We recently put together a Before and After video gallery of dental work performed in my O’Fallon dental office. We used Windows Movie Maker and were able to upload and arrange the pictures within minutes. We chose not to add titles over the pictures, but that is an option. Windows Movie Maker provides a quick, simple way to design an image gallery video that can be uploaded to YouTube and to your dental office website. Mac computers offer iMovie as their equivalent to Windows Movie Maker.

Recently, one of our new patients took the time to write an amazingly kind patient review of our O’Fallon dental office. Everyone in the office was touched by her writing and it renewed our commitment to providing gentle, compassionate dental care. As I was reading through the article, I couldn’t help but notice all of the specific things she addressed which are outlined in my book Dentistry’s Business Secrets: Proven Growth Strategies for Your New or Existing Practice. I have highlighted some of the points she made below with a reference to the chapter in the book that addresses that item.

1. She found our office because she noticed our sign on her way to another business. Chapter 3 of the book discusses finding the right location for your dental office. Chapter 6 discusses the importance of proper signage to attract new dental patients.

 

2. She finally called to make the appointment after following our office for months on Facebook. Chapter 26 discusses the ins and outs of using social media to attract and retain dental patients.

 

3. Our new patient was greeted by a friendly and understanding person when she called to make her appointment and again when she stepped into the office for the first time. She mentions that everyone in the office treated her with respect. Chapters 8 – 10 discuss hiring and training the ideal staff. Chapter 11 discusses treating your dental patients with a guest mentality.

 

4. The office was clean and well equipped. Chapter 5 discusses office design decisions that can lead to patient comfort.

 

5. The treatment plan was presented with time for the patient to understand what was necessary and with an accurate estimate of the costs involved. Chapter 17 discusses treatment planning for case acceptance. Chapter 18 discusses the great importance of training your staff to figure and present accurate dental co-pay estimates.

We were so thankful that our patient took the time to write such a glowing review of our office and to encourage other patients that they can find a compassionate dentist that is right for them.
 
Full Table of Contents for Dentistry’s Business Secrets: Proven Growth Strategies for Your New or Existing Practice.

Dentistry’s Business Secrets has released a new download package with patient letters and forms previously only available on our Dental Practice Management Tools CD.

This PDF download package with letters and forms that can be copied and edited for use within your own dental practice contains the following documents:

1. New Patient Introductory Letter – Mailed to new patients
2. New Patient Policies – Given to patient at first visit
3. Patient Appointment Reminder Preference Form – Filled out by patient at first visit
4. Email Newsletter Opt In – Filled out by patient at first visit
5. Patient Media Consent – Filled out by patient before any pictures of patient are taken
6. Missed Appointment Letter – ( Fee Waived)  – Mailed to patient after first missed appointment
7. Missed Appointment Letter – (Fee Assessed) – Mailed to patient after second missed appointment.

Dentistry’s Business Secrets now offers some of the forms found on our Dental Practice Management Tools CD in a PDF download option. The following forms are available on our Dental Employee Management Forms Download Package:

1. Questions to Ask in the Job Interview
2. Questions to Ask an Applicant’s References
3. Employee Job Description – Office Manager
4. Employee Job Description – Dental Assistant
5. Employee Job Description – Dental Hygienist
6. Employee Manual Example
7. Employee Sick Day and Vacation Day Forms
8. Employee Evaluation Form
9. Employee Evaluation Checklist

To have these documents immediately ready for your dental practice use, press “Add to Cart” below.

In order to continually provide new and relevant material on this dental blog, we accept guest blog post submissions when they provide information that might be of interest to the dentists reading this blog. Recently, we have received an influx of inquiries into the possibility of submitting guest posts. If your dental website contains a blog, you might receive these inquiries as well and it is important to set up guidelines for how to handle these requests.

We have set up the following guidelines for acceptance of guest blogs:
1. The content must be entirely unique and not posted elsewhere online,

2. The content must be relevant and interesting to our readers,

3. The article must be well written and free of grammatical errors,

4. The article must agree with our overall philosophy of business and

5. If the article links to another web page, the content of that website must be relevant and not contain any offensive content.

