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• 02 Oct

Nothing solidifies the image of someone’s face in your memory like their smile. Some people have perfect teeth, but aligning and straightening are necessary for the rest of the multitude with overlapped, twisted, crooked, or gapped teeth. What a gift to have you as an orthodontic specialist to care for those issues, plus lower risks of tooth decay and gum diseases.

You play a crucial role in health and nutrition by improving a person’s biting and chewing functions. You also create comprehensive treatment plans by collaborating with general dentists for patients needing both services. Like any business, you need to prioritize customer satisfaction to grow your orthodontic practice, which can only be achieved through excellent patient care. To make this possible, you must ensure efficient operations, which requires many things. They’re discussed below.

1. Upgrade Your Lighting

Most work lighting on dental chairs are halogen bulbs, which can generate a lot of heat and make things quite uncomfortable for patients. They also give untrue color, making shade matching for restoration difficult. LED will be a better option as you grow your orthodontic practice because you won’t need to get a complicated conversion kit or spend a fortune on electrical installations to replace your entire lighting system.

The latest technology allows you to use your existing lighting fixture by replacing your halogen bulb with an LED bulb. LEDs might be more expensive; however, they make up their cost over time by saving energy, and you won’t have frequent lamp replacements as they’re also shutter-proof. LED is also much brighter, even when using a less-powerful bulb.

They have a larger lifespan and often come with many years of warranty. A bay window with a great view will give you points for aesthetics and patient experience. You can also achieve a more luminous and cleaner-looking surgery by fitting better ambient lighting and getting lighter-colored cabinetry and white walls.

2. Install Additional Storage

To grow your orthodontic practice, you must understand supply management and put supplies where needed. That entails knowing many things, like what supplies you’ll need this week, next month, and how much extra supply material you want to keep so as not to run out. Once you have a rough idea, embrace the concept of visual restocking. This way, you can always buy what you need without wasting. With a custom cabinet design, you can access what you need without too much searching.

As you expand your practice, you must carefully plan for your practice’s future growth and the technologies you’ll need. To optimize a floor plan with no storage space from the onset, you can utilize the wall space, especially if the ceiling is high, by adding hydraulic pull-down shelves, which can triple the storage capacity. To optimize your operations, you’ll need to create a thriving practice designed to hold everything you need at any one time and avoid the cost that accompanies hiring storage spaces outside your office.

3. Remodel Your Facility

You must consider several important factors before remodeling your facility. Weigh the renovation cost versus moving to new premises and whether you can access the funding. If you’re thinking of knocking down some walls, consult a commercial demolition contractor to determine the feasibility of your remodeling plan. You’ll want to know how long the operation will last and effectively communicate that to your patients and have a plan of how and where else you can cater to your patients in that time to avoid inconveniences.

After renovation, you’ll need to dispose of large amounts of waste in an environmentally friendly manner. A roll off dumpster for rent will make this easy, as you’ll load it up and call the rental company to collect it when you’re done. It’s also cost-effective as you’ll only pay for the space you’ll use or rent a size you’ll need, as pricing focuses on volume, not weight. They’re also customizable and offered in different colors or labeled to separate and store recycling, organic matter, and more.

4. Maintain Your Parking Lot

As you grow your orthodontic practice, it’ll inevitably become a high-traffic facility, and you’ll have to think about parking space for your employees and patients. It’s important to reserve parking for your employees so they aren’t late because they were circling the parking lot for a spot and one for delivery vehicles. Ensure you have a real-time display showing occupancy to avoid blocking entrances and exits and have unobstructed driveways for emergency vehicles. Mark out disabled parking spaces and have measures against unauthorized parking

Allocate drop-off points where your patients can stop for a few minutes to maintain optimal flow. Ascertain that your parking lot area is clean by pressure washing the surface, removing trash, and installing the right drainage solutions like pervious concrete. This type of concrete improves water absorption back into the ground, aside from being a great green option that reduces toxic runoff. Hire concrete contractors for regular preventive maintenance tasks such as crack filling, sealing, asphalt overlay, stripping, stain removal, and deep cleaning.

5. Renovate Your Bathrooms

A visit to the orthodontist is nerve-wracking for most people, and the bathroom is where people often run to when they need to calm down. You can lose clients by your bathroom’s cleanliness, features, or lack thereof. Work with a reputable bathroom contractor, particularly one well-versed with medical setups, to help you design and provide insight into specific requirements to provide a safe, functional, and appealing space for your clients. Select relaxing, warm colors and incorporate natural elements like plants, flowers, rocks, and plenty of natural light to help reduce the patient’s anxiety.

Ensure privacy by partitioning some areas. For safety, install only non-slip flooring materials and fix grab or support bars to help patients avoid accidents by helping with balance since pain can be quite disorienting. Make the bathrooms spacious, especially for those with mobility challenges, and install adjustable sinks for accessibility to different patient heights. Provide storage spaces for supplies, including shelves and cabinets, and select an easy-to-clean countertop for placing patients’ essentials while in there.

