Maximizing Dental Assistant Productivity: What Is Your Second Assistant Doing?
By: Megan Urban
Dental assistants play a crucial role in ensuring the smooth and productive operation of your dental practice. Are your dental assistants highly trained or certified, meaning they can confidently work on patients without you? Each dental assistant is valuable even when not with you at the chair and a patient.
Dental assistants provide a variety of essential tasks that maintain a clean, organized, productive, and patient-friendly dental office environment. Most dentists say their assistants have plenty to do, but sometimes we all need a little guidance or time gets away from us.
Creating an Effective Dental Assistant Downtime Checklist
Set up a “downtime checklist” for your dental assistants that may look something like this:
- Take a 10-minute break, not at the front office
- Ask if you can assist the dentist and dental hygienist
- Catch up on dental instrument sterilization
- Take 10 minutes to stock the dental operatory
- Run an Incomplete Dental Treatment Report
Following Up on Incomplete Dental Treatment
These dental treatment follow-up calls are high priority and may be done by others, such as Treatment Coordinators, so keep notes in your dental practice management system to prevent repeated calls to the same patients.
Call scripting is helpful and can be practiced, as this task doesn’t come naturally to everyone on your dental team. The conversation should be clear, and your dental assistant should be prepared to address patient concerns.
Example Dental Treatment Follow-Up Script
“Hello, this is Megan from Azalea Dental. May I speak with (patient)? Dr. Smith is concerned that we have not completed the fillings and crowns we discussed last time you were in the office. You have active decay. What’s keeping you from getting these dental treatments done before they become worse?”
If the patient is concerned about dental treatment cost, remind them of their payment options:
“We offer payment via check, cash, credit card, and monthly payment options (if you use Care Credit, etc.). Many of our dental patients enjoy the comfort of making monthly payments. Please go to carecredit.com and fill out the quick application. It will quickly let both you and us know how much they can provide, sometimes at no interest.”
You can also utilize AI to create useful scripts for all parts of your dental practice.
If the dental patient doesn’t understand the treatment or feels anxious about dental procedures, explain all procedures and share what options you provide for reducing dental anxiety and ensuring pain-free dentistry.
Dental assistant downtime can be fully utilized to increase dental practice productivity and dental team morale. It’s easy for dental assistants to become bored or irritated when not working with patients.
If you have questions or thoughts about dental practice efficiency or are considering a practice transition, please contact me at megan@omni-pg.com or (503) 830-5765.