While our dental school training has provided us with the knowledge and resources needed to provide top-notch dentistry, many of us graduated from dental school without a clue as to how to run a private practice. For those of us lucky enough to have participated in some business training, there is still a lot to learn. One particular area of private practice that is often difficult for dentists is interviewing and hiring new employees.

I recently came across an interesting article in Yahoo’s Finance section regarding common interview questions that are actually illegal. Avvo.com provides an additional article that highlights other illegal interview questions. It is beneficial to be aware of these questions as they might be asked in all innocence as you try to get to know your potential new employee.

Dentistry’s Business Secrets provides a list of appropriate dental interview questions, as well as questions to ask a reference on our Dental Practice Management Tools CD. These sets of questions are also available as an individual download by clicking “Add to Cart” below.

In this busy world of social media, blogs and review websites, it’s increasingly important to take steps to monitor your online reputation and overall web presence. In a future blog article, I will discuss dealing with negative patient reviews, but for this post I would like to focus on tools that can help you monitor your overall web presence.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a simple free tool that can be used to deliver email messages to you whenever your chosen search time is found online. We have set up alerts for a variety of combinations of my name, as well as for terms like “O’Fallon dentist.” You can choose to receive alerts immediately, daily or weekly.

Google Blog Search Engine

The Google Blog Search Engine provides a search tool that analyzes whether your company or website has been mentioned within the blogs it tracks.

Social Mention

Social Mention provides a free tool that searches major social media sites, blogs, comment sections and forums for any public mention of the search terms you enter. At one time, Social Mention also provided alerts similar to Google Alerts, but this feature is currently disabled.

Pinterest

Pinterest is quickly becoming a major addiction for many users and a great option for sharing content from websites. To monitor whether anything from your website has been “pinned” on Pinterest, type “pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite” into the URL of your internet browser. For instance, this website would enter “pinterest.com/source/dentistrysbusinesssecrets.com.”

Recently, Dr. Logan has had the opportunity to speak with a large number of dental students and young dentists preparing to open their first dental practice. Many of these young dentists have the same questions when it comes to how to start a private practice. These discussions led Dr. Logan to develop an abridged PDF e-book available for download from this site. Dentistry’s Business Secrets: For the Dentist New to Private Practice contains several key chapters previously published in Dentistry’s Business Secrets: Proven Growth Strategies for Your New or Existing Practice.  For more information, to download the book or to preview the Table of Contents, please visit our New Dentist’s page.

Google Apps provides an easy avenue for work email addresses that are tied to your dental practice’s website domain. If you need less than 10 email addresses, the service is free. Once you have followed the steps to set up email addresses from your domain to be run through Google Apps, your employees can log into Gmail from Google’s home page.

Google will walk you through the steps to complete this process, but here is a summary of the steps you will take.

1. Have or obtain a domain name that you can manage the domain name system (DNS) for. Providers like mydomain.com and most others provide these DNS services for free, and they can easily be managed with the provider’s admin interface.
2. Create a Google Apps account with your domain name. You will create an administrator account as part of this.
3. Prove to Google that you own this domain by following one of the steps outlined here.
4. Set your mail delivery (MX) DNS records to Google’s mail servers. This makes mail sent to your domain go to Google’s servers. They walk you through this and tell you what to set them to. This change is done on the domain admin page for Mydomain.com or whoever you bought your domain through.
5. Optionally, set a custom URL to access your corporate sign-in page. Users can also just sign in with their full email address on the standard Google sign-in page.
6. Signed on to the administrator account, you can click the “settings” gear (the one below the menu bar), and select “Manage this domain”, and that will take you to the Google Apps administration dashboard. From there you can manage users, including creating, disabling, deleting accounts, resetting passwords, etc.

Special thanks to Jerry McKittrick for his help with this article.

On March 30, 2012 all Facebook business pages will change to the new timeline feature. Take a moment to read about these changes and upload the pictures you would like before this mandatory change happens. Here is a How-To Guide for New Facebook Business Pages published by PCWorld.

I just updated my O’Fallon dental office Facebook page pictures today and plan to continue to tinker with the page this week. Please comment below if your dental office has a Facebook page.