6. Give Your Exterior a Makeover

Beautiful places easily draw people in; if you have a lawn, use landscaping to create an inviting atmosphere as part of your efforts to grow your orthodontic practice. Ensure that your signage is visible, legible, and identifiable from a distance, and install lighting fixtures for visibility at night. Showcase special sales and discounts or seasonal products creatively on window displays and welcome your patients with comfortable outdoor furnishing.

Consider a commercial fence since it enhances your business’s image and improves your premise’s curb appeal. It also offers security, and you can be calm knowing that you, your assets, employees, and patients are safe. See to it that the building you choose to set up your practice in is in good condition and is maintained regularly and refreshed often with a new coat of paint. Fix broken or cracked steps to eliminate tripping hazards and improve accessibility for those with disabilities by adding elevators or ramps to doorways. Aiming for the attractiveness of your business front and its surroundings will help attract new clients, give your patients a positive experience at your location, and make your practice easy to find.

7. Offer Additional Services

To grow your orthodontic practice, you must go beyond traditional services like braces and aligners and broaden your services to meet different needs. You can offer retainers to maintain treatment results or give clear aligners for those needing to keep their orthodontic treatment discreet. You can offer dentofacial orthopedics, which entails guiding facial growth and development in children by influencing jaw growth to achieve facial proportion using some functional appliances such as headgear or palatal expanders.

Offering orthognathic surgery, a corrective procedure for individuals with severe jaw misalignment, will set you apart since you’ll have to incorporate collaborative care from oral or maxillofacial surgeons, adding extra expert effort to your work. For clients needing reduced overall treatment time, you can offer accelerated options with the help of techniques and devices that speed up the teeth movement process. You can start merchandising products your patients may benefit from, like mouthwashes and special toothpaste for sensitivity, which they can access in your office or have the products shipped to them.

8. Invest in New Equipment

As you grow your orthodontic practice, you must upgrade your space to accommodate the traffic. A portable dental unit or a plumb-free system can provide versatility and save you a great deal by not having to incur the costs of ripping up floors to install or keep redirecting plumbing. It will help you navigate space concerns, like when treating a client in a wheelchair. It can also be powered by an air compressor, allowing you to plug in multiple equipment simultaneously.

Chairs with built-in features like a heated message to cater to sedation patients who tend to get cold. Invest in digital imaging with radio-graphs to help see bone and roots more precisely and a customized bracket system to fit every tooth, which enables a personalized approach. A temporary anchorage device is a small implant that goes into the bone during orthodontic treatments to provide additional anchorage and also to gain precision for teeth movement, which increases possibilities of what you can achieve with your clients, helping to widen your clientele.

9. Market Your Practice

Successful marketing is always strategic. To grow your orthodontic practice, you should specifically target your clientele, which means first identifying who you want to attract. This will enable you to get your website right from the landing page, which people can see without scrolling, and ensure it’s purposeful. They should know what you offer by just looking at it.

Ensure that it has a fast load speed, approximately three seconds, so as not to lose potential customers. One of the most viewed pages is the review page, so make sure you have as many video and text testimonials with amazing things that others have said about your practice to convert the people who come to your website into consultations and clients. Do social media ads and run a giveaway like free braces, and engage with potential clients by responding to their inquiries or posting educational content and sharing photos of your work before and after. You can also do signage in appropriate places that have people traffic, and make sure you comply with local authority regulations before you plant or hang them.

10. Prioritize Patient Care

Everything in your facility should be tailored to cater to and serve the needs of your patients, from the location of your facility and customer service to the atmosphere in your office. The only way to successfully grow your orthodontic practice is by putting your patients first. You could start by thoroughly explaining treatment plans and procedures and informing them of expected outcomes.

Making appointments should be easy with timely reminders, and flexible scheduling should be made possible to accommodate busy patients. Equip your staff with the skills to ensure every client feels welcomed and received with friendliness and warmth. Place your patient’s safety, comfort, convenience, and care at the top of your core values.

It’ll take time, effort, and patience to grow your orthodontic practice, but if you implement all the above strategies, you will see steady and progressive growth every day. As a doctor, keeping your oath to not harm the guiding principle for every patient who walks through your doors will have the rest of the benefits and results of your practice taking care of themselves. People remember how they are made to feel more than what someone does for them. Ensure that your patients’ memories of you and your team are pleasant and fond of how you treat them from the minute they walk into the time they leave.

Train your staff in effective communication and empathy to deliver exceptional patient care. Paying extra attention to the little details in your facility for their convenience and safety also communicates thought and care, like your bathrooms being uncompromisingly clean and sanitary with an abundance of soap, hand and toilet seat sanitizer, paper towels and toilet paper, and running water at all times. Everyone prefers to go back and also tell others of a place where they had a great experience.