Managing Business as a Dentist
March 2020 was the celebration of my 16th year of management in the dentistry field. My goal, from the very beginning, was to build a company that works without me. I quickly realised that beside being a dentist, I needed to be an entrepreneur as well. They don’t teach entrepreneurship in dental school so this is something I had to learn by myself.
I divided my job in two: The Dentist Part (DP) and The Entrepreneur Part (EP). I spent a lot of time training, reading books and exchanging experiences with other entrepreneurs before finally making my recipe for managing my dental business. It includes three different areas:
- data management
- team management
- tools to make the best out of the first two
Data
In order to execute a treatment you need to collect, interpret and apply patient data. Compared to other professions, in dentistry we have:
- medical data – the raw material for every treatment plan, and
- non-medical data – incorporating everything else related to our patients: financial data, addresses, phone numbers, emails etc.
A dental business is efficient when we reach a balance between these two types of data and when we find a way to make them work together. More so, there is a single currency common to managing the two: TIME.
In dentistry you can lose time in many different ways, but the worse and most common one is when you have to redo a smile makeover. Even at an initial stage, the motivational mockup, where you invest appointments, lab work and minimal materials, from an entrepreneurial point of view, time loss can be quite consistent.
Team
Ok, so we arrive here: the patient doesn’t like the shape of the new teeth. You do again. But there’s a catch: treatment planning and execution does not depend exclusively on the dentist. This is why, to get to the final result, we need to consider a minimum of 3 people involved in the conversation:
- the patient: who decides colour and shape
- the dentist: who prepares the restorative space of the teeth
- the dental technician: who is creating the prosthetics
These 3 people need to be on the same page and speak the same language. May be simple in theory, but experience has taught me differently.
Tools
Beside the fact that Smilecloud can store all the imagistic data of our patient (pictures, stl, dicom, video) and is one of the best tool for interdisciplinary communication, the platform also allows you to do the 2D design in real time, rendering it into a digital mock-up which can be validated by the patient in minutes.
Once the patient validates the design and treatment plan, the dentist and technician can work together guided by the design already chosen by the patient. For a dentist, this is the best way to deliver patient expectations and communicate to the technician exactly what your needs are. So, if you are practicing esthetic dentistry you need:
- to be efficient – a workflow that allows you to be predictable and Smilecloud can help you with that.
- to have happy patients – patients are the ambassadors of your work and your best marketers. To get happy patients you need to deliver on their expectations, and this is the second thing Smilecloud can help you with.
For me, as a dentist, manager and father, my biggest asset is time. What’s yours?
Dr. Razvan Savu graduated from Dental University Victor Babes, Timisoara, and practiced dental medicine in Germany for 2 years where he first came into contact with “Dental Tourism” concept, which he would later develop in Romania. Today, Razvan Savu is Managing Partner to the largest dental tourism provider for the French market: Medical Tours. He is also the founder of Dental Management, the first dental consultancy company in Romania and implementing his approach in dental clinics around Romania. Since 2014 he is also a member of General Dental Council UK collaborating with clinics in the Isle of Man and Liverpool.
