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Why Dental Group Practices Looking to Grow Need a Centralized Practice Management System

Karina Santos, Strategic Customer Success Manager for Henry Schein One, worked with dental leaders long before the term dental service organization (DSO) was even used to describe these organizations. As the dental group practice market has experienced explosive growth in recent years, Santos says standardizing processes and workflows across locations is more critical than ever to a group practice’s success. 

Not doing so creates inefficiencies, headaches, and in some cases costly errors or missed opportunities. “If a practice location is doing something differently than another location, and they define their items in a software differently, then their data is going to be different,” she says.

The key is to have a centralized practice management system, such as Henry Schein One’s Dentrix Ascend. The following three ways demonstrate how a centralized practice management system can play an important role in standardizing processes:

1. A centralized database minimizes duplicated records and effort. With a centralized system and database, team members share the same terminology, resulting in more data accuracy. That means the process to enter patient data from their first visit on is much smoother and more efficient.
2. Team members can go between offices and only have to know one software instead of multiple. Team members are in sync with the practice management system across locations because the software is the same. By training on one system, dental group practices free up time, resources and money for other areas of the business.
3. You can be assured that when you’re looking at data, it’s the same type of information no matter which location. Think of it as opening up a Starbucks store, Santos said. “You have to document the systems that you have in your flagship. Then in order to replicate, you have to define the standards. That’s what you train and teach, to duplicate right to scale.”

Indeed, it’s incredibly helpful for dental group practices that want to grow to have a software that allows a one-time setup so they don’t have start all over again each time they open up a new location. “Identifying your standards, documenting them and then replicating them will not only help ensure data accuracy, but also allow for scalability and growth,” Santos said.