4 Ways Your Dental Practice Can Recover from COVID-19

We’re more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic with a light finally at the end of the proverbial tunnel. However, while many dental practices are seeing pre-pandemic numbers, there is still recovery to be made in order for your practice to save and even grow your practice. Here are four strategies that can help any practice recover faster, better and deeper.

Cash-on-hand analysis

By projecting weekly expenses and receivables, your dental practice will know exactly how much cash is on hand and what will be available in the future in order to understand how well the practice is doing financially and how well it is recovering. A good goal to have in place is to accumulate and reserve three to four months of cash over the 24-month recovery timeline. Any unused cash reserves can be converted to income.

Communication

Undoubtedly, your staff situation has changed since this time last year due to concerns for their health, family and finances. Dentists who remained in constant communication with both staff and patients saw a higher return rate to the practice. A good leader will continue to provide transparent updates on where the practice stands in terms of new challenges, such as lost revenue, infection control and lower patient volume, both through one-on-one check-ins and company updates to hold both leadership and staff accountable.

Teledentistry

While teledentistry can’t be used to solve all practice problems, it can certainly help improve chair time going forward, such as with appointments that don’t have production or revenue associated with them, like postoperative exams or certain consults and case presentations.

Infection control fee

After much debate, dental practices are starting to charge an infection control fee that wouldn’t otherwise be covered by insurance companies to cover the cost of personal protective equipment in order to maintain profit margins at a time when patient volume has decreased.

What’s next?

Contact the experts at Professional Transition Strategies for more guidance on how to navigate financial matters.