Costs
As a dental practice owner, you know all too well how expensive it is to run your office. Between 
equipment and supply purchases, payroll, lab costs, and advertising, you may worry if it's possible to 
maintain your profitability with all these variable costs.
While you are used to adapting your processes to new dental technology and products, you reducing the 
overhead that inevitably comes with this territory is somewhat challenging. There are several ways to 
tackle wasteful spending, such as going with new vendors for your supplies, but it's always best to 
evaluate how efficiently your dental practice is managed.
Below are our top strategies to manage overhead that is impacting your bottom line and impeding 
practice success:
Top Strategies to Reduce Overhead in Dental Practices
Automate Your Scheduling
Does your practice have a VoIP phone system with SMS messaging capabilities? If so, get the most out of 
text communications with your patients by automatically sending out scheduling requests and reminders. 
This can innovate your entire recall process and save your front desk team time and sanity. That's because 
of the reduction in phone calls they will have to make throughout the course of their day.
Patients can simply click an embedded link to your online calendar or respond back to set up or confirm 
their upcoming visit. Adit's automated scheduling features enable your practice management system to 
automatically book treatment dates based on our software interpreting patient text responses.
Centralize How You Communicate
Most dental offices rely on several methods of communication to reach out to potential and existing 
patients about the latest treatments and special offers available. From traditional postcard mailers to 
radio ads and billboards, the cost to engage your market audience using these channels is costly. When 
you add in secure two-way messaging, emails, and digital marketing, it's easy to find your communication 
strategy disjointed and inefficient.
A state-of-the-art VoIP system that integrates with your practice management system, like Adit Voice, can 
bring all of these channels into a centralized communication hub. This means substantial time savings for 
your team because of smart routing technology, call recording, and auto populating a caller's information. 
These features keep your team up-to-date on everything, from upcoming appointments, treatment 
history, account balances, and more.
Go Remote With Mobile PMS Apps
COVID-19 sent many dental practitioners scrambling to find viable options for continuing patient care 
during a major global health crisis. If you were one of the thousands of U.S. practices that dealt with 
temporary closures, stringent exposure prevention measures, and limited office hours, teledentistry was 
probably a lifesaver.
With mobile applications, dental professionals and their staff can continue seamless communications and 
complete day-to-day administrative tasks while still providing quality dental treatments while out of the 
office. This saves time on supplies, patient travel costs, and operational expenses associated with office 
visits.
Put Your Online Reviews To Work
In just the past ten years, digital marketing has transformed how dental practices engage their market 
audience. This is mostly because people primarily search online for their dentists. Reviews left on sites like 
Facebook or Google My Business are crucial to a prospective patient's decision to book an appointment 
with your clinic. 
The more positive reviews you have, the better your search engine results page (SERP) ranking.
Make it a priority to get this feedback from your patients at the end of every visit by scheduling automated 
texts to trigger once an appointment gets marked complete in your PMS. Not only is it a convenient 
reminder, but you can embed a link in your message for quick access to your preferred review site.
Get All Your Flexible Payment Options Under One Platform
Reduce overhead from payment processor fees by consolidating your bill pay options under a single 
platform, like Adit Pay. With this type of convenient application, your patients can still settle their accounts 
via a secure link or through their patient portal at their convenience. You can have your current practice 
management system seamlessly integrate with this software, which can automatically update patient 
account balances.
You should also consider investing in this platform option to go virtually paperless when it comes to billing. 
Imagine the time saved if your team isn't constantly printing and loading invoices into envelopes to mail 
each month.
Streamline Workplace Collaboration With Internal Chat
How often do your employees need to track down another team member to get answers? Does this happen 
in the middle of a patient's treatment experience? Ineffective communication leads to distractions, mistakes, 
and organizational failures that impact patient experiences. Internal chat integrations can make a world of 
difference in these areas and reduce the time lost trying to track down a team member.
This option also provides an innovative way to improve collaborative efforts, allowing your employees to 
keep up-to-date on important matters discreetly when attending to a dental patient. All these benefits 
translate into saved production time and happier patients thanks to reduced distraction. Your bottom line 
will love these advantages.
Discover What Contributes To Your Overhead Using Analytics
One of the quickest ways to identify inefficiencies in your office that lead to high overhead costs is by using 
practice analytics. Dental companies have quickly discovered the invaluable nature of data collection and 
analysis like every other industry. Using an intuitive practice analytics tool to evaluate everything from 
treatment trends, scheduling efficiency, and patient communication can help you take actionable steps to 
address any issues impacting your monthly spending.
This feature is especially helpful when it comes to staffing decisions. Learn what times of day are your 
busiest and save on unnecessary variable costs, including payroll. Use this same tool to determine which 
patients have become inactive and actively work to recall them. This can offset your overhead expense.
Reduce Your Postage Costs
If you have a VoIP system in your dental practice, make the most out of it and limit how much time gets 
wasted on preparing and mailing physical paperwork. Instead, send electronic patient form requests via text 
message and receive important intake paperwork sooner than later. This allows your team to identify any 
insurance or previous medical history issues that could delay treatment and/or collection.
Using a platform like Adit Voice takes electronic form submission to the next level of efficiency. It integrates 
with your current PMS and automatically routes received information to the patient's file. This means shorter 
wait times and less workload on your front desk. The savings you will earn from using less postage supplies 
and streamlined productivity will put a significant dent in your overhead.
Consider Focusing On Email Marketing
Dental practices often spend thousands every month on ad campaigns in hopes of capturing quality leads 
that will convert into booked appointments. Regardless, if you're a new startup or have multiple branches 
throughout your state, reducing marketing costs is always top on the list of spending cuts.
Email marketing may be a great alternative to the high cost of PPC ads. Consider optimizing your email 
outreach to take on some of your advertising goals. This approach costs just a fraction of pay-per-click 
ads, and their customizability offers you the same targeting capabilities.
Cloud-based practice management platforms like Adit offer advanced email marketing tools that make 
composing email campaigns a breeze. Use pre-created templates or create your own with an intuitive 
dashboard. Need to send out a batch or have segmented lists? No problem! Save time by importing 
patient information with just a few button clicks.
Adit is Your Premier Solution to Decrease Dental Practice Overhead Costs
To truly address overhead spending in your dental office, you need the right practice management tools. It 
takes more than buying fewer supplies and being conservative with energy to address this costly 
inevitability of running a practice. You should take a big picture approach to how your clinic runs and the 
methodologies used to achieve your financial goals.
Adit offers over 15 tech-forward practice management tools that will empower your dental business to run 
more efficiently. From digital file management to billing and teledentistry, our team of expert developers 
continues to innovate technological solutions to help you meet the ever-growing demands of the dental 
industry.
Learn more about how Adit practice management software can help you gain control of your business 
overhead costs by requesting a free demo today.